🎮 Justin Sacks has worn many hats in his 15+ years in the game industry—from competitive gamer to content creator to leading business development for a global multimedia game company. Today, he serves as the CEO of Nexus, a platform specializing in building and managing creator programs for the world's top live service games.

Nexus is at the forefront of integrating content creators into the gaming ecosystem, creating an essential bridge between game publishers and creators. As more games recognize the value of these partnerships, Nexus is leading the industry by providing turnkey solutions that simplify and optimize the process. Whether it's through revenue sharing, robust dashboard tools, or seamless financial management, Nexus is setting the standard for what effective creator programs should look like.

Tune in to learn about the evolution of game marketing, the significant impact and potential of content creators, and effective strategies for incentivizing creators to authentically engage with games they truly love, fostering long-term partnerships and sustainable content creation.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• Understanding the Power of Content Creators
• Strategies for Engaging Content Creators
• Identifying the Right Creators for Game Success
• Real-World Impact of Nexus

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Justin Sacks on LinkedIn
• Justin Sacks on X
• Nexus
• Nexus on X
• Adam Lieb on the Here's Waldo Podcast

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo Podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together, we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.

Lizzie Mintus: I'm Lizzie Mintus, founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique video game recruitment firm. This is the Here's Waldo podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about what it's taken them to be successful. You can expect to hear valuable lessons from their journey and get a glimpse into the future of the industry.

This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm for the video game industry. We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs. 

Before introducing today's guest, I want to give a thank you to Adam Lieb for introducing us. Adam runs GameSight and is wonderful, and works with Justin professionally. And they're friends, so we'll get more into that later. 

Today we have Justin Sachs with us. He is the CEO of Nexus, founded the company alongside his co-founders in 2020 after successfully operating as Chrono, a popular game deal site, for three years, where they began building the foundation of what Nexus is today.

Beginning his career as a competitive gamer, unfortunately, before esports was a word much less in industry, Justin went on to found a League of Legends coaching website and then led business development for a gaming media company called Curse until it was acquired by Twitch in 2016. His life and passion has been the intersection of content creators and game publishers, and Nexus is the culmination of the interplay between those two groups.

Let's get started. Thank you for being here. Glad we can make it work. 

Justin Sacks: Thank you. I appreciate you having me. 

Lizzie Mintus: For anyone that's not familiar, give us the pitch on Nexus. 

Justin Sacks: So Nexus, we call ourselves a creator program in a box, and it's an easy way for any live service game to build and manage your creator program, which is basically how do you as a game have a relationship with all of the content creators who are going to fall in love with your game and then importantly, in an evergreen fashion, incentivize them, not just to drive awareness of your game, but to drive engagement and actually monetization within it.

And so if anyone is familiar with Fortnight's supported creator codes or super sales creator programs, we build and manage programs like that. And our platform makes it really easy for any game to have their own. 

Lizzie Mintus: And what is the story behind, you had a company before this, Chrono, and so how did you start that, and then how did that turn into Nexus?

Justin Sacks: Yeah, so when Curse was being acquired by Twitch back in 2016, my two co founders who were also my best friends at the time, we had all worked together at Curse. And we wanted to start something, and the thing that we believed about the world, that will now sound very obvious, but I promise was more contrarian almost a decade ago. Simply that content creators drove a lot of discovery in games that the way people learn about games, get excited about them, engage with them, buy them and stay engaged with them, is from the personalities they follow on YouTube or Twitch or any sort of personality that has an audience.

But we thought the challenge was attribution for publishers. So if you're the game publisher, how do you know which content creator to work with? And how do you work with them at scale? And if you are that creator, how do you get credit or monetization for making that acquisition happen or getting that player to be engaged with it?

And so the first iteration of that was Chrono, which was a daily deals website. So if anyone is familiar with Woot. com from like the 2010s, which eventually was bought by Amazon. It's basically what if there was one amazing game for the best price it had ever been on for one day. And content creators, if they got their audience to go and buy it, they would get a piece of that sale. And that's what Chrono was. And it worked reasonably well. It just had a ceiling. We could only feature one game at a time. Most content creators only really fall in love with a handful of games each year. And so basically every day we had to recreate that marketing engine. And eventually the product evolution brought us to where we are with Nexus.

Lizzie Mintus: Tell me more about the evolution. So you started it with your best friends and what were their roles? So you did business development. 

Justin Sacks: Yes. And so one of my friends, Zach, led product for Curse and then Adam led design and then also did front end engineering. 

Lizzie Mintus: The trifecta, super different skill sets. And so you came up with the idea or the thesis. And then you all were able to take the plunge. And I think people have all these misconceptions, many misconceptions about what it's like to start a business. So I'd love to hear just about like early days and the iterations and what ultimately made you decide to do something bigger. How did he know it was the right time? 

Justin Sacks: Yeah, we were really fortunate. We had I think the three main pieces that are critical to starting something new, which is we had the team with all the overlapping capabilities in order to make it happen. We also had basically our first employee who's like essentially a co-founder, a guy named Dusty, who was a backend engineer to actually build out the infrastructure of the site.

