Xsolla’s Chris Hewish: Games Studios Are Cutting Out the App Stores as Direct Sales Pass $1bn on PC

For more than a decade, the route to market for most video games was simple: sell through the app stores and PC storefronts, hand over a large cut and never find out who your customers were. That model is now breaking down. Court rulings and regulation, including the EU’s Digital Markets Act, have weakened the app stores’ hold on payments. At the same time, studios have discovered that selling to players directly through their own web shops is no longer something only the biggest publishers can do.

Xsolla, the games commerce company, has an unusually clear view of that shift. It says its publisher network processed more than $1bn of direct-to-consumer sales on PC alone last year, across more than 1,000 games, at an average purchase of about $15. The difference in income per sale is large. On a $20 purchase, a developer keeps around $13 through a traditional storefront but up to $19 through its own shop.

In this interview, Xsolla president Chris Hewish (pictured) explains why direct sales have moved from experiment to core business, what storefronts cost studios beyond their commission, and how AI tools, creator marketing and local payment methods are making it possible for small studios to compete with the giants.

Direct-to-consumer has been talked about in gaming for years. Where is it actually at in 2026, real revenue or still a promising experiment?

The numbers have settled that question. Direct-to-consumer is no longer a workaround or a side thing. It is a real, scalable part of any business model. We have processed billions in direct-to-consumer web shop payments over the past few years, and the momentum is accelerating: what we did across 2023 and 2024 combined, we did in 2025 alone. We now power more than 800 mobile web shops. What is just as telling is how developers are building. A direct channel is being designed in from the start now, as core infrastructure rather than an add-on. The question used to be whether a studio could build a direct relationship with its players at all. That question has been answered. You can. The question now is whether you have the tools to do it at scale, and that is what has changed.

Most of that conversation has been about mobile. Is the same shift happening on PC?

It is already happening, at a scale most of the market has missed. Data from our publisher network, which we presented at GDC this year, shows more than $1 billion in direct-to-consumer transactions processed on PC in 2025, across more than 1,000 games. The distribution of that volume is the interesting part: over 15 PC games surpassed $10 million in direct transactions, more than 90 surpassed $1 million, and 300+ titles surpassed $100,000, all at an average sale of just over $15. That is not a whale phenomenon. It is ordinary players making ordinary purchases through a channel owned by the publisher. The model itself is not new. Some of the world’s largest publishers have run direct operations alongside traditional storefronts for over a decade. What has changed is that the infrastructure to do it is no longer limited to publishers with dedicated engineering teams. A direct channel is increasingly run as a parallel operation serving a distinct audience, rather than as a replacement for traditional distribution.

The assumption has always been that a traditional storefront is the only viable route to market. What does that assumption actually cost a publisher?

There are two costs, but only one is discussed. The structural cost is the commission. On a $20 purchase, a developer keeps around $13 through a traditional storefront, compared with up to $19 through their own web shop. That delta is available today. The quieter cost is the one that matters more over time. Under a storefront-only model, you complete a sale, but you never acquire a customer. The storefront keeps the purchaser data, the communication channel, and the ability to market back to those buyers. You have made the game, made the sale, and still don’t know who bought it. A direct channel changes that equation, and that is why this is much more than a commerce story or a margin story. It is about building trust, understanding your players, and increasing lifetime value by giving them things they can’t get anywhere else.

So what does it take to actually run one? The assumption is that only publishers with big engineering teams can.

That assumption is exactly what has changed, and it starts with understanding that a checkout page on its own was never enough. That is what a lot of people think a web shop is: a page that moves a transaction, and it won’t work for you. What studios need around checkout is acquisition, engagement, and live operations, because those drive monetization and retention, and most studios could never build or staff them themselves. So we brought it together. Web Shop Ecosystem gives mobile studios a connected set of products spanning engagement, monetization, and operations, managed in the newly launched Mobile Games Account on Xsolla.com. This release adds three pieces: that Mobile Games Account to run everything in a single view, Web Shop Skins for fast launches, and Xsolla LiveOps for no-code campaign operations, alongside loyalty, subscriptions, and the storefronts a studio already sells on. A studio enables only what it needs.

Conversion is the number nobody publishes. What does a developer actually see when they send players to their own shop?

The reason nobody publishes it is that until recently most studios could not measure it. Web revenue sat outside the attribution their app store revenue used, so the direct channel was an act of faith. That is now solved. Our integration with Tenjin attributes every Web Shop transaction back to the campaign and install source that drove it, giving a unified lifetime value and return-on-ad-spend view across app store and web, with no additional coding or data team required. Once a studio can see both channels on the same chart, the conversation stops being philosophical.

