Chris Hewish, Xsolla President: “Xsolla’s technology and product roadmap is built around anticipating where game development and player behavior are moving, rather than simply reacting to trends.”

Xsolla started in 2005 with a simple idea that still drives the company today. Game creators should be free to focus on building the worlds players love, not wrestling with the messy, invisible machinery behind global commerce. Back then, the industry was full of brilliant teams making great games, yet many of them kept running into the same brick walls. Payments worked differently in every region. Regulations shifted constantly. Fraud tools weren’t built with games in mind. Monetization systems felt bolted on rather than designed for how players actually behave. The result was predictable. Developers had the talent to create, but not always the infrastructure to grow.  What this really means is that Xsolla was built to clear those barriers out of the way. The founders saw how fragmented the global payments landscape had become. A game that launched seamlessly in North America might hit a wall in Korea or Brazil simply because players there used different payment methods or local rules made things complicated. Most studios couldn’t afford to learn the financial systems of every country, nor should they have needed to. Xsolla stepped in with a dedicated payment and commerce engine built specifically for gaming. The goal was to let developers reach players anywhere without reinventing the financial wheel for every market.

Here’s the thing. Payments were only one part of the problem. Developers were also relying heavily on third party platforms for storefronts and access to their own players. That dependence meant limited control over pricing, data, community engagement, and long term strategy. Xsolla believed developers deserved more ownership. So the company built tools that let them create direct to player web shops, run their own promotions, manage game keys, track player activity, and design monetization plans that made sense for their worlds. This shift allowed small indie teams to act with the kind of freedom that once belonged only to the biggest publishers. As Xsolla expanded its reach to cities like Los Angeles, Montreal, Berlin, Seoul, Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, Raleigh, and Tokyo, another recurring challenge showed up. Even with strong tools and global access, many developers struggled to secure funding that respected the realities of game creation. Traditional investment models didn’t always fit. Some investors wanted company equity when the team really needed project based support. Others didn’t understand the long development cycles or the unpredictable nature of creative work. Instead of accepting that as the status quo, Xsolla launched initiatives like the Funding Club. The idea was to connect developers and investors in a way that honored how games are actually made, giving teams a fairer path to the resources they needed.

Today, guided by Chris Hewish as President, Xsolla offers a full suite of services that covers the business side of game development from launch to growth. Hundreds of local payment methods. A global tax and compliance framework. Fraud prevention baked into every transaction. Custom storefront tools for direct distribution. Creator and affiliate programs that help developers market their games with real reach. Funding pathways that don’t force teams to compromise their vision. Everything is designed around one purpose. Make the business side of games simpler, smarter, and more accessible so creators can keep their attention where it belongs.

Xsolla’s story isn’t about infrastructure. It’s about opening doors for developers around the world. It is about removing friction from the creative process. It is about helping great games find the players who will love them. And that idea from 2005 is still right at the center of everything the company does.

In conversation with Chris Hewish, President of Xsolla

Xsolla operates as a "video game business engine," providing everything from payments and funding to cloud tools. How does this integrated, all-in-one approach uniquely solve the fragmented operational challenges that game developers face, allowing them to focus purely on creativity?

Xsolla’s integrated, all-in-one approach solves developers’ operational challenges by replacing a patchwork of disconnected tools with a single, unified ecosystem explicitly built for games. Instead of juggling separate providers for payments, fraud prevention, funding, distribution, authentication, and creator programs, developers get a cohesive system where every component works seamlessly together.

This eliminates the technical overhead of stitching together services, reduces risk from inconsistent compliance or security standards, and dramatically cuts down on the time teams spend managing infrastructure instead of making games.

Xsolla centralizes global payments, operational workflows, and monetization tools under one roof, enabling developers to gain a reliable business backbone that scales with them across markets. As a result, teams can finally shift their resources away from complex business operations and focus entirely on what matters most: building creative, engaging gaming experiences.

A core part of your mission is to "democratize game funding" through solutions like Xsolla Funding Club. How does your data-driven approach to connecting developers with capital challenge the traditional, often gatekept, models of game financing?

With Xsolla Funding Club, we challenge that model by using a data-driven approach that evaluates games on a measurable potential rather than insider networks. Instead of relying on subjective gatekeeping, we analyze real development metrics, market fit, production progress, team capability, and community indicators to surface projects that might otherwise be overlooked. This structured, transparent process allows us to match developers with investors whose interests, risk profiles, and portfolio needs align with the project’s data profile, not just its pitch deck.


By automating introductions, simplifying due diligence, and giving smaller or emerging teams equal access to opportunities, we reduce friction on both sides of the table. Our approach opens the funding ecosystem to more creators regardless of geography, studio size, or industry connections, allowing developers to spend less time chasing capital and more time building great games.

With the gaming industry being truly global, how does Xsolla's extensive localization supporting over 700 payment methods and 130 currencies directly empower a developer in a emerging market to compete on the world stage?

Xsolla’s extensive localization directly empowers developers in emerging markets by removing the structural barriers that typically limit their global reach. In many regions, players rely on local wallets, cash-based systems, or region-specific payment platforms that traditional global processors don’t support. By enabling these methods out of the box, we allow a developer from anywhere - Brazil, Nigeria, India, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe - to instantly accept payments in the ways their local players actually prefer, dramatically increasing conversion and revenue potential.