We had an idea, this like thing that we believed in that the world maybe wasn't so sure about. And then I'm grateful that we had the chance to go and build this. We had some folks that believe in us and we're like, Hey, we'll invest in you so that you can quit your job and start building this and try to make this into a reality.

And we didn't know what we didn't know. And there was a ton of learnings in the first handful of months of, well, how do you actually like to build a website? How do you accept payments? How do you run payroll for a team? How do you make a contract with a game publisher? There's all these things that are critically important that you have to learn on the fly.

And then we happened to choose a business where we basically had to start and close a new deal every single day with a game developer, which is a daunting task. And so it was a ton of energy and sprinting all at the beginning. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, it is. And you had funding from friends and family, or did you do an initial raise?

Justin Sacks: So the very initial raise was mostly friends and angels that we knew of. So that was about $350,000. And then once we got it off the ground and it was working and the platform was making money and doing reasonably well, we then did a million dollar round from an angel group. And then two years later, we did a two and a half million dollar round with some VCs. And then a $4M round. And then we did a little note, and then in 2022, we did a $10M round with Griffin, who's a wonderful investor in the game space. 

Lizzie Mintus: Oh, congrats. Griffin's great. I went to a fun GDC event with them. It's a really small game world. 

Congrats on raising all that money. I think that's such a hot topic from GDC and given the times right now, although so many new funds have been announced. So I feel like we're turning a leaf, finally. 

What did you learn from all the fundraising? I imagine you're the CEO. Is that right? 

Justin Sacks: That's right. Well, fundraising is not the destination. So we wouldn't have to raise this money if I was better at just building and running a business, and then we could just manage it from the cashflow that the actual business spits off. 

It's a really challenging thing. And I think the most important part that I've learned in fundraising is to be really genuine and authentic with investors. Like you want to tell them upfront all the reasons why they shouldn't invest in you. And like, Hey, if any of A, B, C, and D, if any of these things worry you, this is probably not going to be a fit, but maybe let's talk about how we can support each other. Maybe there's other companies I can recommend to you, or maybe you can recommend other investors to me, and you want to be as open and upfront and transparent in the early days as you possibly can, which probably means I got a much faster nose than a normal person might. 

But it made it so that when I found the right investor I was like, Hey, this is the thing that we believe about the world. These are the things that are good about the team and the platform that we've built. And then here's all the challenges in front of us. When, like, for example, when Griffin leaned in, it meant that they really aligned with the vision that we had. And that makes the relationship moving forward in the future so much stronger.

Lizzie Mintus: That's a really interesting, not really reverse psychology, but I feel like it's probably a very different way than most people take, to bebe so up front. 

Justin Sacks: I'm just like, I'm a really bad negotiator and I feel so uncomfortable like pretending to be something that I'm not. And so I'd rather tell them here's all of the warts and the challenges and the awful things that are happening or could happen. And if you still believe in us, then I think it's going to be a fit. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. You said you had a lot more nose up front. What does that mean? 

Justin Sacks: Yeah. Because I would tell them like, Hey, this thing that a lot of people believe is bad. Like we have that. And back in the day, we weren't web three or crypto. And I was very upfront. We're not that. And I don't think we're going to be in web three or crypto. 

Or recently, AI is a really exciting thing. We don't do much or have much to do with AI. And when you're up front with that. And you're not like, Hey, maybe we could do it. If you give me the money, we can look into it. But instead I was like, Hey, this is just not who we are. Then the investor is like, okay, well we're trying to pattern match to that. And because that's not you, maybe this isn't a fit for us right now. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I've also had some different investors on the podcast and chatted with them. And I think people try to slap on whatever the hottest thing is.

And I'm just gonna make a bad analogy, but you, I mean, sometimes I feel like it's insincere. Like, Hey, we're this thing now, right? Everyone's AI company. Everyone's a web three company or whatever is really hot. Investors might be looking for that, but I think they also see through a lot of bullshit.

Justin Sacks: When we started, e sports was actually the coolest thing. And that was my background. And I had investors literally say like, Hey, I don't know about this idea, but if you want to run an e sports team, I could totally fund that. And I was like, what do you... no, that's not what we're doing. That's not what I'm trying to build and the world I'm trying to live in and change.

 And maybe for the worst, maybe for some of those folks, they can be really successful by taking extra resources and going into areas that are unexplored and maybe not their passion. Maybe that can work for them, but I don't think that's really my path. 

Lizzie Mintus: No, I think that you. Ultimately, for me, I think that people succeed in the things that they're most passionate about. And the biggest danger of being an entrepreneur is shiny things because there's so many shiny things all the time and it's so hard to stay focused.

So, to me, it sounds like you know who you are, you know what you're doing, you're really certain. 

Justin Sacks: We're in an interesting spot right now because all that Nexus is, is the basically the intersection between content creators and game publishers. And like right now that's a really exciting thing. I think one of like the coolest trends I see in the games industry are actually like, the creator led game publishers. 

So I don't know if you're familiar with OTK's Mad Mushroom or Offbrand, which is Ludwig's company that's doing game publishing. I think that's really exciting right now, but it's been like my whole life for the past decade and a half.

