Overwolf’s Nathan Lindberg on the Unsung Heroes, Tools, and Services That Make the UGC World Go ‘Round, Part 2

When I was at Curse, a one of my favorite proverbs that our CEO used a lot was, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” And publishers are starting to learn that they can go farther if they involve the community. That means creators. That means tools, services, websites, apps, mods. All of these things contribute to the culture around your game.—Nathan Lindberg

Overwolf’s VP of Global Brand Partnerships, Nathan Lindberg, joined Player Driven’s founder, Greg Posner, on a podcast this summer. Last week’s Design Desk column rehashed and augmented part of their discussion. More specifically, it got into how Overwolf’s three main business units fit together to serve the creator payout interests of videogame mod, overlay, and website/wiki creators.

We’ll wrap up our profile of Lindberg and Overwolf this week and get into:

• How advertisers and brands interact with Overwolf and its creator community
• Some studios/publishers that have recently partnered with Overwolf and why
• How Lindberg thinks Rockstar Games should approach UGC (user-generated content) in the context of 2026’s impending marquis launch, Grand Theft Auto VI.

The brand and ad angle of Overwolf often flies under the radar. Most gamers disapprove of ads, partly because they’re generally placed between a gamer and a title they want to play. Overwolf’s more complementary approach to ads makes sense on a number of levels, and may well be a harbinger of things to come more broadly.

That Overwolf has a significant audience against which to advertise is undeniable. According to their website, the company’s monthly active user base is around 113 million globally today. The vast majority of users are Gen Z’ers or Millennials and, surprisingly, >40% are female. With an assist from the digital ad quality measurement company Adelaide Metrics, Overwolf showed in 2024 that its user base is quite attentive to the ads/brands they’re exposed to on the platform.

As touched on last week, Lindberg has battled two broad perceptions over many years, in various jobs he’s had at Overwolf, Twitch, Epic Games, and elsewhere: that PC mods detract from, rather than add to, the experience of playing games; and that ads and brands in and around games get in the way and uniformly turn off gamers.

Lindberg rejects both assertions.

A question that Posner put to Lindberg in August got at the first of these perceptions: skepticism from publishers about the value of mods in their gamer communities.

“My favorite feedback that I ever got,” Lindberg told Posner with a twinkle in his eye, “was from a publisher that said to me, ‘Allowing mods and add-ons is like allowing someone to take a highlighter to a Rembrandt.’ And I was like, ‘Woah, okay. First of all, your game is not that good, but I understand what you mean…’”

“It's hard, right? Creating something like a legendary franchise, you know, or some sort of really valuable piece of IP, and then have other people mess with it, doesn't feel great.”

Lindberg pivoted.

At the same time, he told this publisher, “…the better your game’s culture, the longer you’re gonna have players, the more they’re going to spend, the more money you are going to make as a game publisher, and the longer your IP is going to last. And that has now been proven out.”

Lindberg used a “scoreboard” argument, in effect. Many of the longest-running and most lucrative PC video games and franchises since 2000 have indeed seen modder communities grow up around them, or themselves began as mods of another game. As this list of Overwolf-supported games suggests (it’s replicated below), mods, UGC, and strong player-driven tools and community services—see what I did there?—go together with iconic, enduring PC games like chocolate and peanut butter. It isn’t a coincidence.

“Back when I was doing things at Curse,” recalled Lindberg, “there was no guarantee that any of that stuff mattered.”

“You had game publishers that were gonna do it, and they tested it. And they were, ‘Okay, maybe.’ But if you look at the relationship that we had with World of Warcraft, I don't think the folks at Blizzard loved what Curse was doing with the add-ons, but they knew they had to allow support because it was making the game way more enjoyable for tons of people…It's a long process. It doesn't happen overnight.”

“Overwolf has had the same challenges,” Lindberg added. “When you're a tools and services company, helping people’s [studio’s/publisher’s] community have more value, that doesn't always reflect a change in shareholder price…[or show up] on a bottom line right off the bat.”

