Reign of Gaming

Reign of Gaming started as a genuine obsession. I was at university at the time, and this was effectively my student job -- except instead of hospitality shifts or retail, I was getting paid to do something I actually loved. I was deep into League of Legends, spending as much time analysing the game as playing it -- running numbers on champion matchups, building 2D contour plots to visualise stat interactions across the item space. Nobody was doing that kind of work publicly. So I cold emailed the site and asked for a column.

That's the part I think about most. I didn't ask for permission to get interested in it. I just started producing and then found it a home. The fact that it paid was almost secondary -- the work already aligned with what I was genuinely curious about and what I happened to be good at. That combination is pretty rare, especially at university. The column ran, the work got better, and eventually the articles started drawing real traffic.

The thing that clicked was mathcrafting. I'd tried a few formats early on -- patch analysis, tier lists, opinion pieces -- and none of them moved the way the maths content did. Readers wanted to understand why something was strong, not just that it was. The contour plots I was making -- coloured in gradient rainbow bands across the stat axes -- became the visual shorthand for that kind of piece. Readers started calling them the rainbow graphs. I didn't name them; the community did. At some point they became the thing people looked for before they even read the headline. (The articles are still in my archive if you want to see just how nerdy they got -- I'm slightly embarrassed by them, but they're there.)

The site started paying me before any single article hit 100k+ views -- they could see the trajectory. And the trajectory was steep. My writing got sharper, the analysis got more rigorous, the community instincts got better. I got faster at reading what readers actually wanted to know versus what I thought was interesting. Those aren't the same thing, and closing that gap is most of the job. By the time the articles were hitting 100k+ views, the improvement across all three -- writing, analysis, marketing -- had been rapid and compounding. That's the honest version of how it happened.

The distribution side was just as intentional. I'd mapped out how the League of Legends subreddit moved through the week -- what kind of posts hit front page on which days, what the community was hungry for after a patch versus mid-cycle. Consistently hitting the front page of r/leagueoflegends wasn't an accident. It was timing and topic selection, applied repeatedly until it became a system.

When the site promoted me to Editor, the remit expanded to the whole publication. By then I'd already scaled my column with guest writers doing their own mathcrafting -- so managing other writers felt like a natural extension of what I was already doing. I codified what I'd figured out: a content schedule built around the weekly interest cycle, publishing guidelines that standardised quality, cross-promotion processes that turned individual articles into recurring traffic rather than one-off spikes.

The site went from just under 2 million monthly views to 8 million. That's the number.

Along the way, being featured as a headline interview in Forbes Tech at 19 was pretty surreal -- I hadn't really expected the work to reach outside the gaming community.

Eventually I wanted more than that. Running someone else's site well is one thing -- I'd done it. What I wanted next was full ownership over the product, the direction, and the business model. So I left to start C5 Network.