And so I feel really fortunate that right now Nexus is sort of at an intersection of a couple tailwinds because I don't have to be disingenuous about it. No, this is the only thing I care about. And it just happens to be the thing that's cool right now. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, tell me about why that's cool right now. Tell me more. 

Justin Sacks: Well, I think finally, we're seeing more recognition of the impact and the power that creators have, that when a creator authentically and genuinely loves a game, the amount of attention, awareness, and then eventually sales that can drive for it is almost second to none. The power is having the right creator aligned with the right game of what they can deliver. It’s really incredible. And that's not just user acquisition, which I think is what most people initially think of the power of influencers or content creators. It's getting their audience to like first find the game. 

It's more when there's that real connection, the growth metrics and like the downstream impact a creator can have on player behavior, that's what I've seen to be the most significant. Things like converting free players into paid players or retaining players or reactivating churned players. I think content creators can be the most impactful for some of those metrics. 

Lizzie Mintus: Do you have any metric stats facts around that? 

Justin Sacks: Sure. So with some of our programs, I guess fundamentally to talk through what Nexus is, is the piece of the creator program that we most focus on is revenue sharing. So the idea being a player inside of the game can type in their favorite influencers name, so a creator code, and then when that player goes to buy something, that creator gets a piece of that sale.

And so it basically creates this feedback loop of the creator telling the player, Hey, there's this new battle pass in the game. There's this new skin or this new bundle. And if you buy it, it supports me as that creator. And then when the player goes to do it, they see that their purchase supported that creator. And then the creator is like, okay, now I'm going to talk even more about this game and stay within this game. 

What we've seen happen from that is like 40% in one of our partner's games, 40% of the players that use a creator code had never bought anything before. And so, the creator was the reason those players started to make those purchases. And another 15% on top of that were players that had, that used to be spenders in the game, they used to play the game, but they had churned out, so they hadn't played in 60 days. And then their first purchase back was using that creator code.

So the creator was the reason that player reactivated and joined the game. And then retention is like the wild one where we see on average players that use a creator code retain twice as long. So they stick around in the game twice as long as the average player. But if a player reactivates through a creator code versus any other means of reactivation, the retention is five times higher.

And basically we have like a ton of those sort of stats. It's just wild to see the impact that the creator can have, which it gets to the point, you want as many of your game's players as possible using a creator code. And the challenge is, it's not gonna be 100% penetration. Not all of your players are gonna watch and follow content creators. But the ones that do, if you add a system like a creator program, they become really incredible players. 

Lizzie Mintus: Interesting. And you can track that data from the creator program, whereas if you don't have a creator program, it's really just a wild guess. 

Justin Sacks: So Adam from GameSite might not love me saying all this, but that is actually, I mean, his business does a lot on the attribution side, so maybe he's okay.

But a lot of traditional influencer marketing is purely brand marketing or awareness marketing, meaning you give money to the influencer, they make a video or do a stream to tell their audience, like, Hey, this game exists, but then you don't know what actually happened afterwards. 

Did those players try the game out? Did they stay engaged for six months? Did they buy a bunch? Like, you're not really certain of that, but with Nexus, our creator programs are purely performance. The creators only get paid and Nexus only gets paid, if sales are actually happening. If a player used a creator code to buy something, that's the only way the creator can actually get paid from that.

And so because of that, we have a ton of efficacy data around the performance of those content creators. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Can you talk about what goes into setting up a creator program with a company? What are all the steps and what should people think about that they commonly don't think about when they start one?

Justin Sacks: Yeah. So I'll walk through kind of how I broadly described the three buckets of what Nexus solves for. And then I can talk about, how do you set up a creator program? 

So Nexus, for the first piece is onboarding. Which is how do the creators know that your game's program exists and then how do they join it and become a part of it? With Nexus you can have an open program meaning any creator can come in get their code and participate, or you can have an application based program. So a creator might authenticate their Youtube or their Twitch or Tiktok or whatever it might be they might fill out a form saying what country they're in or they're over a certain age or answer questions of why they want to join your program. And then you as the developer can approve or reject certain candidates. Or you can have a closed program where you just say, Hey, this dozen creators that we've worked with for the last two years. These are the people we want to start with. So that's onboarding. It's really important. 

And that comes with all sort of like the CRM bells and whistles of how do you actually manage creators at scale? How do you communicate new opportunities to them? How do you send them keys for your game? How do you have them download new builds or sign NDAs or whatever it might be? That's all part of that onboarding. 

And then gets into the second piece of dashboarding, which is really important, both for the content creator to know when they've driven value. So it's important, again, to make that feedback loop as tight as possible. When the creator gets their audience to buy something and they see that the creator benefits from that they're getting paid for that, that's a really key moment. And so we provide a live dashboard for the creators to see all the information about the program but also all of their sales and when they're next getting paid and all that sort of stuff.

But also that dashboard is really critical for the publisher so that they can see in real time as well which content creators are driving what value, for which SKUs, on what days, and all that sort of stuff. And then they can create the program that best fits their game, meaning, maybe they should have creator tiers. So maybe you want to have a gold tier and a platinum tier, so that you can encourage creators to make the content that you believe is best for your game. Or maybe different SKUs should have different revenue shares.

