This article is part of Bain's 2026 Gaming Report.

Explore the report

In last year’s Gaming Report, we presented clear evidence that app stores were losing their grip on game discovery. This year, the platform economics cracked.

For the first time ever, the base fees that major game distribution platforms charge publishers are falling.

Consumers are already bypassing the platforms in much greater numbers than most industry leaders think. In Bain’s latest annual global gaming survey, nearly half of the more than 5,300 players we surveyed purchased virtual currency, items, or in-game content directly from a developer’s web store at least once in the past 12 months, including 27% that have done so multiple times (see Figure 1).

Figure 1

It may surprise some in the industry, but this isn’t just a mobile phenomenon. Our survey found that a similar share of mobile and PC/console gamers have purchased directly from a game’s own website in the past year.

In short, the direct-to-consumer shift is already happening at scale right now—not in a few years, as many executives have assumed. And it’s only going to accelerate, because the trend is strong among younger gamers; 40% of 13-to-17-year-olds have made multiple direct purchases in the past year.

This article focuses on mobile games because that’s where the direct-to-consumer market has matured the fastest, but the lessons apply broadly. For mobile publishers without a direct-to-consumer strategy, the urgency is clear: They’re leaving a 15% to 30% margin improvement on the table for each third-party sale that they could convert to direct. Those additional resources could help develop the next big game or increase the reach of their existing titles. They’re also ceding the player relationship to whoever moves first.

Owning that relationship opens a path to revenue growth. More data and insights enable better guidance on what to build next and, as we’ll show, more effective customer outreach and personalized offers—which move the purchasing needle far more than generic discounts. As competition continues to intensify and market white space shrinks, few opportunities carry this much upside.

What changed, and why now?

Two forces converged over the past three years to crack open the distribution market. The first is structural, and it’s the story we told last year: App stores are no longer among players’ preferred stops for discovering their next game. As platforms became less central to discovery and tech advancements made distribution easier, publishers had little reason to keep paying relatively hefty fees on all their revenue.

The second force is regulatory. The EU’s Digital Markets Act required platforms such as Apple and Google to allow alternative app stores and payment routes, while a US court ruling forced Apple to let players pay through external links.

The result is a standoff. Publishers still need the reach of Apple and Google, but they no longer want to sacrifice so much profit margin for the privilege. The platforms need the publishers’ biggest titles, but they can no longer dictate terms as before.

This year, as part of a legal settlement with Epic Games, Google agreed to shave its baseline cut of each sale from 30% to 20%, and as low as 15% under certain conditions. That’s a milestone. The settlement paved the way for Epic—the industry’s most prominent holdout—to bring Fortnite back to Google Play after a five-year absence.

Mobile publishers were already moving this way

Publishers didn’t wait for platforms to budge. Three-quarters of top-grossing mobile games worldwide now operate their own web stores, up from just 12% in 2019, according to Bain’s analysis (see Figure 2).

Figure 2

Official app-store charts don’t capture direct-to-consumer sales, so on the surface, the market appears smaller and slower moving than it truly is. A 2026 report from GDC and Appcharge estimated that mobile gaming’s direct-to-consumer revenue reached about $17 billion last year, roughly 15% of the mobile gaming in-app purchase market. In just the past year, direct-to-consumer sales grew from roughly 25% to 40% of total revenue for two large publishers, Modern Times Group and Playtika.

The engine powering the storefront

This new era of unbound distribution rewards not only the storefront but the engine behind it.

A web store alone is a great starting point. Capturing 15 to 30 additional margin points on every direct transaction is a meaningful immediate gain. The barrier to entry is low: The commodity infrastructure that makes the checkout page work, such as payment processing and identity verification, can be purchased from vendors.

The gaming companies pulling furthest ahead, though, don’t stop there. They own the customer relationship behind the storefront. These companies recognize that direct storefronts’ primary challenge isn’t player awareness; it’s conversion. About 83% of all gamers are aware that these direct storefronts exist, our survey found. Among those who have not bought directly, 68% knew it was an option but hadn’t yet used it (see Figure 3). That’s the audience to win over.