“There were definitely situations where people were like, ‘Hey, stop. You can't have access to this stuff. Don't support my game. Stop allowing these things.’ And we constantly have to do education with game publishers to show them the value of what this can do.”

Okay let’s get Design Desk’s education and value train movin’ down the track. All aboard! And don’t forget to toot the whistle by subscribing to our newsletter and sharing!

Advertisers and Brands on Overwolf: Participate, Don’t Stiff Arm

Advertising is really starting to change the narrative of going from interrupting to, kind of empowering, right? “Hey, this content is provided by…” “This content is created by…” You're seeing a lot more, you know, advertising-funded content. You're seeing a lot of rewarded videos of, like, “Hey, watch this content and get this reward.”—Nathan Lindberg

“Advertising,” said Player Driven’s founder, Greg Posner, to Nathan Lindberg, VP of Global Brand Partnerships at Overwolf, in their August discussion, “the thing players hate. Make the case on why it’s not the worst thing.”

“Oftentimes people vilify advertising because of its effectiveness,” Lindberg began. “In a lot of experiences, right, you kind of get the Heisman approach with advertising. Advertising was really, really popular, especially when, you know, with radio and television and these mediums that were providing you with content. And then we're interrupting you with advertising because it was like, ‘Okay, hang on a second. This is what's paying the bills.’”

“You kind of had the old Heisman pose, right, where it's like, ‘Oh, you want content? Gotta watch ads first, or you gotta listen to ads first,’ right? And that was kind of the de facto experience for a long time. It was just, ‘Hey, unfortunately, you're not paying for this. So, therefore, ads.’”

ChatGPT’s rendition of an ad-based Heisman trophy stiff-arming a crowd trying to reach content.

People, of course, have paid for cable TV for many decades, but that’s another story…

“I fondly remember,” Lindberg continued, “the NFL Zone in Fortnite [Creative]. I think about the incredible content that was created there, the team maps, the opportunities. There's just so much really great stuff that existed there that I think was really revolutionary. And fans of the NFL got to experience that. They got to have that experience, and they got to enjoy it for free because of the investment of a brand like Visa.”

“We saw similar things with [Psyonix’s] Rocket League and the Rocket League Championship Series when we brought Ally [Financial] in. Ally was a force that helped to create, you know, new opportunities…They even helped to create some of the minor league circuits that allowed people to kind of level up. And if they were not quite professional level, they kind of went from semi-pro to getting that exposure. Those are things that brands do that I think change the dichotomy of advertising.”

Ally Financial was an official sponsor of the North American Rocket League Championship Series (RLCS) in 2023 and 2024. More recent RLCS presenting sponsors have included Progressive Insurance, Michelin, Blacklyte, and the Epic Games Store (Epic owns Psyonix).

Regarding his role at Overwolf, Lindberg told Posner ads and brands are “a necessary part of the ecosystem because, otherwise, your apps are gonna cost a lot of money. But when done right, when done in a way that drives value…for all three parties—for the for the creator, for the advertiser, and for the consumer—when you can lock in all three of those things correctly, I think that's when you really hit the sweet spot of the value that advertising can have in the space.”

I think he left out a fourth party: Overwolf!

“We're seeing gaming far and away exceed that innovation,” he continued, “much more than any other ecosystem. While I understand that most of the time a creator is gonna say, ‘Oh, I hate advertising,’ sure, but it's probably bad advertising or an inconvenient advertising situation that you're not enjoying.”

On Overwolf, “when you're using an app, and you're in the middle of the game and you're watching, the content is there and the ad's right next to it. The ad is letting you know that it's helping to fund this content.”

“On top of that, there's a little disclaimer that says, you know, ‘70% of this revenue goes to the creator,’” added Lindberg. “That's a great feeling as well. And that creates the symbiosis of, like, ‘Oh, cool, this content, this app that I love to use and love to play with, is free to me because of these advertisers. That's cool. These advertisers get me. They understand what I need, my value, and they're not interrupting the content.’”