So for example, we often recommend for a game to share more of their revenue for a battle pass, which is, if a player buys a battle pass, they become a really great player, but maybe less revenue for less of a revenue share for like hard currency or something like that. And then of course with Nexus, you can run activation. So if you're doing a big marketing beat, season three is coming out this weekend for the next 48 hours, all creators get 10% more or something like that. 

And then the last piece that we solve for, which is really the biggest headache and usually the reason publishers say yes is that Nexus does all of the payouts and all of the taxes. So have a creative program that means, definitionally you're going to have dozens, hundreds or thousands of effectively individual contractors that you all have to pay up to different amounts every month and like your accounting team will get really mad at you if you make them all do that. And so we handle all of that stuff and all the taxes at the end of the year for our partners. 

Lizzie Mintus: That is a dream come true. I think anyone that's a business owner can just imagine having a thousand contractors in different states with different payments. Yeah, that in itself is huge. 

Justin Sacks: And content creators for all of their wonderfulness of entertainment and all of the business value of driving sales for games are not always the best people to sign up and fill out tax forms and give you their information on time and all that sort of stuff. And so we handle that burden of making sure that all the creators get paid in the right way at the right time and all the tax stuff. 

Lizzie Mintus: That is a dream come true. 

Justin Sacks: Yeah. You also asked about how to set up a program. And there are some publishers that have first party programs. So I mentioned them earlier, like with Epic and Supercell, they're doing a great job. And I can talk through the differences, but basically with us, there's three things to accomplish.

The first is the structure of the program. So, how open is it? Are creators going to apply? What are the different revenue shares for the different SKUs, all that sort of stuff. And we have a lot of recommendations and best practices, but every game is different. 

Secondly is the actual integration. And so in order for this to work, there needs to be that user experience inside of the game so that the player can type in their favorite creator's name. There also has to be an API sharing information with us, telling us, Hey, A player like app post transaction when a transaction happens that player bought this skew for this much supporting this content creator.

Next is, we don't need to know the player's name or anything about them. We need to know which creator gets credit for what sale so that we can do all the payouts and stuff. And then the last piece is the legal side. And so we need to make sure that we sign a contract so that the creators can get paid every month for the sales that they generate.

And so those are the three pieces. We've seen publishers fully onboard with us as fast as a day or two. And then sometimes it takes them a week and a half because they want to do a lot of the design cycles and they want to do the QA and edge case testing and things like that. 

Now, if you're a game and you want to do this first party and you don't want to work with us, it's basically all of those same pieces except you also have to build the dashboarding so that creators knows how much they're making when they're getting paid You probably also have to build the internal dashboarding. So your own team knows how the program is doing. You're gonna have to build all of those levers that you can pull around different creators, different revenue share, different skews can have different revenue share, different times can have different revenue share, and all that sort of stuff. And then of course you're gonna have to build the financial function of how you pay out all those people and handle taxes for them and all that sort of stuff. 

Lizzie Mintus: Wow. I'm not even in the space, but I'm always looking for an easy to release solution.

Justin Sacks: Happy to help. 

Lizzie Mintus: Nice to know you do it all. So you touched on setting up programs and figuring out if you should accept anybody, if you should accept the people that you know do really well, or if you should have an application process.

So, I do recruiting, so I'm always interested to think of things from a recruiting angle. Do people recruit the right content creators? Hat hunt them? For content creators, do you advise just taking anybody and organically seeing who's right? How do you determine how open to make your program at the beginning?

Justin Sacks: So it totally depends on the game and where they're at in their life cycle. So if you have a game that's been out for a decade and you have a really robust, organic creator community and a huge player audience, I would recommend at minimum doing an application based program. But probably at that point, you could totally do an open program. And then where do you want to stride creators is post them joining, maybe having different creator tiers where you offer different things. Not just revenue share, but maybe in the platinum tier, there's a private Discord where they can talk with developers or they get access to upcoming content and all sorts of stuff that we can support them with.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

Justin Sacks: But let's say that you're launching a new game. It probably makes sense to be a little bit more closed and see what is working for your game with those creators. The beauty of this performance only creator program is the only time you're spending money as the publisher is if the creator's actually driving sales.

But the flip side of that is mean, means that the creators are only finding value if their audience is actually buying something. 

Lizzie Mintus: Right. 

Justin Sacks: Which again means like you really want to discover those truly authentically aligned creators that actually love your game and will continue to make content for your game for a long period of time.

The KPI that I recommend, at least live service game publishers really truly care about, is like the unique number of individual content creators who make a living by making content for your game. And the higher that number is, the more people that you can support that make a living making content for your game, the better that your game is at the moment, but also the longer longevity that you're going to have for the health of your game.

And so for those newer titles that are just launching or have a smaller creator community, probably start with a smaller creator program and figure out what works best and how can you best support those creators in a way that is both healthy for the creator, but also healthy for you as the game too.

