Studios sell direct; Xsolla carries the checkout.

A sale the studio owns

Xsolla starts from a complaint every mobile game maker knows. On phones, the items players buy inside a game have long had to be sold through Apple's and Google's stores, which take a commission of up to 30 percent and sit between the studio and its players. A studio that wants to sell any other way has to accept cards, wallets and local methods in dozens of countries, charge the right tax, stop fraud and answer refund requests. Xsolla sells all of that as one service. It does not simply pass a payment along: it acts as the merchant of record, the legal seller in each transaction, in more than 200 geographies with more than 1,000 payment methods.

The company began in Perm, Russia. Aleksandr Agapitov registered the 2pay domain on 16 July 2005, the date Xsolla treats as its birthday, and its first product was a payment system called PayStation. An office in Los Angeles opened in 2009 and later became headquarters, and the name changed to Xsolla in 2010. In 2022 the founder described the goal in one line.

What I'm trying to do is like Shopify for video games.

Aleksandr (Shurick) Agapitov · Founder · Bloomberg profile, syndicated by TimesLIVE · 2022-04-19

The belief that sets Xsolla apart is that games are their own commerce problem. Its company page says it builds tools and services exclusively for the video game industry and opens doors for creators and publishers of every size. A game sells many small digital items, often to players in markets where card payment falls short, and it draws constant fraud. A general payment processor leaves those problems with the studio; Xsolla takes them on as the seller, and its SDK pricing page lists 5 percent per transaction with no monthly fee.

Why now: the store walls opened

Mobile was the hard door, and Korea opened it first. On 31 August 2021 its National Assembly passed a law stopping Google and Apple from forcing developers to use their own in-app billing, the first government in the world to do so, and in September Xsolla Korea pitched its web shop to Korean studios as a way to cut a 30 percent store fee to single digits. The decisive change came in the United States. On 30 April 2025 a court barred Apple from blocking links to outside payment, and from 29 October 2025 Google Play games in the US could include external purchase links. Xsolla launched its Buy Button a week after the Apple ruling. The web shops it powers grew from 151 in October 2023 to more than 800 in August 2026.

One purchase, step by step

Take an illustrative Korean studio with a mobile RPG and paying players in the United States and Southeast Asia. The studio pastes its App Store link into Xsolla's tools and gets a branded web shop with local prices; Xsolla says items can go live within 24 hours. In the US, a Buy Button inside the game opens that shop already signed in. A player in Malaysia pays with a local method on Pay Station, and Xsolla collects the money as the seller, screens it for fraud and sends the item to the game. Players who never pay can earn currency through Offerwall quests, and creators in the Partner Network bring in new players for a share of what they sell.

People still make the calls that matter most: prices, which offers reach which players, and how hard to steer players to the web without upsetting platform partners, a worry Korean studios raised at Xsolla's Seoul event in May 2026. Xsolla's answer was that it had seen no platform penalties against its partners in more than 20 years of direct sales, and it advised keeping the in-game link under server control so it can change without an app update.

The model pays off where a store commission is high and a studio has paying players abroad. Xsolla's own example is a $20 purchase that returned $14 through the app store and can return up to $19 through a web link. That gain rests on rules still being argued in court, which the revenue chapter covers.

The 11 Korea-compatible openings sit along this path. Business development and the regional product expert bring studios into direct commerce. Engineers build AdTech and partner web services; developer relations and developer marketing grow a community that can implement them. Communications staff explain the products in Korean and across APAC. Signet reads these duties together as a network around a purchase, rather than unrelated additions to a local office. A candidate can place past work on that network: winning a studio, making an integration reusable, operating a resilient service or showing a credible customer result.

Four products along one purchase

Pay Station is the core. It is Xsolla's checkout, offered as a hosted page, as components inside a game or headless through the API. Behind it Xsolla works as the merchant of record: it takes the money in more than 130 currencies, handles tax and compliance, runs fraud checks and answers players about refunds and chargebacks around the clock. Its SDK pricing page lists 5 percent per transaction with no monthly fee or minimum volume, and its anti-fraud page adds US$15 for each chargeback dispute.

Web Shop is the product the mobile rule changes created. A studio pastes its App Store link, imports its items and gets a branded, mobile-first store with regional pricing and login. In the US the Buy Button links a player from inside an iOS or Android game to a one-tap checkout. In August 2026 Xsolla folded the shop, LiveOps scheduling, offers, subscriptions and player acquisition into one account and said it powered more than 800 mobile game D2C experiences. Its home page claims most mobile studios lift revenue 10 to 16 percent within months of launch, a vendor claim. Appcharge, Stash, Aghanim and Unity's webshop built with Stripe all sell into the same opening.

Xsolla Ads goes after the players who never pay. It began as Offerwall, a list of quests such as trying another game that rewards players with in-game currency while advertisers pay for the completed actions. In May 2026 Xsolla rebuilt it as Xsolla Ads, with a consent-based player identity across games, opt-in rewards and ad formats, and said it was live with more than 25 partners. Its premise is that more than 90 percent of players never make an in-app purchase. One partner, Tilting Point, reported a 30 percent rise in web shop users and an 8.5 percent rise in paying users after adding Offerwall to its web shop. For a Korean reader the product matters for a practical reason: the Seoul backend and full-stack roles sit in the AdTech team and value offer monetization experience.

Partner Network pays creators to sell games. Publishers search more than 137,000 creators, invite them to campaigns and set the share of each creator-driven sale they will pay, and performance on Twitch and YouTube is tracked automatically. The open Product Owner role, which lists Seoul among 15 locations, describes it as a two-sided marketplace in which publishers and creators each shape the other.

Who has bought it, and what was reported

The clearest Korean case is JOYCITY's Resident Evil: Survival Unit, launched in November 2025. The game reached number one in more than 17 countries, and its web shop needed payment methods for markets where card-based store payment falls short. JOYCITY plugged Xsolla Payments into the existing shop. Xsolla's case page reports a 4x increase in payment revenue through Xsolla and a 3x increase in Xsolla's share of the game's revenue within about five months, with the US, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Japan as top markets. A JOYCITY director repeated the result on stage at Xsolla's Seoul event in May 2026 and named local payment methods as the deciding factor.

Wemade, the other Korean name in Xsolla's case library, moved MIR4 payments onto Pay Station, Anti-Fraud and in-game services; Xsolla reports more than 200,000 transactions in two months, five times the daily volume, a $20 average order and a 10 percent rise in conversion. A later promotion with a payment partner lifted MIR4 sales 53 percent in 14 days. Outside Korea, Ubisoft opened a Growtopia web shop in May 2025 and, by Xsolla's account, recorded 66 percent more web purchases than comparable titles and a 10 percent rise in revenue per paying user.

How to read these cases

Every number here comes from Xsolla's own case pages or its own events, and each one measures revenue or activity that flowed through Xsolla, not the game's total. They show where the product works, and the seller chose them. The Korean names that recur, Wemade, JOYCITY and KRAFTON, are publishers with global audiences, which is where cross-border payment matters most.