Inside Overwolf with Uri Marchand, co-founder and CEO

[Music] welcome everybody to the deconstructor of fun podcast i'm your host mishka katkov today as always we have fantastic guests starting off with uri marchand ceo and co-founder of overwolf been at it for 12 and a half years in the position of the ceo and overall for those who don't know and i'm one of them so we're going to talk about that uh it's a guild for in-game creators that empower them to create grow and monetize in-game apps and mods i'm going to dive deeper into that most importantly or i don't know most importantly but most interestingly uh the company has raised 150 million over five rounds with us with the latest round d being let by a16z and the size of the round was 75 million uri welcome to the podcast thank you very much mishka and very happy to be here and those and those who are not watching

uh we essentially share the same shed with uri so we're both recording this out of our wooden palisades nice uh and then um second guest lee mcneil ceo and founder of tibex a platform that enables creators to monetize game servers uh a company that was recently acquired by overwolf for 29 million dollars so almost half of the round d uh lee welcome to the podcast nice one thanks having me all right uh so let's kick it off with the most important stuff what is overwolf why or what is overwolf why is the company such a funding magnet and actually before you answer that question please tell me that the post about overwolf being the first company to fully embrace the metaverse vision and move its entire operations to a new state-of-the-art headquarters located in minecraft server was april's fullest joke right it was yeah let's start off with that it was definitely an april's full joke um you know even though we're big believers in digital experiences

we still think that humans need to work when physically present with each other um it doesn't always have to be this way and we're definitely a hybrid organization but this was definitely an episcopal's joke yeah because when you read the comments people did not get it the world is so crazy that that i was i was like this is april like it's april and i was going through the comments and people were so serious about it they were congratulating you i know this one this is kind of what made it funny um i mean for me i was really happy to see one of our board member members saying something like hey i'm a board member i just want to put on the record that i supported this decision something like that no way well he was in it right he would no no he was in the loop i was actually curious to know you know what's going to be the deal and he totally got that i did get a gazillion messages of people like asking us and so how do you guys do video conferencing i was like oh man look at the date look at the date look at the date and um even last morning i got this

voice message and what's up saying hey buddy um saw your transitioning into minecraft congrats wanted to do a podcast and talk about it you know those things um so yeah it was it was it was an interesting airport fool's joke yeah i would i would block everybody who who doesn't get it it's like there's not there's no worth of a further conversation but that's me uh please don't don't follow it uh but anyway let's let's get serious like what is overwolf and and of course uh i think you've done recently a couple of funding rounds i remember just going through the news and the latest one was that 75. so uh based on that there's tremendous amount of interest from from top of the food chain investors i mean a16z like i don't think you can get much better than that i don't think you can get better that in in our business they're amazing so i think you know overwolf is building a new profession in the world we call that profession in-game creators and in-game creators are pill people

building gaming apps gaming mods or managing private gaming servers and making a living doing so right we're building a new profession in the world kind of like youtube had built a new profession right it started as this destination where people just upload random videos 80 of those were with cats and you know other funny things but then eventually it turned out to this huge content platform that adds so much value to the world and has so many people making living off of building content on youtube and this is exactly what we want to do with gaming we did not invent gaming ugc it has always been here for the past i want to say four decades people created content around games at beginning it was like the hacking days and then warcraft 3 came out and official editors became a part of the mix but now you know their ecosystems like minecraft and like roblox and like it exists in other games and we believe that the big part of the future of the games industry is going to be driven by community creations and we want to be

that company providing the service because they think that it's extremely hard to as a studio build a great game and manage a developers community and do payments and do a gazillion things that you want to do if you have a creative community around your game and we're here to enable that so i think this is what wolf is about in uh from a high level perspective from high level we're going to dive deeper because yeah some of the biggest games are of course in in some context there are mods like if you think about dota 2 or dota or even pub g kind of being a you know everything coming from arma can you walk me through um let's actually how old are our typical how old is a typical modder um interesting um so i think we we have folks who are in their even late 50s that are still you know at it and doing it um and we have folks who are super super young uh in their teens um it's hard for me to say where their average is because we don't we don't

actually have that data it's just basic partnerships that we have what's that that would be actually interesting to see the demographics of the moderate like like what is i understand that there's no typical modder because anyway my question was more like let's say i'm a typical modder and i'm just going to throw out there like i'm a 16 year old i know a little bit of of of a lot of things but not really anything like to play games like to mod games i'm deep in the communities i don't have my big twitch channel but i'm big in the modding community how do i get started like like what is what is what is the sort of example path where where like i'm just trying to kind of create a user story of of over wolf if you can walk me through it so that i can understand a little bit better how that works of course we all know what modding is so i think first thing you have to really love a game you have to be you know a gamer for the most part folks that create are gamers themselves and they're really connected to this game that they're playing and let's say it's league of

