Xsolla president’s new book reveals how gaming companies can ‘get off that hit-driven hamster wheel’

Amid more layoffs and contraction and renewed going-discless discourse, we are facing no shortage of opinions about what strategies will finally rightsize the global-gaming-industry ship. Apart from relying on the highly anticipated release of “Grand Theft Auto VI” to solve for the nearly $350 billion industry’s problems, a new book by Xsolla president Chris Hewish has a few clear suggestions.

Titled “Durable Advantage: Five Pillars of the Modern Game Business,” the book debuted last month at Gamescom 2026 in Cologne, the annual meeting of the minds for the bigwigs in the gaming industry. In the text, Hewish outlines a handful of areas that, when utilized to the fullest, make up a healthy gaming business: relationships, commerce, intelligence, trust 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 current president of a fintech company that makes payment software for video games, including its PayStation payment-integration tools and former exec at Activision and DreamWorks, Hewish wants those in the gaming industry to examine their first-party vs. third-party models and ask, “Are they actually owners or are they just renters of all of the different parts of their business?”

When considering 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 look at more-informed data. This also requires looking for gaps in intelligence created when a company doesn’t have proprietary numbers for all aspects of its business, including 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 example Hewish offers is a company noticing revenue dropping in one country and making incorrect assumptions based on its own incomplete data.

“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.”