Advertorial | The shift to direct channels is no longer a forecast, and the publishers treating it as core infrastructure will walk into Gamescom negotiating from a different position than those still catching up. Meet Xsolla at Booth #A030-B035 in Hall 2.2.
For nearly two decades, the economics of mobile gaming ran through a single pipe. Apple and Google built the billing infrastructure behind in-app purchases, charged commissions of up to 30%, and in exchange delivered distribution, discovery, and a payment experience players trusted. For most studios, platform billing was never really a decision. It was the default.
That default is ending, faster than most publishers' planning cycles have adjusted.
The numbers in the latest edition of The Xsolla Report make the case plainly. Overall mobile game revenue grew 0.2% in 2025, essentially flat. Over the same period, U.S. direct-to-consumer (D2C) revenue grew 26%, and the top 100 titles grew their D2C earnings 38%. When an entire market stands still while one segment grows by double digits, that segment is not a trend to monitor from the sidelines. It is where the growth went.
It is worth pausing on how quickly this happened. Until recently, D2C in gaming was a side project: a web shop here, a loyalty program there, running quietly alongside the "real" business on iOS and Google Play. That framing is now obsolete. Playtika generated $814.5 million in direct revenue in 2025, up 17% year over year, and has raised its long-term D2C target from 30% to 40% of total revenue. Stillfront Group drew 39% of net revenue from direct channels in Q2 2025. Huuuge Games reached roughly 41% by February 2026, and Take-Two reported its strongest mobile D2C quarter on record. These companies are not dabbling. They are structuring their businesses around the channel.
Three forces converged to make that possible. None of them are temporary.
Regulation opened the door. In the United States, the Epic v. Apple rulings forced open external payment links, and Apple is, for now, charging no commission on those transactions while the remedy works through appeal. Google's revised fee model went live in the U.S., U.K., and European Economic Area at the end of June. Japan's Mobile Software Competition Act took effect in December 2025, and more than 70% of surveyed Japanese mobile games already use external payment systems. The European Union remains messier, with the Digital Markets Act in force but fee structures still contested. The direction, though, is unambiguous: market by market, the requirement that every purchase route through platform billing is coming apart.
Infrastructure made it operational. Running a direct channel used to mean a studio had to become its own payments company, tax compliance department, and fraud prevention team, which is a lot to ask of a business whose core competency is making games. Merchant of Record models, in which a commerce partner becomes the legal seller and absorbs payments, tax, chargebacks, and compliance liability, have taken on that complexity. That is the main reason D2C moved from possible for large publishers with dedicated finance teams to accessible for studios of nearly any size.
And the economics are genuinely better, though not in the way most people assume. The instinct is to read D2C purely as keeping the 30%. The report's math is more honest: platform commissions run 15% to 30%, direct processing costs 5% to 10%, and after fraud prevention, tax compliance, and the operational overhead of running a channel, real net savings typically land in the 10 to 20 percentage point range. That is substantial. It is not free money, and treating it as a pure margin play misses the more important shift underneath.
This is the part I would push publishers to sit with longest. What a direct channel actually buys a studio is a relationship with its players that platform billing never allowed: visibility into who is spending, what they value, and how to build for lifetime engagement rather than a single transaction buried in someone else's ledger. And notably, every publisher scaling D2C successfully today is doing it alongside its platform presence, not instead of it. The distinction that matters is not platform versus direct. It is owned versus rented.
Geography sharpens the point. Latin America's games market reached $26 billion in 2025 and is on track toward $79 billion by 2034. Southeast Asia's six primary markets are climbing toward $7.2 billion by 2027 as their player base heads from roughly 290 million to 344 million. The Middle East is expanding through sovereign-backed investment in gaming as a strategic sector, with Saudi Arabia targeting a $13.3 billion contribution to GDP by the end of the decade. But the report is blunt about what unlocks these markets: payment and localization infrastructure. Average revenue per user runs from $3.39 in Egypt to $84.60 in the UAE, and studios that localized their pricing, with taxes and exchange rates handled automatically, grew overall revenue 22% and paying users 12%. The gap closes through operational maturity, not player volume.
The publishers ahead on this curve share a starting point: none of them tried to convert their whole player base to direct channels on day one. They started with their top 5 to 10% of spenders, built the relationship where it mattered most, and expanded from there. For studios still filing D2C under next year, the runway is shorter than it looks. Expect the gap between platform-only and dual-channel publishers to widen. Expect more studios in emerging markets to build direct commerce into launch plans from day one rather than retrofitting it later. Expect Merchant of Record infrastructure to keep lowering the bar for who can credibly run a channel.
The timing of this report is not incidental. It lands about a month before Gamescom, where thousands of publishers, developers, and platform partners gather in Cologne to set the tone for the industry's next year. Distribution strategy, monetization models, and market expansion plans get shaped in the meeting rooms surrounding that show floor, and the studios walking in with direct commerce already treated as core infrastructure will be negotiating from a different position than those still catching up.
The publishers building direct commerce as a durable channel today are the ones who will set the terms for how this industry monetizes tomorrow. Gamescom is where that starts to show.
To read the full report, visit https://xsolla.com/the-xsolla-report. If you are attending Gamescom, you can speak with Xsolla at Booth #A030-B035 in Hall 2.2.
