How Nerd Street Gamers highlights each facet of its esports infrastructure business with its new gaming facility

At the moment, Nerd Street has its hands in three sectors: an event production side, a content side, and a physical esports arena business that now boasts 13 affiliated facilities across the United States. While there is a turnkey aspect to all three, NSG vp of marketing Paige Funk made it clear that Nerd Street always serves both itself and its clients. “We run tournaments under the Nerd Street brand; we operate tournaments for third parties,” she said. “Same thing with content: we create content under the Nerd Street brand; we create content for third parties.” 

These different facets of Nerd Street’s business operate symbiotically. “All parts of our business really do work hand in hand, and there’s synergy between them all,” said Nerd Street vp of media Todd Berman. This applies to all aspects of Nerd Street, including its turnkey events, which are usually devoid of front-facing NSG branding. “At the end of the day, that user came out for Red Bull, that user came out for Riot — but they’re probably going to come back because they got to see this really cool venue, and we’re going to make more money off of them coming back,” Fazio said. “Now, we’re able to subsidize and offset the cost basis of the initial up-front event because of our downstream income from those acquired users.”

The company’s network of both physical locations and esports industry connections also supports its content business. “What we can do for people like Jacob [Wolf] is leverage the cross-country network of studios, and the relationships we have with distribution partners and advertisers and sponsors that we created for the content we create already,” Fazio said. “Now, we have it at scale, and somebody like Jacob can use that to accelerate their own plans and vision.”

So far, Nerd Street Gamers’ multidisciplinary approach to esports infrastructure seems to have paid off. Though it had to shut down its physical venues in 2020 due to COVID-19, the company has produced year-over-year revenue growth throughout the pandemic, with its Twitch follower count rising from 30,000 to over 500,000 across channels over the last two years. In 2021 alone, hours watched of Nerd Street content has increased by 1,700% year-over-year, according to Fazio, with Q3 2021 revenues up 118% from Q2. He did not provide exact figures or provide a revenue stream breakdown. “Obviously, those are not sustainable numbers for long,” Fazio said. “But I don’t think our scale will slow down; I just think that the growth rate will shift to something more reasonable.”

From Nerd Steet Gamers’ roots as a LAN party to the launch of its latest esports arena, a core tenet of NSG’s business has been to provide gamers with opportunities to do what they love. As its star continues to rise, the company continues creating growth opportunities for esports players, esports organizations and game developers.

“This is what I want to do for the rest of my life,” Fazio said. “I believe that we have a really high potential for a massive economic return on the platform we’re building — I think that esports is going to be bigger than even the most bullish investors right now think it’s going to be.”