Over the years, gaming has evolved far beyond entertainment. Today, it blends creativity, technology, business, and culture, reshaping how games are developed, marketed, monetized, and experienced. As the industry continues to evolve, so too do the opportunities and challenges facing developers, publishers, creators, and brands.
To explore those changes, we spoke with Chris Hewish, President of Xsolla, whose career spans game development, publishing, studio leadership, and interactive entertainment. Before joining Xsolla, Hewish held senior roles at Activision, DreamWorks Animation, Survios, and Skydance, giving him experience across the creative and commercial sides of the industry.
During our conversation, Hewish discusses Xsolla’s evolving role in the gaming ecosystem, the opportunities and complexities of the APAC market, what it takes to build sustainable game businesses, the changing relationship between brands, creators, and players, and the shifts he believes will shape the future of game commerce.
For readers who may know Xsolla primarily as a payments company, how would you describe the role Xsolla plays in today’s gaming ecosystem, and how has that evolved in recent years?
Payments are where we started, and they remain the foundation, but Xsolla has evolved just as the industry has. For most of gaming’s history, selling a video game meant going through a gatekeeper, whether that was a retail shelf or an app store, and the transaction was essentially the end of the relationship with the player. Today, the biggest games operate as living businesses that run for years, and the game itself is no longer the whole business. It’s the foundation of one.
Today, the biggest games operate as living businesses that run for years, and the game itself is no longer the whole business. It’s the foundation of one.
So we’ve grown into a broader commerce platform for the video game industry, from payments and web shops to user acquisition, player engagement, and monetization, so developers and publishers can manage the business side of their games and focus on creating great experiences. What excites me is that going direct-to-consumer has shifted from a niche strategy to the primary way of running a game business, and we’ve been building toward that moment for years. The goal has never changed: give game creators more control, flexibility, and opportunities to grow their business on their own terms.
For years, Xsolla has been known as the company helping developers monetize and distribute games more independently. As gaming becomes a much larger marketing and entertainment ecosystem, how do you see Xsolla’s role evolving beyond payments into enabling deeper relationships between brands, creators, and players, particularly in Asia-Pacific?
We’re building the infrastructure that helps developers, creators, brands, and players create value together across the entire player journey. I’ve been saying for years that the creator and the consumer are converging into one and the same, and now we’re seeing it for real. I also like to think about games the way you’d think about any great hobby: the game itself is one touch point in a much larger experience that includes community, creators, content, and commerce. The developers who embrace that, who ask what else they can build around the game, are the ones creating the deepest relationships.
The APAC video game market is the largest globally, projected to reach approximately USD $315 billion by 2030, growing at a 13.1% CAGR.
Asia-Pacific is where that future is arriving first. The APAC video game market is the largest globally, projected to reach approximately USD $315 billion by 2030, growing at a 13.1% CAGR, and games there already overlap with entertainment, social platforms, and digital commerce in ways the rest of the world is still catching up to. Our focus is on giving developers the tools to build direct relationships with their communities, collaborate with creators and brands, and create personalized experiences that drive long-term engagement.
Ultimately, we want developers to grow sustainable businesses while players get richer, more connected experiences.
APAC isn’t a single gaming market: it’s dozens of cultures with very different payment behaviors, gaming habits, and platform preferences. From Xsolla’s perspective, what are the biggest opportunities that global brands and publishers still underestimate when entering Southeast Asia and the broader APAC region?
The biggest misconception is treating APAC as a single market. It’s a collection of very different countries, each with its own player behaviors, payment preferences, regulations, and cultural nuances.
The scale makes that diversity easy to overlook: APAC’s mobile gaming market generated approximately $73 billion in revenue in 2025, with a player base of 1.9 billion, over 50% of all mobile gamers worldwide. But that number is an aggregate of very different stories, led by markets such as China, Japan, and South Korea, each with its own dynamics.
Here’s a concrete example of what gets underestimated: payments. In some markets, half or more of your potential players simply can’t transact if you don’t support the local payment methods they actually use. That’s not a technical detail. That’s your addressable audience. The companies that succeed localize the entire go-to-market, from pricing to payments to partnerships with regional creators, not just the content.
Players across Southeast Asia are highly engaged and incredibly community-driven, so investing in trust and genuine cultural relevance compounds in a way that simply translating content never will.
The biggest opportunity, though, is building direct relationships with local gaming communities. Audiences can be rented, but communities are owned. Players across Southeast Asia are highly engaged and incredibly community-driven, so investing in trust and genuine cultural relevance compounds in a way that simply translating content never will.
We’ve seen brands become much more interested in gaming, but many still approach it like traditional advertising. Based on what Xsolla sees across thousands of developers and publishers, what separates brands that genuinely add value to player communities from those that simply interrupt gameplay?