Figure 3

Our survey makes clear that discounts alone don’t persuade gamers to buy direct—the relationship does. In a hypothetical scenario, increasing the size of the gem bonus for a web-store purchase from 10% to 30% barely moved the share of gamers who preferred a direct purchase over buying through an app store (see Figure 4).

Figure 4

By contrast, among gamers who have made multiple direct purchases in the past 12 months, 84% said a personalized offer from a game they play often would make them more likely to buy (see Figure 5). The lesson: A bare-bones storefront with a discount attached isn’t what shifts behavior. It’s developing the relationship and using it to personalize offers.

Figure 5

The contrast in the hypothetical scenario above explains why relationships compound value while discounts don’t. A player who buys direct strengthens their connection with the publisher and supplies data that makes future offers more relevant. Those personalized offers convert far better than a basic price cut. And the players most receptive to that kind of offer are the same ones who buy direct in the first place, our survey found. Direct buyers are more than twice as likely to be receptive to personalized offers as gamers who’ve never bought direct. Direct buyers are also nearly five times as likely to have increased their spending on games in the past year. The loop feeds itself: The players you pull in directly are exactly the ones the engine monetizes best.

Some of the required capabilities may be new for gaming companies. These include strengthening the ability to find players (user acquisition), knowing who the target player is and what they want (behavioral data), and understanding how to reach them directly and keep them (customer relationship management and live operations). That engine is what turns the margin gain into a durable, compounding advantage.

Implications for gaming executives

A significant share of gamers are switching their buying habits right now. Every quarter a publisher delays its direct-to-consumer strategy is a quarter that its competitors are building direct player relationships and capturing the margin gains that follow. Three moves will position companies to lead.

Build or buy the engine while the window is open. The fee reset is real, but the window to capture the value at stake won’t stay open indefinitely. Those who wait face the same build at a higher cost, against competitors with years of direct data and relationships.

For midsize publishers, the platform fee savings alone should typically cover the cost of building a web store within a year. For smaller publishers without the scale to justify building, the move is to partner, but the decision itself can’t wait.

Restate your view of the market based on triangulated data, not app-store charts alone. App-store charts, by design, can’t see direct sales. Boards working from uncorrected numbers aren’t just missing data; they’re planning against an incomplete picture of the competitive landscape. The fix is triangulation: Combine app-store data with publisher disclosures, third-party field reports, and your own player research. The most effective companies will use this as an opening to revisit their entire approach to competitive intelligence in the AI era. The amount of available data is increasing significantly, and many gaming companies likely aren’t taking full advantage.

Decide which games to move and in what sequence. Moving to direct sales isn’t a single decision; it’s a portfolio question. Publishers that try to move everything at once can spread their capabilities too thin and underperform on all fronts. The smarter approach is to identify the one or two titles where the engine is strongest, move those first, build the playbook, and sequence the rest of the portfolio from there. Games with deep engagement, strong live ops, and established player communities are the natural candidates to move first.

For one large publisher, the decision was guided by which games’ players were most ready to migrate and whose purchase mechanics decoupled most naturally from the core gameplay loop. The first titles the company chose had a large share of players with existing company accounts registered outside third-party app stores. That enabled the publisher to prompt recurring purchases via a pre-renewal email rather than an in-game push. In addition, these games’ internal development teams were excited to pilot the first migration.

Each subsequent title moved at a lower incremental cost because the direct-to-consumer infrastructure, player data, and organizational playbook built on the first wave of games could be redeployed across the portfolio. As a result, direct channels now account for more than a third of the company’s total revenue.

Read our 2026 Gaming Report

Download the PDF Explore the report

Explore more

• Gamer Survey: The End of the Average Gamer

• AI Won’t Save an Unfocused Game

• Gaming’s Personalization Imperative

• Game Distribution: Half Your Players Already Buy Direct