Then there is a piece of the business people don’t think about at all. When you sell only through a platform, you are constrained by the payment options that platform provides, which means anywhere from 10 to 40 percent of players in a region are unable to transact with your game. They may want to buy. They literally can’t. We operate as merchant of record across more than 200 geographies with access to over 1,000 local payment methods, and this release adds more than 15 new ones across Asia, EMEA, and the Americas. Every added method is one more market where a developer captures a sale that would otherwise have been lost at checkout, without writing a line of new payment code.

You’ve said PC is where the overlooked opportunity is. What are you doing about it?

I am an avid PC gamer myself, so this one is personal for me. The reasoning goes back to the second cost we talked about: if the value of a direct channel is that you finally know who your players are, a storefront alone doesn’t get you there. You need somewhere for that relationship to live. Xsolla Publisher Account now has two dedicated tracks for PC studios, premium and free-to-play, each paired with a quick-start guide showing exactly what can be turned on. Added to that is Community Hub, a studio-owned space where players gather around the game and the studio can reach them directly and on its own schedule, along with a LiveOps event template, richer cosmetics and video, and Launcher notifications. All of it exists to give players more reason to stick around, on a surface the studio owns.

Even with the tooling, standing up new infrastructure is a real engineering cost for a small team. How do you shorten that?

This is where AI genuinely earns its place, rather than being mentioned for its own sake. Adding Xsolla CLI to the Xsolla AI Toolkit completes an AI-assisted path that takes a developer from a new merchant account to a working web shop in a single session. The CLI handles setup from the command line, creating the publisher account, generating API credentials, and configuring webhooks. The Toolkit is a free library of agent skills published to a public GitHub repository, and it guides developers in correctly integrating the API inside the AI coding tools they already use, such as Claude Code and Cursor, with validation across the current integration paths for login, catalog, and payments. That validation is the point. The real cost of AI-generated code has been code that looks right and fails in production, with someone still having to debug it by hand. Fast and careless is not the pitch here. The code a developer reviews and ships is correct the first time, rather than after multiple rounds of debugging. Speed is what you gain, and review is what you keep.

Players increasingly discover games through creators they trust rather than advertising. How does that fit the direct-to-consumer picture?

A recommendation from someone a player already follows does work that an ad cannot. Ads can be engaging and fun, but players skip them, and they don’t carry the same weight. The problem is that most studios were never built for creator marketing. They don’t have a creator marketing department. They have one person, a budget, and no time to vet a hundred channels or chase down payouts across a dozen countries. That is the gap Xsolla Partner Network closes. The creator platform now lives inside Xsolla Publisher Account, where developers already run their business, with verified creator onboarding and a single, redesigned campaign workflow. Developers get one place to launch, manage, track, and report on creator campaigns while we handle payments, payouts, taxes, and compliance. Flat-fee campaigns, a guaranteed payment option alongside revenue share, and data-driven creator recommendations are coming soon. Creators get the same consolidation from the other side: they now run campaigns, earnings, payouts, storefronts, and their streaming tools from a Creator Business Account on Xsolla.com. One person can now run a creator program that used to require an entire team, which changes who gets to compete.

There’s also a backend partnership in this release. Where does that fit?

That is the layer a studio has to stand up before any of the rest matters. Through a founding partnership with AccelByte, we are pairing AccelByte Gaming Services, their player management, matchmaking, store, and AI-powered analytics, with our payments, subscriptions, monetization, and identity services in one interoperable layer. We are building this by listening to developers who already use both of our platforms. A closed testing program is open now to a small group of studios who can apply for early access and help shape the integration ahead of its broader launch. What they will be testing is whether backend services and global payments can be stood up together, without a separate team for each, and get a studio to market faster as a result.

Where does the player actually meet all of this? Storefronts and dashboards are the publisher’s view, not theirs.

Fair, and it is why the most interesting work is at the point where the player already is. Our Discord bot lets a studio send a message to its community with a Buy Button embedded right inside it. A player taps once, and a checkout window opens instantly, with no new infrastructure to set up because everything is pulled in from the Publisher Account the studio already uses. That is the shortest path there is from announcement to transaction, and it only works because the studio owns the relationship in the first place. Xsolla Points does something similar on the loyalty side: a fully funded layer that rewards players automatically rather than asking a studio to build and finance its own program. The pattern in both is that the player gets something better without being asked to go anywhere unfamiliar, and the studio gets there without a platform team.

That is a lot landing at once, across mobile, PC, creators, and backend. What ties it together for you?

Every one of these came from the same conversation with developers, just at a different point in the journey. How do I find players I can’t reach, close sales I’m losing, keep the players I’ve earned, and do it all without hiring a team I can’t afford? The answer to all four is the same: own the relationship with your players. Everything we shipped this month is in service of that, and none of it should require a platform team.

Full details of the August release are at xsolla.com/release-notes/august-2026