This indirect approach to ads appears to have resonated. An internal survey found “70% of Overwolf users are positive towards ads.”

“We have Adelaide and a whole bunch of attention metric services that tell us that our visibility is very high for those ads,” Lindberg told Posner. “But it doesn't interrupt. And I think that that is a very important way that the industry moves forward.”

“And we see more revenue. We see higher CPMs. We see more opportunity for creators to get higher payouts if we have a more pleasurable experience for advertising.”

A YouTube video by Overwolf that was uploaded in late 2024 showed an example of this approach. In the video, a PC gamer, DarkSword255, described how he used a popular Overwolf app, Porofessor.gg, while playing Riot Games’ League of Legends. Video ads indeed show up in that app, as the screenshot below makes clear. These ads are powered by Nitro, Overwolf’s ad tech arm.

The 2024 YouTube video, “Overwolf Ads - How Gamers Use Overwolf,” laid out that free companion apps such Porofessor.gg add value to the PC gaming experience—and may serve up a side order of Pringles to help creators eat.

“It does not have to be Heisman,” stressed Lindberg. “It needs to be complimentary. And that's where you see those opportunities, and where you see some of the other innovations we've done around rewarded achievements [and] rewarded challenges. ‘Hey, if you do this, you get this presented by a brand.’”

That's awesome. That's a brand, right there in the chat, giving you a high five, right? Right in the gameplay with you. And I think that that is the next level of what video games can do that other industries just simply cannot do.

“While people might say they hate it,” Posner reflected, “I think that's the vocal 10% of people you hear online that say, ‘I hate ads.’ It's not the actual mass population…”

Lindberg agreed.

“As advertising evolves and we see more participatory versus more of this kind of exclusionary style of content, I think that that's exactly what's gonna happen…People are gonna say, ‘Hey, listen, I am getting a good value for what this advertisement is giving me.’”

“I think that is ultimately…what's the most important thing for consumers, right? It really has very little to do with the ad itself. It's more of, ‘Okay, you're taking up my time, you're taking up my attention.’”

“The biggest rift and the biggest critique that I hear about, especially CTV,” added Lindberg, is “they don't necessarily do a great job of frequency caps or, you know, having a variety of ads.”

CTV refers to Connected TV, meaning TVs running over-the-top content from Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc.

“You may get the same ad nine times in a show. And that’s also obnoxious because…there’s no separation.”

“If someone's sitting down and watching a marathon of shows,” he continued, “I'm almost angry at that brand at that point of, like, I have watched that ad 25 times in my seven shows…That's brutal.”

“I think that that's one of the things that that has to be taken into account, as well, is that that's where we're getting the resistance from. That's where Gen Z is going: ‘No, not gonna do this. I'm gonna do something else.’”

“By having that variety, by having that environment where you're not having this content blocked by the same brand over and over again, it's a much better exchange of value. Not just for…the creator or the consumer but, more importantly, for the brand. Because if brand advertisers don't see value, they're not coming back either.”

Wheelin’ and Dealin’ with Indies and Krafton

The biggest games that we support are games that have been around for over a decade, that still dominate the PC market. And we're excited about that. We think that that's a proof case that what we're doing is exactly what is necessary to keep the games industry alive, innovating, and moving forward, and that's a great place to be.—Nathan Lindberg

A question Posner put to Lindberg involved the types of studios and publishers that directly partner with Overwolf.

“The biggest support community that we work with,” Lindberg responded, “are indie developers, because they have nothing to lose, right? They're starting out from square one. They're looking for opportunity. And what we're seeing from this community is like, ‘Hey, help us. Help us to create the best possible game.’”

“My favorite example recently is the launch of Hytale” on this front. “You're talking about a game that was created by, you know, its community. It's launched. It's had great fanfare, and Overwolf played a piece of that.”

Hypixel Studios’ Hytale launched in January. The sandbox RPG grew out of a popular Minecraft: Java Edition server. This Cybrancee article from March goes deep on its wild and rocky development ride, but the bottom line is that the title hit >1 million players on day-one and “crushed it on Twitch during launch…”

Way to stick the landing!