legends or let's say it's minecraft after getting uh hundreds of hours in playing the game and because they have a bit of a technical skill they would start thinking on hey why don't i do this world and have these rules or why don't i open my own server for playing with my friends but then after a while i'll i'll say to myself well this is actually a really cool server and what we built here between you know a couple of friends is actually really cool and we can kind of take it to the next level and open up the server to our entire like high school or junior high and then sing some traction and then open up to some more folks in the country and then kind of go from there so i think the journey starts you start as a gamer you love a game you have good ideas on how you can add more value for other players you test it out if it works great you continue doing it and if it doesn't maybe you try again but i think this is a typical journey are there is it easy to start modding i i mean i no

yeah because i don't know i remember like back in the days i may be modded commanding conquer like like that's the only game in like 96 i i made some changes to the units but uh so actually you know we we started as creators ourselves as like modders ourselves um i finished studying computer science um exactly 12 years ago minus one month i think uh graduation was in may of 2010 and then i started working full-time on building over wolf and um back then we were creators ourselves trying to add apps to existing games apps are like mods like overlay mods two existing games and adding functionality that we were missing while playing games and as creators we um we had so many difficulties i mean first and foremost the tech piece of being able to put a layer inside the game and understanding things like real time telemetry speaking with game developers that was like literally impossible and we didn't want to get banned or we didn't want people using our products to

get banned so we we had a ton of barriers and as creators by the way we failed we got to mid 2013 and we had no traction but we have built a bunch of tools and at that point we thought well if we take all those tools because we now know from our own experiences how hard it is to build content around games if we take all those tools and democratize them and expose them to third-party developers you know this could be a good idea and this could be you know the one thing we do better than anyone else in the world just build tools instead of building everything in-house so i think it's hard to be a creator i mean maybe it's easy to be a creator but it's super hard to be a successful creator right a lot of iterations a lot of journey in experimentation and trial and error and i think one of our missions in overwolf and now together with tabex and curse forge is to make it easier and easier and to reduce barriers and those could be creative barriers those would be technical barriers there could be commercial barriers you know business relationship barriers

with the game developers etc etc so the short answer uh yeah i think overall being a successful creator is really hard and we're here to help got it and then over wolf by the way really cool name uh offers everything that that comes to it so the tools to do the modification the uh the access to mod communities where you can share information and get people test your mods early on and kind of that early feedback that community feeling as well as anything that goes to to the uh the monetization of these and the mods are going do where do they go live are they live on some on your own platform or are they live on some other platforms like you know launched on steam or something um so it depends um we have mod repositories sort of uh like bucket for servers but we also have curseforge which is a marketplace for mods or we have curseforge core which is kind of like

you mentioned steam it's kind of like steam workshop but cross-platform so um going back to your previous question it is our mission to indeed do all those services and provide all these services by the way i think it's an endless task it's not like we're going to be done in three years and we definitely have our shortcomings in terms of things that we don't provide in a good way and that we lack this is exactly you know what we intended building but i think you know basically um with our different assets you could either choose to host your mod on one of our repositories or marketplaces or do it elsewhere ideally with one of our solutions yeah of course um how how big is overwolf right now and and like how are you located i understand everybody's in minecraft servers uh but but outside that uh yeah outside minecraft so just walk me through a little bit from the growth like i understand that

you tried until 2013 straight out of the university from computer science but since then it's kind of picked up especially during the uh the last year if you can kind of walk me uh through the uh the recent history of overwolf sure um so right now we're 120 people including tabex most recently that have joined us a team of 10. um we're headquartered in tel aviv where there's about 80 of us and there are uh 10 folks in the uk and then a lot of people from different parts of the world ukraine russia very relevant by the way but also italy canada and korea and these are people that you know we met along the road and we thought could be a good fit in teaming up with us and we found ways to you know team up and work together um i mentioned physical proximity so it's important for us to make sure people fly in in the pre-covered days but potentially now postcode the days um once a quarter to you know plan and interact and once a year to have everybody come to the hq for uh work

