Xsolla President Unveils 'Durable Advantage' Book at Gamescom — SkimNews
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- Chris Hewish, president of Xsolla, launched "Durable Advantage: Five Pillars of the Modern Game Business" at Gamescom 2026 in Cologne last month, outlining five pillars — relationships, commerce, intelligence, trust and time — that he says distinguish healthy gaming businesses.
- Hewish argues gaming firms should examine whether they are "owners or renters" of their business, saying companies working only through app-store platforms are "completely reliant" on those platforms for player relationships, commerce and behavioral data.
- The book urges the industry to "get off that hit-driven hamster wheel of always just being reliant on the next big hit" by mining deeper proprietary data instead of dashboard-level metrics.
- Hewish warned that when payment and commerce data flow through another platform, it "stays with the platform, it doesn't come through," leaving companies with blind spots in their intelligence.
- Hewish illustrated the risk with an example: a studio seeing revenue drop in a country might misdiagnose it as a content or localization problem, when in reality 20% of players had shifted to a new payment method like Venmo that the platform hadn't integrated.
- Hewish is a former executive at Activision and DreamWorks; Xsolla builds payment software for games, including its PayStation payment-integration tools.
Why it matters: For gaming companies whose commerce runs through app stores, Hewish's argument means their dashboards miss payment-method shifts — like the hypothetical 20% migration to a Venmo-style option — leading them to spend on content fixes for problems that are actually payments-integration gaps. The five-pillar framing reframes platform dependence as a strategic liability, not just a cost line.
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