Lizzie Mintus: And is there ever an instance where you start with a really open program and then you find your top whatever creators and you tell the other creators, thanks or not right now? Is there any disadvantage to having people who aren't making a living but are creating content and driving some revenue? I mean, is more people just better? 

Justin Sacks: The drawback is mostly just a distraction, of the more people in the program. If you and your team are not set up to handle. Like they're going to want more from you. They're going to want like, how do I go up this tier and then get access to these other things? Or how do I make more money from the program? There's just going to be more folks that want your attention.

A lot of that we handle with and for our publisher partners, but it sort of depends on what they're looking for. And so I'd mostly recommend having more of an open program and more of a wide, easily accessible application based program if the game has been around for a while and if you have a team that's comfortable communicating with a lot of creators at scale.

Lizzie Mintus: Can you talk about the communication issues? Just like having a larger team, right? There's so many different communication points. So what kind of team would someone need to have in place to be able to support that and really effectively drive revenue from the creators? 

Justin Sacks: So a lot of this stuff we want to support our partners with, but the best partnerships that we have are the ones where it's a partnership where we're supporting them with the tools and the expertise and the capabilities and some of the more account management stuff.

But also they have a great team. And the unsung heroes, in my opinion, of the games industry are community managers and influencer managers. They don't often have the most decision making ability within organizations, but man, are they carrying so much of what really truly matters to the game. And so whenever a game has really exceptional community department and an influencer department, like they're going to be a joy for us to work with. 

Lizzie Mintus: Is that what you'd say is your ideal customer? 

Justin Sacks: Yeah, the customer that I know day zero, we're going to drive a lot of value for is a game that's been out for a while, that has a meaningful player base and an organic creator base, and knows that the creators that they have matter to them. And they want to retain those creators. They want to reactivate trend creators. And they know that when those creators are incentivized, not just to play the game, but to drive attention to the new bundles inside of the game, the new discounts, the new battle pass, that it'll be better for them as the publisher. If all of those things are true, like I know on day zero, we're going to be really meaningful and impactful to them. And those are the dream folks for us to work with. 

Lizzie Mintus: And why is it live service games? Why is that your niche? Did you try other genres to begin? 

Justin Sacks: Yeah, so Chrono and early days of Nexus were premium. And the distinction I draw is like a premium game is a one time purchase game where there's usually no content really added to the game afterwards, maybe there's a sequel in a couple years, or one big DLC a year or something like that. Versus live service, which are often free to play games, but not always, there's content added all the time.

And where we've found premium games, creators do drive a lot of sales of premium games. In fact, I think they're the most effective marketing channel. At this point for most games the largest part of their marketing budgets is influencers and it's the fastest growing part of most marketing budgets as well. And that's true for both premium and live service.

The challenge for us is just with premium games the window of opportunity for when the creator can drive value is so small. It's basically pre orders to two weeks post launch. And if we don't align having the license to the games that we can sell it on behalf of the creators and getting all of the creators who are going to be most interested within that window. If we miss that window, there's not a lot of value that we can really offer to the game because if we get the creators six months after, they already made content for the game. They're not really excited to make it again. And most of their audience who were going to buy it, have already bought it and they can't buy it again.

Versus a live service game, let's say, we miss a really important game. Patch that the game has. Well, they're probably going to have another big patch in two months. And the players who maybe bought the battle pass in the previous season are probably going to buy the next one. And they'll be able to support the creator again in that fashion.

And so we found that frankly, it just makes it easier for us to run our business for live service games. The dream steady state vision of the platform of what we're building for Nexus, we'll be able to support and work with premium games as well. We still have a web store product that supports premium games and we still support a lot of wonderful partners that way. It's just our focus is more on live service. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, totally. I think all businesses have focus and you can be like, this is my focus, but that doesn't mean that you can not support things that are in the periphery. And that's interesting. Do you think there are some exceptions to that rule? Obviously that's a pretty general rule, but have you seen any premium games where somehow they can really reactivate people like the launch was rocky for whatever reason, but then they've made a lot of updates and somehow it can work in the future. 

Justin Sacks: There are a handful. I think that the two that come to mind, No Man's Sky did an amazing job there. Their initial launch was maybe misaligned expectations of some of the players but where they're at now is like someone's universally loved as a game and they've totally turned their like review score around.

And then Among Us, I think is a really great example of a game that was out for, I think it was like more than a year and a half and maybe had a couple of hundred concurrent viewers, but then when some content creators, specifically a streamer named soda pop and really started playing it and showing it off, it blew up to be like the biggest game of the six months of when it was super in the zeitgeist. And it's still doing incredibly well today. 

 Then I think of publishers that do a really great job. There's a couple that come to mind. So I think Paradox does a really great job with this. Paradox and then also, ARK, which is a survival game. They both do a really great job because they sort of act like live service games.

They just monetize through consistent DLC. So every Paradox game, if you go and look it up on Steam, whether it's city skylines or whatever it might be, it'll have like dozens of DLC that you can purchase. Which are sort of like them adding content periodically, so it feels like a live service game. And ARK does a really similar thing to a really successful degree. 