week um so this is kind of where we are company wise in terms of funding and you know how that evolved so we started the company we were three back then um and i think for the next uh three and a half years our maximum number was like nine or ten roughly and then back when we've done our a round we've grown the company to about 20 25 uh this is the end of 2013 and uh it's been a slow process of taking all those tools that we built in the first three and a half years and outsourcing them kind of or opening them up to third-party developers we started getting early traction in 2015 early real attraction we started doing modernization in 2016. and i think the reason 2021 was great for us by the way it was great for a lot of other tech companies um so we're not you know too special on this front is that we started very early on and with a very sort of grassroots approach

we've iterated on tools that other people found really valuable the creators found really valuable and we hit an inflection point with uh creator engagement so you know we have a lot of creators that we work with about 30 million monthly active users 10 000 creators will make anywhere between a couple dollars to over 100 000 a month uh the company itself is like operationally profitable and so it became appealing for i think investors that look very broadly on the industry and are betting on specific behaviors kind of maturing in and scaling um and i think this is what we saw happen in 2021 and by the way i should say tablex you know leads with us and tedx has grown in a pretty similar way um of you know bootstrapping the business and just iterating and working with customers to the point that got them to build a very impressive business yeah before we we jump in on only on on the before we start talking with leon

done back can you just explain how overwolf makes money because you're operationally profitable uh 80 people in tel aviv is not cheap isn't telling you like the most expensive city in the world at the moment yeah at least in the top five for sure yeah um sure the business model high level is we do a rough share with creators on overwolf the split is 70 30 creators get 70 we get 30 and the creators themselves make money either from ads or subscriptions so in that sense it's kind of similar to spotify where you know there are ads in spotify and there's subscription and as an artist you're gonna get paid based on thresholds of engagement and those kind of things so it's a very similar model in that sense if you created something and people are using it you're going to start monetizing people are happy to support you you're going to continue monetizing this how it works got it so if somebody plays my mod they subscribe to it or how do they pay for it do they buy the mod they could uh so okay interesting so the first thing if

someone plays your mod or modpack they would download your mod and you would get a download count that you're gonna get rewarded for that's one um if people subscribe generally to the service kind of like you subscribe to spotify then you're going to get another kind of in like a proportion like your relative part of the subscription based on the engagement uh something that we haven't added yet is direct donations maybe kind of like patreon but made from modders and it's something that we have on the roadmap and hopefully with the help of tebx we'd be able to expedite on this front got it interesting so essentially uh a person who's modding is running uh their live service and they're communicating with their absolute team they're taking their their feedback and as they are engaging their like a one man or woman live service team correct uh i mean sometimes it's a group people by the way i mean sometimes you know it could be uh sometimes it's companies i mean we have companies also building products in the wolf even intel um relatively big company has chosen over a

platform for for their uh like loyalty program um product that they're building as like a gaming app kind of like geforce experience but using uh the framework and tools that we provide um so it's it's really um you know it could be a single person but it could be a larger company interesting okay well now i understand a little bit more cool and i'm sure everybody listen he understands i try to ask very simple questions sure because i'm a simple person uh but but uh lee uh why did overwolf need to vex why did overall meet telex so i think the good question so i think with with tablex and overwolf we kind of we shared a very similar kind of passion for ugc um you know tebx was founded on the whole basis of allowing people who run multiplayer servers to monetize the content that they create within their game servers so you know overwolf they like to support mod creators and app creators and tabex our whole passion really is supporting game servers so

you know me and eric started speaking around a year ago now and i think it was very clear from the get-go that we shared that same passion so we was like you know let's let's kind of see where this goes and here we are today uh you know 10x is now joining the join the pack as we like to say um and yeah very excited for the for the future really of you know overall helping us grow to be honest and what did tebex do like like what was your service because i unders so first of all do please talk about how you bootstrapped your service and and grew it into a into a profitable company because that is a feed on its own uh but also just do do walk us through like what does tibex do sure so with with games you have single player and you have multiplayer now certain games support multiplayer but they actually allow individuals to run their own game servers so around 10 years ago there was a popular game kind of starting to happen called minecraft i'm sure everyone's heard of it and minecraft was very different back then

in the sense that you had these kind of tiny servers and you could see people starting to create content within these servers now what was happening was people started to sell this content but instead of actually having an automated system to allow them to sell their things they were using kind of buy now buttons of paypal and then people would buy things and they'd give them the items manually in game so i kind of came along and with with my background in other kind of games such as runescape and habbo i made originally it was called by craft and effectively what you did was you installed the plugin on your minecraft server and then we provide the game servers with a web store solution so the gaming servers would give the web store to their players they could browse their products be that vip ranks in-game items upgrades etc and then the players would purchase them items from the web store and tebx would handle the payment and then provide the items in game automatically so we kind of automated the entire system now you know fast forward over the next few years minecraft became very very popular

