The Hidden Creator Economy Built on Top of Games, with Nathan Lindberg of Overwolf
Nathan Lindberg of Overwolf on why 66 games hold 80% of all playtime, and why the mod authors keeping them alive only got funded once the case reached the CFO.
Sixty-six games account for more than eighty percent of all the time people spend playing video games. Most of them are old. Some shipped before the current console generation existed. Nathan Lindberg's argument, built across twenty years at GamePro, Curse, Twitch, Epic, and now Overwolf, is that the thing keeping those games in that club is not the publisher's roadmap. It is thousands of people whose names nobody knows, building mods, add-ons, wikis, and private servers on top of games they did not make.
Lindberg is VP of Global Brand Partnerships at Overwolf, which means he is the ad guy, and he says so more than once. But the conversation is less about advertising than about a category error the industry keeps making: assuming the creator economy is the part of it that appears on camera.
The creator economy has a visibility problem, not a size problem
Lindberg's framing for this is a coffee shop. If George Clooney walks in, everyone knows. He is glamorous, he is recognizable, and the recognition is the point. If Banksy walks in without the mask, nobody looks up, and yet the work on the wall outside is worth millions.
“That's the creator economy that I think doesn't get the attention that it deserves, because they are creating the tools and services that help to make not just a couple people, but millions of people's lives better when they're playing the games that they love.”
The practical consequence is that the industry keeps measuring the wrong population. Streamers, influencers, and TikTokers are legible, so they get the budgets and the case studies. The people updating a wiki so a player can find a boss, or maintaining the add-on that makes a ten-year-old game bearable, do not show up in any creator report.
There is a durability argument underneath the fairness one, and it is the sharper of the two. Lindberg spent seven years at Twitch watching creators rise and fall. Tools do not work that way.
“If you've created the best League of Legends app on Overwolf, timeless. It doesn't matter what people think of you personally. It's the app and the tools and the service that are the ones that drive it.”
What the ladder from first dollar to first million actually looks like
Overwolf's stated organizing metric is creator payouts, with a target of a billion dollars paid out. Lindberg describes that number as doing real internal work, because it collapses the usual cross-team objective fight. Ads, CurseForge, and Tebex are all judged on the same question: did creator payouts go up?
The mechanics are unglamorous and that is the point. A developer builds an app and gets from zero users to a few hundred. At that threshold the platform reaches out with promotion and guidance. As it scales, monetization enters, and the revenue split runs from fifty to seventy percent, sometimes as high as eighty.
The less obvious half is protection rather than revenue. Tebex exists so a solo creator does not have to work out how to pay income tax on a three dollar mod sold in Uzbekistan. Lindberg is blunt that for a large company this is routine and for one person it is a reason to quit.
The ceiling is real but rare. The largest apps on the platform have sold for over forty million euros. Lindberg is careful not to sell that as typical, describing the range instead as level one to level ninety-nine, with plenty of people comfortable in the forties running a small business that works.
Advertising is not the problem, interruption is
Lindberg's defense of ads starts by conceding the complaint. Advertising earned its reputation in an era when it functioned as a toll: you want the content, you watch this first. He calls it the Heisman, the stiff-arm between the audience and the thing they came for.
What he argues has changed is placement and disclosure. Inside an Overwolf app the ad sits beside the content rather than in front of it, and carries a line stating that seventy percent of the revenue goes to the creator. That disclosure is doing more work than it appears to, converting the ad from something taken from the player into something visibly funding the tool they are using for free.
He points at rewarded formats as the same move: watch this, get that. Visa funded the NFL zone in Fortnite. Ally's sponsorship of the Rocket League Championship Series funded minor-league circuits that gave semi-pro players a path up. In both cases the brand paid for something that would not otherwise exist.
His read on the generational split is that older audiences accept the toll because they want to finish the show, while Gen Z demands a return on their attention. And he is candid that the industry's own execution is often the problem, singling out connected TV for frequency capping so badly that a viewer sees the same spot twenty-five times across an evening. His warning cuts the other way too: advertisers who do not see results stop showing up, so gaming has to become an easy and consistent buy or it loses the funding.
Convincing publishers took proving it to the CFO, not the community team
The best line in the episode is a publisher's, relayed secondhand. Told that mods and add-ons would be good for the game, the publisher told Lindberg that allowing them was like letting someone take a highlighter to a Rembrandt.
“First of all, your game is not that good, but I understand what you mean.”
The objection is emotional, but the thing that eventually moved publishers was not. Lindberg is direct that the community argument loses inside a game company, every time, at the same desk.
“You have to explain it in a way that a banker can understand it. Trying to sell someone on the woo of, hey, this is good for your community, that doesn't get by the CFO.”
So the pitch became quantified. Overwolf's client is a desktop application, which means the company can see what players are actually playing, and can tell a publisher what happened to their game after a change. Lindberg's example of a business outcome is a title moving from eighty-first most popular on the platform to thirteenth, measured through a product called Gamer Grid that launched this year. Get into the top sixty-six and hold it past three months, he argues, and the game is financially stable for years.
The adoption curve ran the way it usually does, from the bottom. Indie developers were the easiest partners because they had nothing to protect and everything to gain. Hytale, a game largely built by its community, launched with Overwolf involved. The harder wins came later: a recent partnership with Crafton brings mods and add-ons support to PUBG, a game that has held a serious core audience for years on exactly the mechanism under discussion.
Lindberg quotes a proverb his CEO at Curse used constantly, and it is the shape of the whole argument:
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
What this means if you run a game
Three things carry out of the conversation for anyone operating a live game:
- Your community argument needs a business outcome attached before it reaches finance. Sentiment is not a number that survives that room. Retention, lifetime value, and ranked position are.
- The creators worth investing in are mostly not the ones with audiences. The forum maintainers and tool builders produce assets that outlast any individual's relevance, which makes them a better bet than a personality.
- If advertising funds any part of your ecosystem, disclose the split. The exchange only feels fair to a player when they can see who the money reaches.
Where to go next
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