At the same time, we handle taxes, compliance, fraud mitigation, currency conversion, and regional regulatory complexity, giving smaller studios access to enterprise-grade infrastructure without requiring them to hire specialized teams. This means a developer in an emerging market can launch globally with the same commercial capabilities as a major publisher, reaching players around the world, generating more consistent revenue across regions, and scaling far beyond what their local financial systems would typically allow. By bridging these gaps, our localization stack turns geographic limitations into global opportunities, letting creativity, not infrastructure, determine who succeeds.


You've described the "Xsolla Universe" as a suite of interconnected products. How does the synergy between your products, like using data from your payment platform to inform your marketing and analytics tools, create a competitive moat and a more powerful ecosystem for your clients?


The strength of the Xsolla ecosystem comes from the way each product is designed not as a standalone tool but as a data-connected component of a larger, unified engine. When a developer uses our payments platform, for example, every transaction generates valuable insights about player behavior - purchase patterns, regional trends, churn signals, and spending preferences. Instead of that data sitting in a silo, it becomes immediately usable across our other products.

This synergy creates a competitive moat because the depth and quality of insights improve as developers use more of the ecosystem. No external combination of third-party tools can fully replicate this level of tightly integrated, gaming-specific data flow. Developers benefit from a self-reinforcing loop: better data leads to better decisions, which drive better performance, which generates even more valuable data.
The result is an ecosystem where each product amplifies the value of the others, reducing operational complexity, eliminating fragmented tech stacks, and giving developers a more powerful, centralized engine to grow their games. This interconnected approach not only increases efficiency but also provides studios of any size access to the kind of unified infrastructure that historically was available only to major global publishers.

The gaming landscape is rapidly evolving with Web3, cloud gaming, and new monetization models. As an infrastructure provider, how is Xsolla's technology and product roadmap adapting to not just keep pace with, but actively enable, these next-generation gaming experiences?

Xsolla’s technology and product roadmap is built around anticipating where game development and player behavior are moving, rather than simply reacting to trends. For emerging areas like Web3, cloud gaming, and new monetization models, our goal is to provide the commercial and operational infrastructure that enables developers to experiment, launch, and scale without rebuilding foundational systems from scratch.

For Web3 and digital ownership, we’re focused on offering compliant, friction-free ways for developers to integrate blockchain-based assets into familiar gaming commerce flows. That means tools that support tokenized items, wallets, and on-chain transactions while abstracting away the technical and regulatory complexity that has slowed mainstream adoption. By bridging traditional payment rails with Web3 asset management, we allow developers to create hybrid experiences that blend the best of both worlds.

In cloud gaming, our roadmap emphasizes identity, payments, and distribution tools that support play-anywhere experiences. As games move away from local installs, developers need secure account systems, flexible entitlement management, and global payment flows that work seamlessly across devices. We’re building infrastructure that lets studios deliver cloud-native experiences without needing to engineer their own billing, access control, or session management systems.

For new monetization models, including subscriptions, battle passes, and direct-to-player storefronts, we’re expanding our commerce and analytics stack to give developers granular control over pricing, behavioral targeting, and dynamic offers. This includes data-informed monetization tools that adapt in real time, enabling developers to optimize revenue models as players' expectations evolve.

Across all these areas, the throughline is that we build the underlying systems that let developers innovate freely. By staying technology-agnostic but infrastructure-focused, we ensure that when the next generation of gaming arrives, developers already have the operational backbone they need to create it.

What does the future hold for your company and its customers? Are exciting things on the way?

We’re doubling down on next-generation monetization infrastructure, making it easier for studios of all sizes to sell directly to players across platforms. This includes expanding our direct-to-consumer ecosystem with new SDKs, improved checkout flows, and deeper integrations with PC, console, and mobile environments so developers can own their player relationships end-to-end.

We’re also expanding the Xsolla Ecosystem, our curated network of vetted technology and service partners. This reduces friction for studios looking for analytics, marketing, cloud services, user acquisition, live ops support, and more, creating a “plug and play” stack that accelerates development and scaling.

Meet the leader behind the success of Xsolla

Chris Hewish, President of Xsolla, is an award-winning Interactive Executive and Studio Head with experience in managing operations and market strategies in all segments of the video game industry. His professional experience encompasses managing large teams of employees - sometimes over 300 people - at various companies, such as Activision, DreamWorks Animation, Survios, Skydance, and Xsolla. He has many skills and knowledge across different areas, making him perfect for leading multiple teams and businesses. As an avid gamer, Chris turned this passion into a successful career. With direct experience in designing and producing over 50 games that generate more than $1B in sales, Chris has a rare and successful combination of creative and business acumen in an ever-changing industry. His unique skill set allows him to develop, design, and produce content, understand a company’s strategy, and market and brand media products — all simultaneously.

“Xsolla centralizes global payments, operational workflows, and monetization tools under one roof, enabling developers to gain a reliable business backbone that scales with them across markets.”

“Xsolla’s extensive localization directly empowers developers in emerging markets by removing the structural barriers that typically limit their global reach.”