Lizzie Mintus: From Among Us, the creator that really turned them around, how can other companies replicate this? What is it about this creator that was so aligned with the game? That's what everyone's really trying to figure out. Maybe you have some of the answers here.

Justin Sacks: That's what it was. And I think another great example, I don't know why I'm sticking with OTK, which is a creator group, but Asmongold with Final Fantasy, the MMO, he also revitalized and brought them to almost an order of magnitude, more players than the game had ever had before. Because when he started playing it, I call them like lighthouse creators or meta influencers, where other creators watch them to see what content to make.

And I think soda pop is a great example of this. Coke carnage is a great example of this. Shroud is a great example of this. There's a handful of creators that are like sort of lighthouse content creators that other creators look to, to be like, Hey, that's content that I should be making as well.

 And so I think the best thing you can do as a game is authentically align with one of those meta influencers or lighthouse content creators. If you can do that and like to have them fall in love with the game, you're going to be in a really great place. Especially if you can marry that with a creator program, which is the incentive to have that creator stick with your game long term.

Lizzie Mintus: Who's the one who's going to make the connection. I mean, how do you go about convincing this lighthouse creator to play your game in the first place and create content for you? I'll send two things. 

Justin Sacks: I'd recommend two, three things. The one that is that I'm biased is having a creator program. So if you have a creative program, there's a reason for those creators to know that the game exists and stick with you long term. But if you have a really great community and influencer team members at the publisher, this is their role to foster that and identify that.

And then the last one is there's a couple of really great companies and agencies out there on the game site. One of them is that their whole job is to prospect, find, and then attach them to you.

Now, the problem, of course, is agencies work from marketing budgets and so you need to have a budget and then basically it's a job of game sites to deploy your budget with the right creators. And hopefully you couple that with a creator program, so those creators stick around for the long term.

Lizzie Mintus: So you work pretty closely with Adam at GameSight. You'll create the creator program, and then Adam is going to find the right creator for the company. 

Justin Sacks: That's basically right. Yeah, one of the partners that I think is a standout has done just as such a great job is Capcom. And so Capcom is a shared partner between GameSite and us.

And GameSite does most of the marketing spend and also the attribution piece. And then at Nexus, we have the foundational layers of a creator program. And so how does the creator make money by continuing to pay attention and drive their audience towards Capcom's titles? 

Lizzie Mintus: And how has that made Capcom successful and the players of the game happy?

Justin Sacks: Yeah, I think a good example, they just launched a game. I think it was during GDC, so this is like three weeks ago, Dragon's Dogma 2, which is an amazing game by the way, if anyone listening hasn't played yet and likes sort of open world RPGs. And it was a great example of, GameSite ran their marketing activation for Dragon's Dogma 2, so identifying which creators should be part of the paid activity that we do.

And then with Nexus, we were on top of the paid activity of those incentives for the creators not just to play the game and tell their audience it exists, but tell their audience like, hey, go buy it in my store. Go buy it here. We also support some of the earned creators. So like when other creators see this game is awesome. I want to play it too. 

So an example is Shroud and Lyric. They're able to work with Nexus and also work with GameSite to start playing the game, tell their audience about it, and get their audience excited about it. And then when they want to go and purchase it, they can purchase it through Nexus.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Sounds like you have such good synergy and you're friends. So that's the best. 

Justin Sacks: Yeah. I think we'd be friends even if we weren't good business partners, but it does help. 

Lizzie Mintus: So when should people start thinking about creators and how to attract the creators? Like if you're, at what stage of making the game? I know it can be a growth strategy, but if you're a startup and let's say you're making a live service game, you raised $50M. You don't have the budget that a Capcom would. How can you think about that in the really early days? And what should you build into your game to make sure that it ends up being good for creators other than a creator program? Like what sorts of things should the actual game itself have that's going to make it attractive? 

Justin Sacks: So first, so I have a challenging answer to that, but the first thing is make sure that your game actually should be a fit for creators. And most games should have some sort of creator community. The games that maybe are less of a fit are casual. So if you're making a mobile hyper casual game, where almost all of your monetization is going to be through ad revenue, there's not going to be a lot of creator attention because it doesn't make a lot of sense to watch a creator play those sorts of games.

If there isn't a strategy or progression or collaboration or things like that. But assuming you're one of the 90%, 95% of games that should have greater community. Unfortunately, the answer is the whole time. It's sort of like a life cycle of your game. And the hot button, I guess like definition is creator strategy is like you should have a creator strategy, which is basically what is your game's intentions around how you can work with creators initially, and then eventually at scale.

And so I think the very earliest days are to invite and try to identify the creators that will align organically with what your game is doing. So it's like, as you're developing the game, you can think of, Hey, this game is basically this other game plus this slice of this title, plus maybe the social layer for this game.

And then you identify well, who are the creators that really love one or ideally multiple of those titles and you bring them in really early as basically like development and QA partners for the game so they can come in and this is a practice. There's a couple great teams that do this regularly. Loaded is a great agency that does this all the time. Basically bringing in creators to give feedback. during the development of the game. And I think that's really important. It's both important to get the perspective of a content creator, but also too early on to build that relationship with the creator. 