“Giving them the ability to launch a game that folks wanted,” Lindberg told Posner, makes it a “great example” of Overwolf’s value-add for indies.

Moreover, he added, “The more we can do to show big game publishers that there's an opportunity with this industry, and with mods and add-ons, the more we're going to see it.”

Lindberg continued down this path.

“We just announced, recently, a partnership with Krafton, where PUBG is gonna be supporting, you know, mods and add-ons and stuff like that, which is really exciting.”

Krafton’s announced PUBG: Playgrounds, a new hub for community-created modes and content, in early August. CurseForge and Overwolf weren’t directly mentioned there, but Krafton also announced a PUBG x CurseForge UGC Contest in the same timeframe. This global modding competition featured a $95,000 prize pool, and it wrapped up in September. Winning creators and other contest deets are laid out here.

“PUBG is a is a game that's been around for a while,” Lindberg noted. “It's one of my favorite games to play with friends. And for us to be able to solidify the opportunity for our creators to create the tools, the mods, and stuff like that, that they want in that game, there's no better feeling for us.”

“It allows people the opportunity to bring to life their passion for that game, which it's not just about frying pans, but, man, there's nothing more satisfying than whacking someone with a frying pan in PUBG!”

Agreed.

“PUBG,” Posner confirmed, “is still kicking, with a very strong core audience, because of this UGC…Anyone that's in it understands, like, ‘No duh, this is why the game is alive.’ Its core audience is building the content that it wants in the game.”

What may be obvious to players isn’t always obvious to execs, Lindberg countered.

“Trying to sell someone” in the C suites, he said, “on…like, ‘Hey, this is good for your community.’ That doesn’t get by the CFO.”

A game publisher CFO, he continued, is more likely to respond, “’You're stealing advertising. You're stealing revenue from us.’ Like, ‘No, that doesn't work.’ We've had to take the time to show how that quantifiably affects the bottom line in a positive way, how it increases LTV. And you’re seeing that.”

“Our apps platform is a downloadable dot EXE file,” Lindberg elaborated. “We get to see how games are doing. We get to see what's rising, what's falling, how games are doing. You know, we were very aware of [Embark Studios’] ARC Raiders well before everybody was talking about ARC Raiders. Why? Because we saw that our audience was playing it.”

“We have a huge advantage from that perspective, of being able to go to game publishers and say, ‘Hey, when you do this, this is what happened,’ right? And we can share that information, to say, ‘This is the impact of your community building, your advertising.’ Like, we can go to PUBG and say, ‘Hey, it's been a month since we've launched our partnership, here's how your game ranks on Overwolf now.’”

That detailed data “gives game publishers quantifiable information on how they’re doing,” he underscored. “The CFO is going, ‘But did that drive more revenue? Did that drive our business forward? Is that helping our stock price? Is that doing the things that we as a game publisher need to do?’ Getting to business outcomes is a place where we’re really investing in, to make sure that we can actually show game publishers” the type of data they need to make well-informed investment decisions.

“Our new Gamer Grid product, that we rolled out this year, has been really, really valuable because it is giving actual tangible information on how we can show business outcomes, as opposed to just clicks.”

Gamer Grid is Overwolf Ads' audience-identification layer that’s designed to improve ad targeting.

“As I said,” and as was noted in last week’s Design Desk column, “66 games make up roughly 80-plus percent of all time spent in [PC/console] video games. If you get in that top 66 club, and you stay there…you are in a great position to be financially stable for a long time.”

That’s what “we try to explain with game publishers, especially people watching new games, is ‘You gotta get in, and you've gotta stay there.’ And it's a combination of advertising and community building that keeps you there.”

Overwolf + GTA 6

Toward the end of Lindberg’s and Posner’s discussion, the topic turned to Grand Theft Auto VI (GTA 6). The much-anticipated game will launch on Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series X/S consoles two weeks from today. A PC version appears to be slated for 1Q27.