and game servers became one of the the major aspects of minecraft you know the benefits of of game servers that it kind of creates new content for players to enjoy it expands the longevity of the lot of the game and this really is all about ugc as a whole you know when you allow people to create content on top of your game you increase the the the life span of that game because there's always more content to to experience the players and tab x really was the the foundation of that because we allowed people to make money from this and that opened up new career possibilities you know when creators are starting to get paid for what they're doing they can actually look at making it a full-time opportunity you know they're getting paid so they can spend more time on it which in return allows them to um create more content and it's kind of that ever you know growing circle of opportunity for people so yeah i mean kind of how we how we bootstrap the company so i founded tedx when i was 16 had no external investment i think i had 20

i think that the news article was it was 20 20 pounds which was which was true i actually someone lent me that 20 quid and i did eventually pay him back for me to buy the domain name um but yeah you know we went for an interesting phase really that you know we tried to get investment and we we never did bother because we was profitable and we always have been profitable from day one so we kind of grew naturally we didn't grow faster than we kind of could manage um and then we kind of we we we grew off the back of ugc becoming more and more popular uh and then you know overwolf came along and said hey let's let's partner up and here we are today got so so basically a payment provide hubba hotel that's how this is an old game it is uh so um so you start okay so a payment provider um essentially is what tablets did is yes so then yeah so we remove all the complexities around receiving payments within game servers you know people who create game service they're

good at you know one thing and that's making amazing content for their players to enjoy accepting payments uh dealing with chargebacks dealing with sales tax etc is complicated and we come in and remove all of that complexity from the game servers and just let them focus on doing what their they do best which is creating content for their players to enjoy that's what a lot of blockchain games need uh anyways so so uh okay so we're now as a part of a blocked god damn it as as a part of all over wolf you're uh did overall have before up like because i mean you were a business that was scaled so you also had a payment system so what was about tedx that was that was different and um and better than what you've built uh sure so we've integrated a third party solution for payment related needs um the thing that tabix had is the built-in services to enable that for servers so they have the a-to-z solution anywhere from the server plug-in that

you need to integrate from the web store cms type thing to uh data and analytics on what's happening on your server cashing out for different creators on different wallets and different ecosystems they really had built like a dedicated solution that is the best in class solution for that specific audience and you know theoretically folks could potentially use shopify or could potentially use paypal or other solutions but this is you know the best one that was tailor-made for the needs of server owners so this is why we felt like you know this could be a great start and then we can grow from there and since we're strategically all we care about is building services and you know for us it definitely opens a new category and it's definitely a service we felt like it's a strategic fit and and they and was tabex used already in the mods they made by in overwolf or by old no yeah

no so so mods are usually you usually can't sell mods you can you are allowed to sell merch inside private servers uh but eula's tend to prevent you from say selling a modpack for minecraft java or selling an add-on for world of warcraft or selling an app for league of legends you know etc so for us this was like opening up to new audiences okay so basically with with tibex players are able to do we essentially offer micro transactions in their mod their modern sharing in their servers right in their servers correct huh okay well that that brings it even more towards uh live service and one thing that lee you mentioned that there was a there was a cultural fit and i understand like both of you uh started off like right after like i mean you didn't even go to university if you started this at 16. i think you skipped that part so both of you started you know from the bottom essentially just just

with no vc money and just doing you know working on your passion um that's of course a cultural fit but but how do you how do you find or how do you measure a cultural fit especially during the if you started you know on the deal like a year ago so you were doing um you know meetings in roblox world like how do you find that that cultural fit through uh through a video conference or did it end up with you having a meeting and then after you've met face to face you closed the deal or how was it i think from for for me anyway i think i vividly remember the first time me and eric spoke because i think for the first like half an hour we just basically had this like dreaming session of backwards and forwards of how we see things in the next 10 years and for me i had that same conversation with someone else you know five ten years ago and i think it's a very kind of future looking kind of um industry and i think when someone actually explains it back to you exactly how you explain it to them that's a very

