Podcast: Xsolla on D2C's growing momentum and its biggest product wave yet
Direct-to-consumer is one of the hottest trends and biggest talking points in the games industry right now.
Each quarter, PocketGamer.biz has been investigating how much revenue the world’s top public games companies have been generating. For some, the D2C revenue is approaching or exceeding 40%.
On the latest episode of the PocketGamer.biz Podcast, Xsolla president Chris Hewish discusses all things D2C and, ahead of Gamescom, the company’s key announcements in the space.
You can watch the episode, sponsored by Xsolla, on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other channels.
“Structural shift”
Hewish says there’s been a “growing momentum over the years supporting the ability for studios to adopt a direct-to-consumer strategy.
“The regulatory pressure on app stores, it's not just a moment, it really is a true direction, a change in how business is operating,” he says. “We've had the Epic versus Apple rulings, the Digital Markets Act, broad legislative pressure on app store dominance in regards to things like anti-steering and whatnot.
“You could look at these as isolated events, but they're really not. They're all part of a broader, larger shift, which is benefiting the consumer, opening up platforms so that the people that are creating content and the people consuming content on those platforms can connect more directly.
“So there’s a real structural shift that’s happening.”
D2C at scale
Hewish adds it’s no longer a question of can developers build direct relationships with their consumers anymore, but do they have the tools to do that at scale?
In the run-up to Gamescom, Xsolla has announced six new solutions it’s rolling out. These include the Web Shop Ecosystem, a complete D2C offering built specifically for mobile games. There’s also 15 new local payment methods; the Xsolla AI Toolkit and its new CLI, an AI-assisted path from a new publisher account to a working web shop; an expanded creator platform; and a backend partnership with AccelByte.
Describing the Web Shop Ecosystem in more detail and Xsolla’s plans for mobile developers, Hewish explains that a lot of people think a web shop is just a checkout page. “That’s not enough, that’s not going to work for you,” he says.
“Studios need, and have needed and we've heard this, not just the ability to do checkout, but they need the acquisition, the engagement and live operations tools that go around it, because that really increases your monetisation capabilities and your retention. And that's part of what most studios could never really build or staff on their own, because it does require additional work to create these things. So what's different now is that all of this lives in the same integration, and this is our web shop ecosystem.
“We already power more than 800 mobile web shops and the web shop ecosystem connects products across those four areas through just a single mobile games account. And that means that every studio can now run loyalty, subscriptions, chat commerce, no-code live ops, with analytics and attribution, all from one place, alongside the storefronts that they already sell on.”
AI tools
Part of Xsolla’s suite of announcements includes new tools for AI - including the claim that developers can build a working storefront in a single session.
“AI is part of our workflows, it's part of our lives now, and we really are providing that capability as well,” says Hewish.
He adds: “When you were setting up a web shop and you would come to us, create your publisher account, do all of this, it meant that you used to have to read a tonne of documentation.
"You should still read the manual, I suppose, but you know, you'd still have to do that, you'd have to do provisioning by hand for every account, debugging AI-generated code that looked right but maybe failed in production. You still needed somebody to manually debug that, and that was a real cost of AI coding. Code that looks right but isn't.
“So introducing validation at every step really is our answer to exactly the productivity question that a lot of people have encountered and have been raising.
“So overall, much better productivity, much quicker path, taking a lot of the manual, labour-intensive work off your plate and making sure it's all done in a way that's validated before anything goes live.”
As well as listening to the podcast, you can learn more about Xsolla’s latest announcements here.
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