The difference comes down to mindset. The best brands don’t see games as another advertising channel. They see a community they need to earn the right to be part of, and players are incredibly good at spotting experiences that feel forced or purely promotional.
Something I spend a lot of time on in my new book is the idea that trust isn’t a feeling players have about you. It’s a track record you build one decision at a time, and players update it constantly. Gaming communities are networked, so word travels fast in both directions: a collaboration that genuinely adds value gets amplified, and one that interrupts the experience becomes content for all the wrong reasons.
The best brands don’t see games as another advertising channel. They see a community they need to earn the right to be part of.
The brands that succeed contribute, whether through meaningful collaborations with developers and creators, exclusive in-game experiences, or content that enhances play rather than interrupting it. When brands focus on contributing instead of advertising, everyone benefits: the players, the developers, and the brand itself.
Independent studios across Asia are creating world-class games, yet many still struggle with commercialization, discoverability, and global expansion. If you could give every emerging APAC studio one piece of advice on building a sustainable game business, not just a successful game, what would it be?
Treat your game like a business from day one, not at the tail end when you launch. Years ago at Activision, I started embedding our marketing teams directly with our development teams because, for too long, marketing had been an afterthought: three months into launch, someone finally asks what the campaign is. I wanted the player’s voice at the table alongside the designer, the programmer, and the artist from the very beginning. Today, the person you want at that table is a business person, someone thinking about how the game reaches players, builds community, and monetizes, as early as the first design conversations.
In my book, Durable Advantage, I describe two kinds of game companies: renters, who build great games on someone else’s terms, and owners, who govern their player relationships, commerce, and data directly. The difference isn’t creative talent, and it isn’t studio size either. I think the industry conversation is shifting from studio size to studio mindset. Warframe is my favorite proof: Digital Extremes launched in 2013 with no major publisher and almost no marketing budget, but they owned their player relationships from day one, and more than a decade later, the game is still growing with over 80 million lifetime players.
Own the relationship with your players, treat your game as an evolving service, and treat your players as long-term partners, not just customers.
For emerging APAC studios, that path has never been more accessible. Own the relationship with your players, treat your game as an evolving service, and treat your players as long-term partners, not just customers.
Looking ahead five years, what do you think will be the biggest shift in how games are marketed, monetized, and experienced across APAC? And where do you see Xsolla helping shape that future?
A few shifts I feel confident about. First, account-centric economies: players will expect one identity that carries their progression, purchases, and relationships across every device and platform, the way Roblox and Fortnite already work, and that expectation will extend to games of every size.
Second, hybrid monetization running in real time: instead of choosing a single business model, developers will layer premium, subscription, bundles, and seasonal value simultaneously, matched to different player segments.
Capabilities that once required a major publisher’s resources, like owned identity systems, direct commerce, and behavioral data, are now accessible to studios of every size.
And third, community-driven commerce, where creators and players generate value within the ecosystem itself, will continue to accelerate, with APAC leading that convergence.
The shift I find most exciting is on the developer side. Capabilities that once required a major publisher’s resources, like owned identity systems, direct commerce, and behavioral data, are now accessible to studios of every size. There’s no longer really a technology cost, just a knowledge cost, and that knowledge is spreading fast.
That moves competitive advantage from whoever has the most technology to whoever has the strongest architecture. That’s where Xsolla will keep investing: web shops, global payments, creator partnerships, and the tools that remove complexity so developers can focus on creating great games while building durable, long-term businesses.
One of the recurring conversations we have at Gaming In Asia is that brands shouldn’t simply advertise in games: they should become valuable participants in gaming ecosystems. From Xsolla’s vantage point, are we entering an era where brands become part of the player economy rather than just sponsors? What will it take for that to happen?
We’re already moving in that direction, and honestly, players are driving it. They don’t want brands to simply show up in games. They want them to contribute something meaningful. The most successful ecosystems are starting to generate value that doesn’t come only from the developer: creators, communities, and partners produce it together, and the ecosystem becomes bigger than the product that originally attracted everyone to it. Brands that want a durable place in games need to enter as participants in that economy, not sponsors renting space on top of it.
What it takes is a shift from campaign thinking to community thinking. Campaigns are measured in weeks; relationships compound over years. It means contributing things players genuinely value, whether that’s collaborations with developers and creators, exclusive content, community initiatives, or rewards, and committing beyond a single quarter. It also takes the right technology and partnerships to connect brands, developers, creators, and players in ways that feel authentic to each game’s culture.
When brands become participants in the ecosystem rather than just sponsors, player engagement deepens and outcomes improve for everyone involved.