rare kind of opportunity so i think from the very early days you know even before commercials are starting to be spoken about and we knew that we shared that same passion i think that culture fit was very important to kind of getting the deal done uh in the way that was the best way possible really um i think you know and you're getting your gut instinct tells you when things like that are right because it's such a big transaction so i i don't know if you have anything else to add to that already no sure i i think what at first i agree i understand but also i would add that um because we've dealt with um so before tedx we were like over 100 people right 110 people um as you're scaling the organization you understand that you need to be clear on your structure and on your core values and then how you do things and sometimes more importantly how you don't do things as part of your organization and what makes it unique compared to other organizations and so as we spend the time articulating these values and writing them down and putting them

on our website it's that way available there um under our culture for me a culture fit is uh value alignment on top of the things that we mentioned and i felt like in our conversations there are dozens and dozens of examples of cultural alignment which is reflected in value alignment you know anywhere from things like transparency or candor or being willing to um get feedback and not get too defensive and you know let's just think together on the concrete thing we're trying to communicate and find a solution um and many other things so i think for me that's this was a very important piece and you're right i mean when we flown the team uh to meet us face to face that was also a critical part on determining culture fit uh and chemistry and you know all those things that don't necessarily go well through zoom or one of the other solutions well i really wanted to ask that question because i've seen so many deals go through

well so many deals went through doing the uh the the lockdowns and people never met and they just explained you know i haven't had people here on this podcast explaining like hundred multi hundred million acquisitions that were done through zoom and how cool it was to have this conversation i'm like you guys are crazy but okay so and and how when did you come up with values because um i mean it's a long road for companies like yours and for the beginning you were for for several years there was only 10 of you um i assumed that the tibbetts didn't have like a you know strong written down values and value workshops done and then like mission statements and that kind of stuff like you guys were just living the values uh but but how did how did overwolf arrive to its values and and how do you enforce them because your company is growing quite fast uh it has multiple locations around the world and and i understand the mission is simple and simple i mean simple to to communicate and these acquisitions you're bringing people that share the

same mission but but values is like how do you work to achieve that mission so so how did you how did you arrive on those values and how do you kind of like um i don't know enforces a really bad word how you set examples for people to follow those values sure so i think it started off for us when we were at around say 40 50 60 which is the size in which i don't have and potentially some of the leadership team members don't have as much face time with everybody in the company and we're starting to form this layer of middle management which may come to the company with other beliefs or other perspectives and we just felt like if we're not going to make sure there's alignment we're going to face uh problems um as always first we faced the problems and then we figured out what the solutions are so you know we had we had a couple of hires that weren't the right fit and then we thought well uh it's obviously our fault how can we fix that

oh there's this thing called culture and values let's figure that thing out and then we started this discovery journey um that uh um i think we're still in it i i feel like we have a good mvp and a good you know 1.0 but it's an ever uh progressing and um it's like a constant evolution for i think your culture and your values and the way we started is we um set a bunch of people we try to think about what makes us unique and then we've done this uh survey for the company and we ask people to add more and then we've done this all hands meeting and you know we came up with this list of about 16 or 14 values that felt so generic and boring and could have been innovation yeah that's kind of honesty oh wow honestly you you guys aren't lying really well nice i don't see yeah so so it just felt so bad and so like

generic and just like a boilerplate that any company in the world could put on their walls and it would mean absolutely nothing um and then about a year and a half maybe a year and a half ago we said you know we want to level up and we took the time to spend with a branding agency to help us work on our visual identity as well as our culture and our values and in this process of having conversations with our partners and asking you know a third party partner what makes our wolf unique and um you know talking with ourselves and digging deep and then digging deeper we came up with four values that i think are what makes this is what makes this company so these values are um become legendary that talks about constant evolution and striving to be better tomorrow level up together that talks about teamwork on the hunt that talks about hunger and support maine that comes from the mobile world but it talks about a mindset like uh our mindset has to be that we provide services for creators we put the

spotlight on them and we're like the support player just like a support player in league of legends um and there are a bunch of other you know uh information there and uh written sentences to help you further understand why this is who we are and why this is our culture the way we sort of and enforce is not the right way it's educated right and the way we educate i think is we we constantly kind of quote and remind those values and when we celebrate successes we say well that was leveling up together and you know you were really on the hunt over there and you kind of grabbed that prey and you you know made something good out of it or you know how do we support maine this situation in ukraine and how do we reach out to our community you know so we just talk this way and at some point and we're not quite there yet i think but at some point i hope it would become just just the way we talk and the way we act as an organization and if someone new comes along they would kind of get absorbed to that feel

