Nitro-powered growth: Rising opportunities in the game resource ecosystem

For huge numbers of today’s fans, to play a game is only part of their relationship with it. Their devotion to a given title is equally expressed across the vast ecosystem of resources and creator content that now supports the world’s most successful live-serviced games.

It’s an ecosystem that has been growing for decades, and it increasingly fuels games’ journey into the heartland of popular culture. And a new generation of companies like Nitro are putting increased momentum into this off-platform ecosystem, hoping to extend its potential for the wider medium and its industry.

Dividing their time between a game and the content around it has become very normal for gamers native to live titles. World of Warcraft players, for example, might not only give hours of each week to their in-game life, but also devote just as much time to contributing to – and consuming from – resource websites, wikis, and community hubs built to serve the perennially popular MMO. It’s a movement founded on live games’ collective rise to become one of the medium’s dominant forms – and accelerated by the ongoing cultural growth of video game fandoms as a significant audience and powerful commercial driver.

The result is a sprawling network of websites such as the influential Maxroll.gg, which offers resources such as character planning tools, build guides, news, and community elements for a range of games such as Diablo IV, Lost Ark, and Path of Exile 2. Elsewhere esports is served by comparable websites such as VLR.gg, which gathers player stats, match results, rankings, event listings, and more, entertaining over 10 million devoted fans each month.

They are places where the most engaged, high-intent, high-value players come in huge numbers, and as a result, these content ecosystems are now significant growth drivers – for studios, publishers, and the increasingly professional outfits that build and power the resources that can arguably be seen as support platforms for gaming’s wider success.

It’s a world Cody Bye knows very well indeed. Today Bye stands as co-founder and general manager of gaming ad tech company Nitro, which is part of Overwolf, the all-in-one platform that enables creators to build, distribute, and monetise in-game apps, mods, and private servers. Nitro specialises in providing highly appropriate ads to the website ecosystem that surrounds games, empowering creators to professionalise and monetise their content, while letting brands connect with an enormous, highly engaged audience with readily segmentable demographic preferences.

Nitro is proving especially popular with content creation customers thanks to its seven-day payment structure, which sees ad-generated money delivered within a week after the end of the month it’s earned – a time substantially quicker than that offered by their rivals; more on the impacts of that below. Bye and his team have also focussed on building a platform that gives full control to web developers, and that loads ads fast and reliably, letting publishers and brands be sure they’re offering visitors the best in user experience. Collaboration and consulting are baked into the support Nitro delivers, and as you might expect, the team provides a fully featured analytics dashboard for tracking and adjusting campaigns.

Bye himself is a true native of the live-game ecosystem. His first contribution came in the form of fanfiction published to an EverQuest site, which inspired a brief career in game journalism that in turn led him to selling ads around games, holding the reins at WarCraft resource portal Wowhead, and helping game companies in the space develop their businesses and content. In other words, Bye has spent a lot of time as a consumer, contributor, and professional in the network of content creator websites that now surround modern games. And he’s convinced that the ecosystem has contributions to make that can be felt across the industry.

"Nitro gives creators the tools to not only monetise their gaming website, but also not have to move away from their initial intentions for what they’ve created - a truly free resource for all"

“These games, and especially modern live games, are becoming much, much deeper,” Bye reflects. “I think people don’t recognise the potential of this ecosystem, or they see it as a space of lower quality, fan-made stuff. But to think that is to miss a huge opportunity. Back in the days of Sonic the Hedgehog or Battletoads, maybe you’d need a guide to get you past a certain difficult point, or you might learn a few tips and tricks from a magazine, but there wasn't any need for more than that. By contrast, current games are much more in-depth. It’s not even that they’re just more complicated or more difficult.

“They’re way bigger in every sense of the word. They’re more dynamic, and always evolving. With the first wave of those online games, the Ultimas and Everquests and Meridian 59s; that’s when we started to see the beginning of these ecosystems of resources and community emerging around games. Those online ecosystems became foundations for the games’ successes – players were more online, potentially playing while running these early community resource portals and websites in the background. They were looking to understand more and therefore play better.”

Over time, Bye suggests, studios, publishers and savvy brands have started to see this ecosystem as important to their own growth – because these places keep games in people’s minds when they’re not playing them, and keep brands in the minds of very online individuals.

“We’re going to keep seeing more of this, as game companies start building their own resources for this ecosystem, and consumers grow more comfortable with seeing relevant ads in those spaces,” Bye proposes. “In those cases, I’d recommend keeping those player resources free of charge. You can monetise through ads, rather than obscuring information about your game behind a paywall. I think one of the best examples of a game company doing that internally is Paradox Interactive with the wikis they create for their main titles like Stellaris, where they’re really actively contributing to what their fans have already been building.”

Elsewhere, Bye explains, we are seeing more companies provide APIs that let content creator resources hook into live information generated by games – something Epic did with its MOBA Paragon and Riot has done for years with League of Legends. Other game publishers are becoming more open to collaboration and contributing directly to these resources, or simply giving blessing and recognition to fan-made ecosystem elements.

And Bye is certain the monetising power of ad tech can bring a foundation and consistency to this movement that can accelerate its contribution to individual titles and the wider gaming medium.

“At a high-level Nitro has been built to empower creators, giving them all the tools that they need to not only monetise their gaming website, but also not have to move away from their initial intentions for what they’ve created - a truly free resource for all,” he offers. “We can bring them income, and consistency, which in turn helps make this wider ecosystem more impactful, and more interesting to the game companies themselves.”

“At Nitro we pay the fastest, offering seven-day payments – or ‘Net 7’ payments, as they are called,” Bye continues. “Most of our competitors pay at Net 60, so we are quite a bit faster. And we’re all about empowering creators and bringing more potential to that ecosystem they’re building around their favourite games. Being paid fast isn’t only a nice extra. It can mean keeping up with server payments, which typically come every 30 days. That can keep a site running. Net 7 can also power faster growth, and let you reach your goals sooner, and have more money to spin up related projects, or start hiring and growing.”

That’s certainly going to be an appealing prospect for hosts and creators of the ecosystem Nitro supports. But if we look at the existing legacy of this movement, then the idea of Net 7 payments accelerating momentum in the space suggests a very exciting future indeed.

“I think it’s important to remember just how much these creators have contributed to what games have become today,” Bye enthuses. “Those early mods like the Defense of the Ancients Warcraft III mod, or the Quake Team Fortress mod came from creators, and spawned entire new games and genres. Mods led us to battle royales, and thus what Fortnite is in popular culture today. And then you look at the websites around games – Allakhazam is a really early example. It didn’t just support EverQuest; it helped that game's growth and success and what it became. So, for Nitro, supporting this movement is about celebrating and supporting creators and making sure they are paid fast enough to thrive – but it’s also about supporting and fostering something that’s one of the main driving forces for what games are – and what they might become.”