Xsolla president Chris Hewish released his new book, “Durable Advantage: Five Pillars of the Modern Game Business,” at the Gamescom 2026 conference in Cologne, proposing operational strategies to steer the nearly $350 billion global gaming industry away from a risky hit-driven model. The publication arrives amid ongoing industry layoffs, market contraction, and growing debates over discless hardware.
The Five Pillars of Modern Game Business Strategy
Debuting at the annual industry gathering in Cologne last month, Hewish’s book outlines five foundational areas essential for building a healthy gaming business: relationships, commerce, intelligence, trust, and time. According to Variety, Hewish emphasizes that successful studios do not rely entirely on third-party platforms for these functions.
“Not just great games, but they’ve really built up this business around these five framework pillars,” Hewish told Variety, noting that healthy companies govern those pillars independently rather than depending completely on external app stores for player relationships and commerce.
Evaluating First-Party Ownership Versus Third-Party Platforms
As the president of a fintech firm providing video game payment software, including PayStation integration tools, and drawing on his background as a former executive at Activision and DreamWorks, Hewish challenges developers to examine their operational independence. He urges studios to ask whether they are true owners of their business components or merely renters.
When studios rely exclusively on external storefronts, they surrender direct control over player relationships, commerce, and behavioral intelligence. This structural reliance can ultimately slow down trust-building with users.
Data Blind Spots and Payment Intelligence
Addressing the intelligence pillar, Hewish warns that relying solely on standard dashboards creates dangerous blind spots for developers. While companies track active users and general revenue per country, putting all transactions through an external platform means critical commerce data stays with the platform rather than flowing back to the developer.
Hewish illustrates this risk with a hypothetical scenario where a studio notices a drop in revenue in a specific country and mistakenly assumes it faces a content deficit. In reality, the drop might stem from the sudden rise of a new local payment method—such as Venmo capturing 20 percent of the player base—that the studio’s existing platform has not integrated. Without complete payment intelligence, companies risk wasting valuable resources on unnecessary content creation instead of addressing payment friction.
Worth a look