New Gaming Industry Guide on Ending Hit-Pushed Mannequin, Xsolla President

Amid extra layoffs and contraction and renewed going-discless discourse, we face no scarcity of opinions about what methods will lastly rightsize the global-gaming-industry ship. Apart from counting on the extremely anticipated launch of “Grand Theft Auto VI” to resolve for the almost $350 billion {industry}’s issues, a brand new guide by Xsolla president Chris Hewish has just a few clear recommendations.

Titled “Durable Advantage: Five Pillars of the Modern Game Business,” the guide debuted final month at Gamescom 2026 in Cologne, the annual assembly of the minds for the bigwigs within the gaming {industry}. In the textual content, Hewish outlines a handful of areas that, when utilized to the fullest, make up a wholesome gaming enterprise: relationships, commerce, intelligence, belief and time.

“Not just great games, but they’ve really built up this business around these five framework pillars,” Hewish tells Variety. “They are governing those pillars when it comes to their business. They’re not completely reliant completely on somebody else for all of those. So the direct analogy is companies that are only working through platforms like the app stores are completely reliant on them for the relationships with their players, for the commerce, for the business, behavioral intelligence on the players and it can slow down building trust with the players because of all of that.”

As present president of a fintech firm that makes cost software program for video video games, together with its PayStation payment-integration instruments and former exec at Activision and DreamWorks, Hewish desires these within the gaming {industry} to look at their first-party vs. third-party fashions and ask, “Are they actually owners or are they just renters of all of the different parts of their business?”

When contemplating the “intelligence” pillar, Hewish says the gaming {industry} can “get off that hit-driven hamster wheel of always just being reliant on the next big hit” by taking a deeper have a look at more-informed information. This additionally requires in search of gaps in intelligence created when an organization doesn’t have proprietary numbers for all features of its enterprise, together with monetization.

“Companies all have dashboards,” Hewish says. “They know the number of active users. They know the revenue from those users. They know the revenue per user in a particular country. But right now, if they’re only looking at a dashboard, they haven’t really governed all of the intelligence of the data because if you put everything through another platform, the payment data, the commerce data, it stays with the platform, it doesn’t come through.”

An instance Hewish provides is an organization noticing income dropping in a single nation and making incorrect assumptions based mostly by itself incomplete information.

“You may assume, oh my gosh, we need to make more content for that country because it’s just not relevant or we need to localize more in that country,” Hewish says. “And so you spend resources in that direction. The intelligence pillar is saying, well, hold on, you need a complete picture of what’s happening because what you have missed is the fact that there was a new payment method that was introduced in that country and it blew up. Like, Venmo came on the scene and 20% of your players have moved over to that new payment method, but your platform has not integrated it. So they literally have stopped using their old payment methods. They can’t use the new ones, so you see a drop in revenue and you erroneously think it’s a content problem and spend resources on that content.”