. When you get closer to closed alpha closed beta, I think one of the most important things you can do is bring in a bunch of creators to play together and give feedback all at once. And then the second you're ready for the game to be viewed by players doing some sort of like invitational event for content creators, whether that's them all streaming and are playing it separately or if you're a pvp multiplayer game having some sort of like invitational or tournament, that can be really powerful as well.

And then just making sure as you're doing all these things how do you think about partnering with the creators who will organically love your game both initially so how do you get their attention initially but then how do you keep them around for the long term. And that's when you know start thinking about things like creator programs. And then some of the pieces that can be hard are, let's say you're trying to do that, not just with like two or three, but with dozens of creators. Well, how do you manage them at scale? How do you provide them with builds? How do you give them keys? How do you have them sign contracts? And so Nexus is one of the platforms and tools that can do this, but there are other places out there that do a great job as well. 

Lizzie Mintus: How do you differentiate from the other ones?

Justin Sacks: So the big thing that Nexus does is that revenue share piece, because we handle all of the payouts and taxes, which everyone hates doing. That's like the core piece that we rally around. You want to have an incentivized creator program where the creator is There for the long term where they're not just taking your influence or marketing money, you know every six to twelve months for a marketing beat, but rather they're there to be your partner driving value for the long term That's what nexus provides, is that revenue share part of it? There isn't really You know any other platforms sort of doing that.

And then I really pride ourselves on you know the other tools that come with Nexus, which is how do you have a great onboarding experience for a creator, or how do you communicate to them at scale, or share with them the things that those creators need to be successful, whether that's assets or a webinar or it's keys or a SDK or whatever it might be.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. And you touched on, I mean, there's revenue share, but as you know, people are so incentivized by different things. So you talked about different tiers and working with the devs. Can you talk about incentives other than pure cash that work well if you have a creator that you really want to retain.

Justin Sacks: Exclusivity, audience building, and financial, so dollars are the big things. MHE or the founder of Twitch had a really pithy way of saying it that I can't remember. It was like the three F's of what do creators look for, which is like fame, fortune, and finance maybe or something like that. I don't know. But fortune and finance are the same. Oh, friends. 

But some of the like tactical specific tools that I think developers can do a great job of is if you can offer exclusivity. So this can be, hey, you can make content for this game, but other people can't. Or I'm giving you early access to look at this thing when other people don't know about it. Or you will put your logo in our game, that people can achieve. Or you're going to have access to this only system. You know, exclusivity is a thing that creators really, really love. 

Additionally, if you can help them grow their audience, some games have done a really great job where they put creators' content into the game or into the owned social channels that the game has, and help to surface new audiences to that content creator. Creators love to hear that. 

And then of course there's dollars, if there's a way that the creator can make money by playing the game that they love, that can perform really well. And it doesn't just have to be the two ways that. Us and GameSite do it, so us is through revenue share, GameSite is through marketing budget. But it can be through, sort of like bonuses. So we call this bounties and referrals, but if you refer a certain number of players to us or if your community all plays 12 sessions and joins a clan, you get some reward. There's all sorts of interesting things that we've seen publishers do.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I'm sure there's a bunch of different ways you can do it. Interesting. I'm learning so much from you. Thank you. Podcasting is so fun. 

So who are the biggest creators to watch right now? Who are the lighthouse creators that you would recommend companies keep their tabs on?

Justin Sacks: The challenge is, it depends on the game. It depends on your genre. I don't recommend going for just the biggest name and force fit them into your game. One of the hottest creators right now is a streamer named Jinxy, whose main game is Rainbow Six Siege, which is a tactical fast time to kill shooter. And if you're making a puzzle game, I don't think you should work with him. But if you're making anything close to that genre, he'd be such an incredible creator to work with. 

And so I think it's first identifying which are the creators that are fit for you. And so I go back to the early parts of this conversation, when I think of actually the creator groups that are doing a really great job, those are the first folks that come to mind.

So I'll give three answers. So OTK, which I've mentioned a handful of times. So that's like Asmongold and Sodapoppin and Sear and Wilmeth and a handful of really great creators. They're known for a lot of them coming from MMOs. So like World of Warcraft and a lot of them now are more variety content creators, they play a ton of different things.

The next one off-brand. So this is Ludwig's Group and Ludwig is like just a wonderful content creator. 'cause he both has done such a great job building an audience, building an identity, and like building a true connection with his fans and his audience. But he also really has a business mind. He's built an entire company around himself and has multiple products and teams and all sorts of stuff. 

And then also tribe gaming in the mobile world. So Tribe is here in Austin and I think they're the best of the best when it comes to mobile content creators, especially if you're anything around like the Supercell world. So any of those sort of like strategy mobile games. Those are just a handful of the groups that I think have done really well.

 I think also on the agency side of some of the exclusive agencies, I've been a fan of Loaded for a really long time. They're really Twitch focused but I mentioned a bunch of their names which are like Lyric and Shroud and Co Carnage and a handful of those great creators they've done a good job of bringing together a bunch of those lighthouse content creators. I could talk about this for a long time.