yeah i get it i actually one question so i when i'm when i was going through your web page which is really cool but this is something that i've heard sure on our web page it's quite masculine do you get that a lot that uh i mean down from the name to the the color palette this is just a uh like i've gotten a lot of uh i mean nowadays you do get a lot of feedback on like how welcoming you can make your your your company um so have overwolf is uh is you know very very fast kind of and let's be honest my company name is also extremely going so this is just me kind of reflecting like how do you approach this stream more no not that one uh oh sorry my the constructor of fun is like this is my passion project to be honest okay my gaming company is called savage game studios that's so savage that's that's on the on the level with overwolves so i'm just asking kind of like for your support like how do you make it more uh

accessible because when you go to your career page like the values are strong like very you know on the hunt that's uh that's a quite quite aggressive i get it but but not every but then you put in a lot of photos where you see the you know the team and they're all happy together and then you go back again on the web page it's like all darkness and and magic like how do you make it more inclusive how do you how do you how do you do that because the company is growing and i assume that that hiring talent is difficult especially if you're in tel aviv especially if your majority of your employees are in tel aviv the uh the competition for talent is probably the uh the toughest in all the world so so how do you make it into a more inclusive you know it's i think it's a wonderful question and and i think the women on our team are at a point where they kind of feel at home um and you know we we live in a world of fantasy and we serve creators who create in worlds of fantasies and i think this is really authentically who we are

and what our dna is and for the women on our team it seems like it's quite aligned and you know most recently we've done this um brand awareness campaign on billboards in israel because the market is super competitive and we wanted to raise awareness for the company so what we've done is to take photos of our team members and they're you know dressed up as like developers slash warriors in a pretty i would say you know fantasy world but that created a lot of noise in a good way and actually reading some of the comments on linkedin i saw um someone sharing uh it was it was um carmel who's who led our branding process from his uh agency atreya and he said that his daughter told him something like dad look how powerful this woman is um and it's you know one of our support engineers holding a virtual sword yeah on a giant billboard

yeah and you know for me that that was great and for me like this is just who we are and if you feel like you can connect with your inner i don't know uh power capabilities love for fantasy then you know we're the right place for you and we're trying to put a better and better emphasis on um i guess diversity inside the company and uh you know right now i think we're like 70 30 um men and women so kind of okay probably below average not where we wanted to be i don't know that that was a quite a vague answer to how we made the company more inclusive but i think we just stay authentic and stay true to our roots well that's that's that's kind of like what i mean nobody has i mean some people might have the right answer but i'm just curious about it because there's a way to water down your culture and be as you said like do do what you do with values where they don't mean anything because they mean everything and and you you guys have uh have a you know people should go to overwolves homepage

and kind of look at it it's it's as over wolfy as it sounds so it's really cool but sometimes when it's cool it makes it feel that oh it's a boys club but like how do you cross the line of like no no it's cool for everybody and we don't want to make it less cool we just want to make it like as you said virtual swords for everybody so so um anyways um let's talk about a little bit about the the future of ugc or user generated content how do you see this this um this progressing because i'm drawing perils in my head to the all the metaverse talks and and nfts and and you name it um what's your kind of a view of the future so i think we're at an inflection point and i think more and more people understand the value of uh open environments versus cloud closed walled gardens and so if you're building a game right now and you're thinking multiplayer you it would be a good idea to think about a private server architecture and

not just having a centralized place where you control everything and you need to be responsible for scale if the game blows up and you're going to be the only one responsible for creative um in a lot of ways you know server code can be open source under the right license and to allow you know folks to create i know a lot of people think oh my god i'm going to open the source code for my server what's going to happen but well what's going to happen is that if your game's good a lot of people a lot of smart people are going to take it and make something interesting with it and if you put the right license in place and you have you know a piece of the pie as it grows then it might be you know a good idea and i think um again like ugc has always been there but we've reached this inflection point where more and more people trying to understand are trying to understand how to make it happen and how to scale and how this becomes a revenue stream for them as well as keeping their game on the shelf forever potentially if they do a good job from that perspective i think we're just the beginning because of the different complexity layers and in this big

metaverse hopefully overwolf and our different business groups inside the company we're responsible for empowering the creator layer and making it easy for game studios to have a creative community for their game and lee you've been you've been on it for almost as long time as azuri so what's what's your take on on the growth like have you seen um i don't know i don't know if you guys have any stats but but how many how many creators and what's the growth of the creators and what's the growth of the companies that are um enabling modding or even encouraging modding over over the past decade yeah sure so i mean i mentioned this earlier but i started kind of modding in like the runescape private server days and the habbo private server days and and back then they weren't really kind of legal things to do i mean you don't really care about that when you're 15 working out of your bedroom at your parents house but um you know looking back all you know them 10 years ago and seeing how the industry is starting to change from loads of creative kind of young people