“GTA 6 is gonna set every record ever known to mankind, and that’ll be great,” predicted Lindberg. “Everyone talks about, ‘Oh, you know, GTA [6] took $2 billion to make. Well, they have $3.2 billion on preorders already, so they’re doing okay.”

For the record, neither Rockstar nor its owner, Take-Two Interactive, has said the game cost $2 billion (most internet speculation hovers closer to $1.5 billion). The $3.2 billion figure is specious as well. An analyst firm did predict that total revenue over the first year may reach that figure, but actual preorders as of October appear to have been around $630 million.

“Roblox continues to be a dominating force” in the UGC space, noted Lindberg. And “Microsoft came out and said that their entire game studio portfolio was being bailed out by Minecraft, a game that's…almost 20” years old.

“That's because,” he continued, of “the UGC content that’s there. It's because of those ecosystems that are there. Not just the Bedrock [Edition], but the rest of the ecosystem that exists in Minecraft.”

“And then you look at, you know, what [Epic Games’] Fortnite has done and the UEFN space there. More and more people are gonna talk about that. More and more people are gonna get excited about that.”

Lindberg pivoted back to GTA 6.

“GTA Online,” which is the online multiplayer component of Grand Theft Auto V, “has a thriving culture…It’s not as big as Minecraft and Roblox and stuff like that in Fortnite, but it’s very lucrative, and it’s very, very financially stable.”

“When you add a new IP, I just think there's a ton of opportunity there. And I believe that by partnering with the community, by doing the right things in terms of empowering the creators and the private servers…that have done the legwork of keeping your game popular—I mean, GTA Online is still a top 10 game and that came out in 2014—Wild!—but it's a direct result of the fact that people are continuing to ideate on it, and continue to innovate on it.”

“GTA 6 will be flashy,” predicted Lindberg.

GTA 6 will be, you know, an experience like none other, I have no doubt. But what's gonna keep it relevant, what's gonna keep it exciting, what's gonna keep it at the top of the list for the next decade plus is the UGC, is the community content, is the ability to make updates and experiences and keep the game going, and keep content fresh, and innovate and share that innovation, you know, with the creator community.

“It doesn't matter at the launch,” he added. “I think that afterwards, that's where the community is gonna play the role of—if this game has the right community aspects and the right community infrastructure and incentivization—[making it a] game [that] will be around forever.”

This isn’t idle speculation on Lindberg’s part.

Overwolf’s Tebex business unit has been the monetization and local regulatory compliance layer of GTA Online more or less since inception. To be more precise, Cfx.re was an indie multiplayer modification framework that Rockstar bought in 3Q 2023. Tebex was, and is, the merchant of record for all official transactions associated with GTA Online, and a few other Take-Two games and franchises that support PC-based modding, because Cfx.re and Tebex were joined at the hip before Rockstar bought Cfx.re.

From a monetization standpoint, Cfx.re/Tebex get a 15% cut of GTA Online spending. It’s not clear how the rev share breaks down, but those funds are split between Rockstar and Overwolf.

There’s every reason to think this same infrastructure layer and rev share arrangement will carry over to the PC angle of GTA 6. It may take well into 2027 before we see a ramp up of GTA 6 custom scripts, vehicles, maps, props, tools, and private server hosting—but that marketplace is coming, and Rockstar and Take-Two will build a shark-infested moat around the whole thing to protect their long-term interests.

As their conversation wound down, Posner asked Lindberg if he had any parting thoughts or advice.

“With video games,” Lindberg responded, “I wish I had ignored my parents’ feedback, saying, ‘Oh, don’t play video games. You’ll never go anywhere with that.’”

“It's incredible with this kind of side hustle culture and this…gig economy. There's an opportunity for you to monetize your passion.”

“Don’t end up, you know, getting to the end of your career and wishing you had done something different. There’s a huge opportunity to build something incredible.”

“If anyone out there has been thinking about it, come on in. Try it out. Now’s the time.”