This week was the first in which we got used to having a website after some 18 months of being a newsletter-only publication. The site allows us to make these issues somewhat snappier by linking out to content online, and we start this week with James Batchelor's report on legal issues surrounding the Trump administration's persistent use of copyrighted videogame IP.

We also speak to Xsolla president Chris Hewish on the rising importance of direct-to-consumer sales for developers and publishers. If you're selling games and still ignoring this vital revenue channel, you should be taking note. Read the full interview below.

After that, you'll find analysis of the positioning of this week's Zelda reveal in Social Commentary, as well as some productive time-wasting suggestions: IllFonic's new Halloween game, for example, lets you be Michael Myers. Dreams, demonstrably, do come true.

Direct-to-consumer specialist Xsolla arrived at Gamescom 2026 fresh from what its president, Chris Hewish, calls "a big release week" – an AI-assisted integration toolkit, expanded web-shop functionality, new local payment methods, and more.

Speaking to Knowledge in Cologne, Hewish made the case that direct-to-consumer commerce has become a necessity for any studio not wanting its business to held hostage by third-parties.

D2C is ceasing to be optional

"It's not a margin story," Hewish says. "That's what everyone kind of fixates on – is this the margin, because numbers are fun, right? But it really is about building that direct relationship."

The case rests on data as much as revenue share. Selling exclusively through a third-party platform, he says, only provides studios with gameplay data without context.

"You would only say, 'Oh, this is declining in spend', and you only had gameplay data to see that… [But] maybe it's because there's a new payment method that's very popular in that region that's not integrated into the platform, or there's a higher incidence of declined transactions."

Owning the commerce route, he says, closes that gap, and the payoff compounds into better-targeted offers, higher lifetime value and happier players getting a better deal. Despite his convincing enthusiasm for Xsolla's products, however, Hewish is careful to frame their use as additive.

"We never recommend it's an either/or," he says of pulling revenue away from Steam, the App Store or Google Play. "The game industry is kind of evolving and catching up to where a lot of other industries are, where you don't just sell through one channel."

Large platforms remain valuable for discoverability, he says. The shift is towards running direct commerce alongside them, not instead of them, a distinction that matters given how much of 2026's Apple and Google policy change (both now permit external payment links in various markets) has been reported as a straightforward financial story.

From weeks to a single session

The product story supporting Hewish's position is largely about removing friction from engineering teams. Xsolla's just-announced products aim to cut the time it takes to develop a web shop from days or weeks down to a single session, chiefly by using AI to automate the documentation-reading and integration work Hewish calls "the bane of every engineer's existence". He is quick to add a caveat: "You should still manually check everything out before deploying. That's really the only catch, and it's just good practice anyway."

The wider web-shop ecosystem, which now bundles account management, storefront templates and live-operations tools, is presented less as new capability than consolidation: "Of course you can stitch these things together, and a lot of people do," Hewish says, "but the real benefit is that it's also easy to manage once it's out of the hands of the engineers and into the team, whether it's a live-ops team or a marketing team."

That handover, from engineering to monetisation teams running everything through a dashboard, is arguably the more consequential change for studios than the deployment speed itself.

Coming back west

On where publishers should be looking for growth, Hewish breaks from the industry's default answer: "We talk about China a lot [but] it's incredibly difficult."

Pressed on the biggest near-term alternative opportunity for western developers, his answer is immediate, with a caveat for platform: on PC and mobile specifically, "I would say the Middle East is a huge opportunity. Very young population, educated, high disposable incomes, and a high gamer population."

The regional nod sits alongside a broader framework for internal capital allocation that Hewish returns to repeatedly: decisions should be judged not just on immediate value but on their future implications.

"It's not just about the value of a dollar now," he says. "It's, 'What does that dollar do?' If you're in the position of being able to look six months down the road, or six years down the road, how does that compound? That can help inform decisions as well."

Asked what he wants developers to do differently because of Xsolla's new announcements, Hewish circles back to the same point from a different angle: "Really taking direct-to-consumer seriously, beyond just a revenue point of view, [and] understanding that it's about allowing you to build that deeper relationship with your players. And it's not limited just to the big studios any more, because the tools are so easy now."

The underlying message, he suggests, applies whether or not a studio ever touches Xsolla's tools: "Diversify, so that your business is not at the mercy of one person changing what their priorities are."

The Trump administration published a suite of web games last week, one of which, 'Build The Wall', clearly borrowed from Tetris's classic puzzle formula. It's the latest incident of the current White House drawing on copyrighted game IP in its online messaging without authorisation, having previously exploited properties from Microsoft, Sega and others. But why aren't franchise owners suing over copyright infringement? Legal experts spoke to Knowledge to explain why staying silent in these cases is usually the best policy.

SOCIAL COMMENTARY

Highlights from industry chat channels

"This is the worst videogame crash, or disruption, that we’ve seen since the 1980s, when Atari fell and was replaced by Nintendo," Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney tells us. "I was just a player back then – I only joined the industry as a programmer in the 1990s – but I’ve not seen anything this bad since then."

In Edge 428, out now, our special report gathers nine experts, including Sweeney, Shawn Layden and Raph Koster, to comb through the numerous factors that have driven the videogame industry into its perilous position, and we consider some options for turning its fortunes around.

Elsewhere, we meet with Chinese studio Eclipse Glow Games to discover how it's reimagining the legend of King Arthur in Tides Of Annihilation, and talk to a group of developers about the art of translating movies, TV and books into games, from The Godfather to The Da Vinci Code. 

For Studio Profile, we visit Criterion to track its evolution into its modern role at the heart of Battlefield 6's production, and in Time Extend we dust off our PSPs for a few more rounds of Wipeout Pure. For The Making Of, we meet the founders of Onion Games to discover how they created the delightful Stray Children, and in the magazine's iteration of Knowledge we weigh up how Nintendo is faring in an industry of wide-scale turmoil.

In Hype, we preview forthcoming games such as Metro 2039, Star Wars: Galactic Racer and Guns Of Eschaton, while in Play we run the rule over new releases including Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, Beast Of Reincarnation and Onimusha: Way Of The Sword.

(Find more extensive details about what's inside this issue here.)

Buy Edge 428 here. To take advantage of our current subscription offer, you can also get your first three issues for just £5.

We'll be back next week. In the meantime, don't forget to share your feedback with us by email ([email protected]), and follow us via Bluesky and LinkedIn.