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By Patrick Garratt

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."

This article was originally published in our weekly email newsletter – read the full issue