working on these illegal type modding platforms and now actually over the next over the you know now we're at a position where game studios are actually starting to realize there is no reason to not allow people to do this and i think one of the major reasons potentially is because though game developers have always was always scared of them you know potentially taking away revenue from their game but actually with platforms such as tab x and curse which core you know we're actually allowing now game developers to say instead of stopping creators from doing this within your game actually allow them to do it but we'll we'll moderate it will allow you to monetize it and you know if there's people who are doing things that shouldn't be done we can stop them from doing that and as uh mentioned we can actually give them a slice of the pie and i think that kind of enablement of creators is taking people away from kind of the the black market modding to actually being legitimized and that to answer your question i think because game studios are starting to allow that it's actually starting to make modding more more popular and we're kind of

seeing that in the growth because it's becoming more acceptable to do that and minecraft service was a big element of you know kickstarting the game server industry especially and what what encourages game studios to to allow modding like uh out of the latest mods that have been really successful for in my perspective which has no understanding of mods is of course the other uh you know auto chess that kind of came out of nowhere and what followed the mod was actually the company's you know riot valve several others did their own games based on on those mods like like i'm just trying to understand what is the um is the benefit from a for a company let's say i'm riot uh i wish uh so i'm watching watching these young hungry modders do these super interesting things uh with the assets that i provide them um is my incentive to just hey i'm here to build a community i'm really excited to see how

how they're reacting or is it more capitalistic where i'm looking at great idea guys um check this out and then i come out with uh with full-on games like what's what's the perspective uh you want to take that early yeah sure so i mean something to something to compare this to is you know you'll have a game that is released and it'll have an instant popularity to increase but then you see that game potentially start to lose traction so what happens is you have game studios who release dlc so they'll release dlc to kind of increase the popularity now a different way of thinking about this i think with allowing creators to create mods on top of your game is that you actually allow the creators to constantly release new dlc on top of your game which gives players more content to enjoy and really it's it's increasing the lifetime of that game i mean if you look at for example minecraft it's been going for like 12 years now it's still immensely popular if you look at graphic auto five it's still the best exactly i almost mentioned that that one and it's because

instead of just releasing like the odd dlc pack all the time which the game studios have to invest significant amount of money and to keep releasing this dlc if you let creators do that for you it's a constant stream of new content now the developers can receive a revenue share of that and they're not actually having any kind of upfront investment but it's still maintaining the longevity of the game so developers do receive a revenue so gta 5 like that's one of the most modded like it's insane rockstar has no ability to do live services and their game is like probably the most sort of a live game out there um so do they they receive a cut from those mods or how does that work um to our best knowledge uh they do not uh however we envision a future in which they will and you know um other game studios and ipo owners be there aaa or indie will have that ability and we as we mentioned can be the facilitator that provides

the technical tools but also the live ops you know hands-on work that's going to be needing to get done to kind of make that feature happen got it got it oh they don't receive the picture you probably feel me but but look i mean there are derivative values i think there were for a long time like the game number one on twitch and it's mostly you know gta 5 role play so you know um 5m etcetera and um they still probably get a good amount of people still just buying the game so this for them could be potentially be looked at as a marketing budget uh you know this is great i think this is not good enough i think that in you know in an ideal world at some point in the future and i don't know if it's a a year or five years or a day kid out i would like to see you know a world in which game developers you know officially participate but without the heavy lifting and you know we'll help with the faf thing yeah no no i understand and

it's just the world of public corporations where if they see somebody's making money they always see that we could be making that money right given that they use the asset so um all right uh on to the last thing before i let you guys go metaverse blockchain nfts like where where do you stand with all of this because i assume you know the type of services that that you're making it's almost like you're talking about you know the typical metaverse talk uh except that you actually have a have a profitable business around it and and 30 million for the 30 million active monthly users so this is actually a real thing with uh web 2 still yeah like how is it possible all these things that went through promises you're kind of doing so i think that the when i think about our strategy you know if we were to do something in the space and we are looking at the space we made a couple of