Most of my experience is with like Western content creators and English speaking content creators are some amazing agencies and groups in places like Southeast Asia and in other places. I'm not as familiar with them as I should be, cause I can't easily watch them.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Interesting. I wonder if it's a whole other strategy for different regions, right? 

Justin Sacks: Well, the platforms are totally different. So the platforms that work really well in Southeast Asia are not Twitch or even YouTube. It's Facebook live, which is like... 

Lizzie Mintus: Oh. 

Justin Sacks: It's very, very, very underrepresented in the West.

Lizzie Mintus: That's shocking. 

Justin Sacks: Spanish speaking content creators are also on different platforms. There's a huge representation for Spanish speaking creators on Twitch. But also in other platforms and for other genres and other types of content. And it is wild just how different platforms can be. So one thing that I talk about often is how Twitch is incredibly strong for awareness, but YouTube is the best for conversion. 

So if your game is focused, not just on branding, but you want people to download something or buy something, YouTube is the place to go. And the reason for that is part of the medium. So, and also I should mention TikTok after, which is like the one that's really blowing up. But YouTube is particularly powerful because everyone that watches a YouTube video gets the same experience because it's a pre-recorded piece of content. Two, you can pause the content to go take a call to action and go and do something. And three, there's actual links that people click on in the description and all sorts of stuff.

Verses on Twitch. All three of those things are different where someone might shout out to a brand on Twitch. And then if you join the stream five minutes later, you're going to totally miss that shout out. And you might not get it for the next like two hours until the streamer does it again. Two, if you want to do that call to action and like, actually go check that thing out, you have to interrupt your own experience. You have to not see what's going on in the stream, interact with that. And really like links and below the fold things just don't do as well on Twitch as they do on YouTube. And so there's just different reasons to work with different platforms. 

Lizzie Mintus: Interesting. Yeah, to base it on your game, your genre. 

Justin Sacks: It's probably a frustrating answer to hear. It depends... 

Lizzie Mintus: well, it does depend. That's a true answer. You're no bullshit. Thank you. What advice would you give anyone who's listening who wants to start their own business?

Justin Sacks: Just in general? 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I mean you learn a lot from starting a business and you have very specific things for your own business but like I'm in a business group I learned my friend has an IBS clinic, right? I learned so much from him. So yeah, what would you say if you want to start a business? 

Justin Sacks: It is so hard. It is so hard. And so many things that you'll never, that you don't know, you don't know will break and mess up that you can never predict and never prepare for. Only one, start a business. If you can't do anything else, if you just like it, can't stand working for someone else or growing within a large company. And two, only start a business for something that you actually care about, because the thing that'll carry you forward when you've had, like, three weeks of terrible news and everything's going wrong.

Lizzie Mintus: Or a year.

Justin Sacks: Yes, or a year, is that it's like a thing that you just want to exist in the world, that the thing you're building just should exist, that you can help people in a way that other folks can't. I don't know. That sounds cliche as it comes out of my mouth. But one, maybe it don't, but if you're going to make sure it's a thing that like you love and you're going to be excited about for the long 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Cause there's some, some ups and some downs. And the downs are really hard, for sure. 

I have one last question before I ask it. I want to point people to your website, nexus.gg. My last question, what can people look forward to from Nexus in the future? Are there any new features you can tease or partnerships that we should watch out for?

Justin Sacks: Yes. Okay. So one of our partners is trying to think of how much I can say. One of our partners is going to be working with a or and they will have a creator code. And so we're going to have some great learnings of the S tier creators and the experiences and values that they can drive for creative programs in the next couple of weeks.

Additionally, in features, we just launched some really great key distribution stuff. We're launching better tools for the publisher's dashboard so that you can easily see, hey, this creator has this sort of audience and they created this sort of content. 

Reporting is a really important thing for publishers to know the creators in your program, what sort of content did they make in the last month? And so we're building a lot of those sort of tools. 

At the end of the day, and I'm biased, but I believe wholeheartedly in the next, I don't know, certainly in the next five years, probably the next two to three years, every live service game will have to have a creator program. It will become table stakes. 

 But I don't think you should build and manage it yourself. It's going to be a really challenging process that'll take years and millions of dollars and has nothing to do with building a game. And so I'm hoping we can be a great partner and support all of those. And the goal is whatever you as the publisher need to manage the program that's best for your game, you should be able to do with us. And so we're trying to build all those tools for all those partners. 

Lizzie Mintus: I like it. Turnkey. Thank you so much. We've been talking to Justin Sachs, who's the CEO of Nexus. Justin, where can people go to learn more about you or Nexus and partner with you? 

Justin Sacks: So, go to our website, nexus. gg. Feel free to email me if you ever just want to reach out directly. I'm justin at nexus. gg. I have a Twitter. It's like Justin and then two underscores and then Sachs. It's a terrible Twitter handle, but you can reach me there to learn more about us. Also Nexus has a Twitter as well that you can go find. And if you have a game and creators that all matter for your game that they either don't play enough of your game and you want them to, or they are playing and you want to keep them around, please reach out and I'd love to see if we can support you.

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you so much. 

Justin Sacks: Thank you. 

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To catch all the latest from Here's Waldo, you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.