D2C isn't a payment method: Inside a webstore doing 70% of revenue

• Gamesture's webstore went from 32% to 70% of sales across three titles.
• A new main page, loyalty leagues and value bonuses instead of discounts took it to 50%.
• Putting the best offers and highest tiers store-only took it to 70%.

Michal Korek is an executive advisor helping mobile game studios grow revenue and scale products through D2C, monetisation and economy design. 

Ahead of his talk at PGC Nordics, Korek shares what took one studio's webstore from a third of sales to 70%.

Somewhere in a guild chat right now, your players are working out the fastest way to finish in the top three in your next event. Comparing offers, counting currency, deciding what's worth buying. That's the conversation your webstore is competing in and it has almost nothing to do with payment fees.

Most D2C talk in mobile games is about fees. You save 30%, give some of it back, the rest is margin. That's fine as far as it goes, except that framing quietly sets your ceiling. If the store's whole pitch is "same thing, slightly cheaper, one extra step", your store will only ever be as big as the group willing to take an extra step to save a few percent. In most games that's a fifth to two-fifths of your payers, which is exactly where most webstores sit.

Over the past year I worked with Gamesture, a Polish studio I advise, across three live titles in the social casino PvP space. Their store share went from 32% to 70%. That's the story I'll be telling at PGC Nordics 2026, and here's the short version.

This isn't another article about discounts or nicer layouts, and the uplift happened in two separate halves, of which the industry mostly talks about the first one.

Phase one: make the store worth arriving at (32% to 50%)

The first phase was product work. Boring, necessary, the kind of thing that gets a redesign brief.

The analytics were humbling. 71% of visitors had never seen the main page, and of those who did, 99% clicked through to Games rather than anything they could buy.

Six things, shipped together as one big rework:

1) New main page. Rebuilt around per-game entrances instead of a merchandising showcase, because that's how people already moved through it.

2) New loyalty programme. Visible leagues, visible progress, a reason to return to a page that used to be flat and static.

3) New economy. The 10% price discount came out, a 10% value bonus went in. Same generosity, except the fee savings stays in the business instead of being handed straight back.

4) Rewards you can calculate. Gifts used to land every $200 spent, so rarely, and working out what you were owed took real arithmetic. Now they land every $10 to $50 depending on your league, with rewards that are easy to understand and high in perceived value. Buy something, get something, no homework needed.

5) Better in-game communication. We didn't invent this one. We stopped rationing it and opened more and better ways to reach players inside and outside the game.

6) Auto-login. Nobody should have to remember a password to spend money with us.

By December 2025 that got us to around 50%. This is where most studios stop, put the number in a deck and move on.

Phase two: run it like a live product (50% to 70%)

This half is the one I care about, because here the store stopped being an in-game shop with lower fees and became a product with its own live ops cycle.

We moved where the good stuff lives:

1) Offer architecture. The store carries 100% of the in-game price ladder, always. The game carries a rotating subset. The top of the ladder, $250 and $500, exists only in the store.

2) Purchase limits. Raised from one or two per offer to five or 10. One of the most profitable changes in the whole project, and it wasn't a price at all.

3) Popups that sell an offer, not the store. "We have a store" isn't an offer, it's an errand. One specific store-only deal, price on it, button straight to it, creative rotating like any UA channel.

4) Button placement, tested properly. Four variants. Store plus main menu won, because the button has to be where players already are, not filed under maintenance next to the audio settings.

5) The whole offer set reworked event by event, week by week, not once a year.

None of that is a payment proposition. It's a design change to the shape of the offer, and it's the same loop you already run inside your game. Ship, measure, rotate, repeat.

Then the players did the work

Gamesture's games are competitive. Guilds care about placement, top guilds optimise every event, and players in that group treat an event as a problem with an optimal solution.

Once the best value, the highest caps and the exclusive tiers all sat in the store, the optimal solution ran through the store. Not because anyone was persuaded, but because that's where the economy and the math went.

Players didn't choose the store. They chose to win, and the store was on the path.

By April 2026 that got us to around 70% across the three titles.

Where this breaks down

This works because the game is competitive and spending visibly changes outcomes players care about. Guilds create the pressure, events create the deadline, leaderboards create the comparison.

If your game is a relaxed single-player experience with small spending depth, the math doesn't point anywhere in particular and your store has to win on something else. Probably convenience and content.

Stop treating the store as a payments problem

Your store isn't a cheaper till, and it shouldn't belong to whoever owns payments. It's a position in your game's economy and the question worth asking is whether the shortest path to winning runs through it. If it doesn't, no amount of payment optimisation will fix that. If it does, you never had to convince anyone of anything.

I'm giving the longer version at PGC Nordics 2026: the charts, the month-by-month numbers and the parts I'd do differently. If you want to see the data or poke holes in it, come to the talk and grab me afterwards!

You can get tickets to PGC Nordics here.