investments because we want to educate ourselves but we still then start writing code or product specs and those things and i would want to see you know real games and i want to see blockchain solving real needs in real games to give you an example um one of the things i'm saying um i mean the the industry really suffering from is uh in-game trading and you know people who are getting scammed while trading especially kids and it's like it's really annoying and bad and so blockchain theoretically could provide a safe environment for trading so you know if a game is going to be built on web 3 and they're going to allow in-game trading it's still not the better verse you'll still you won't be able to take your ar and play with it in a different game but in this specific game you're going to have legit trading you know for me it's a good thing instead of people just uh scamming each other you know i'd like to start seeing those kind of things nfts

you know this good and bad i think the good is that for creators it kind of breaks a glass ceiling of web 2 monetization the bad is we've seen examples of just you know people exploring the system and then pulling the rug and that's really sad and scams sure i also you know there are kind of difficulties with the distribution of wealth and crypto right now you know not a lot of people own like 95 of the value or 90 of the value and i think it would be better for the world eventually if crypto you know reaches critical mass it has reached critical mass but as it comes more popular the distribution of wealth gets a little more democratized and then you're gonna see less uh speculations on things i think and less like weird things it would be more conventional oh cool it's another coin versus oh you know this is just a gold mine and you get free gold yeah so i mean i i can you know i cannot speak for the world i can say that for us um we'd like to be

helping the creator of the metaverse grow we're doing it so far in web too and with web 3 we want to be focused on real real things and real value-add got it but but you're not actively you know strategizing around around this and it seems like you're able to raise money even without the uh the metaverse i mean we're constantly thinking we just don't know exactly what we're going to do yet no um so are we strategizing yeah i would say we're strategizing you know we're thinking we're trying to figure out hey what are we going to do but you know did we launch our creator token that you're going to mine through people using your products and then you're going to have exclusive creator nfts for or you know mod nfts that you can only kind of download this mod or this modpack if you have that nft um not yet no i mean we're not we're not quite there yeah i think that's smart because it's uh it's short-sighted to jump on that it's a it's a way to make money a lot now but especially with the companies like yours that is so community driven um i mean relying on the community to really produce all the

content uh you have to be really careful with uh with short term right monetization schemes yeah great well i mean you've been at it at 12 and a half years so it's not like you're trying to turn um lee any i mean any points on on blockchain nfts metaverse you want to you want to kind of mention because i mean it's a it's a hot topic everybody wants wants a take on it yeah sure i think i mean for us because we're a payments company i mean there's there's various issues of kind of cryptocurrency just from regulations point of view compliance and i think really from from our research given the average age of kind of you know people who are purchasing on game servers they don't always tend to have a crypto wallet you know like kids don't have crypto wallets normally so we kind of we're focusing more on the the kind of the general the the usual payment methods be that like paypal credit cards etc but you know we are keeping an eye on kind of cryptocurrency uptake etc and because i think it's something that is important to to to focus on but yeah right now i

think it's just like as we said we're we're aware of it we're just not kind of acting on it just yet yeah yeah just being smart about it yeah um all right thank you so much for for joining the podcast for those lists and very interested in open positions uh what so careers at overwolf anything particular that that that you want to highlight in the in the open positions oh this is awesome i mean we have many open positions in many parts of the world uh so lee's building up his team the uk uh nottingham area specifically with uh engineers and support professionals and and qa and you know um i guess other positions and israel we have pretty much everything product managers engineers back in front and um ops people finance people like i think maybe like 30 open positions so not crazy but a lot of different positions um but more importantly if if you you know listen to the podcast and like the story and you know want to be part of

that journey um you know just reach out to us and we'll see if there's an opportunity and we've done this with so many with so many people so far so you know it may just work just to add on that as well tedx is hiring remotely so it's not just in the uk so if anyone likes it or says anyone's listened to this and you want to join the team please feel free to reach out be great to speak remotely from everywhere or roughly the same time zone uh same time zone in las vegas okay just just making sure just making sure so no us that's that'll be the we are hiring in the us um okay okay east coast yeah it goes worse all right uh so that's uh that's a pretty healthy um setup so uh for folks interested over wolf just just even if you're not interested in in new job just go to the uh the web page uh the career section is really cool the uh the value section is really calm actually have it have it open here it's cool in my opinion i don't know if it's your opinion so just go and check it out uh and and uri and lee thank you so much for for joining the podcast thank you so

much educating me on user generated content and and how this the how this world is changing my success much luck and um hope to see you sometimes in in not roblox beta verse but just actually in real life face-to-face and sometimes face all right cool everybody thank you for listening and thank you guys for joining thank you thanks [Music]