The games business has no shortage of big questions at the moment: layoffs, contraction, changing distribution habits and familiar hopes that one enormous release can lift the mood across the market. Chris Hewish’s new book, Durable Advantage: Five Pillars of the Modern Game Business, argues that the answer is not simply finding or funding the next blockbuster. It is building a business that understands—and retains meaningful control over—the systems around the game.

Hewish, president of game-payment technology company Xsolla and a former executive at Activision and DreamWorks, introduced the book at Gamescom 2026 in Cologne. Its proposed pillars are relationships, commerce, intelligence, trust and time. The names are broad by design, but the practical idea underneath them is quite direct: a game company should examine which essential parts of its player business it actually governs, and which parts it has handed to outside platforms.

That makes the book less a promise of a single cure for the industry’s current pressures than a framework for asking harder operational questions. Who holds the player relationship? Who processes the transaction? Who can see the reasons behind a revenue movement? Who earns and maintains player trust? And how does a company use time to make those systems stronger rather than merely chase an immediate launch window?

Ownership versus rental in the modern game business

Hewish’s central distinction is between being an owner and being a renter of the crucial layers of a game business. A company that works exclusively through platform storefronts can gain reach and infrastructure, but it may also be dependent on those platforms for key parts of player contact, purchasing and behavioral information.

That does not mean third-party platforms are inherently a mistake. The evidence here supports a narrower warning: dependence can create gaps. If the platform intermediates the relationship, commerce and data, the publisher or developer may not possess a complete view of the player journey. The problem is not that a dashboard exists; it is that the dashboard may only display the portion of reality the company is permitted or able to collect.

First-party in this context means a company’s direct relationship and systems: its own customer data, payment flow, account infrastructure or communication channel. Third-party refers to an external service or platform that sits between the business and the customer. Neither term automatically signals good or bad practice. The important question is whether decision-makers understand the limits of the information and control they have accepted.

Hewish’s five pillars turn that question into a broader management model. Great games remain necessary, but the argument is that a strong game alone is not the entirety of a durable company. A business also needs to know how it reaches players, how players can pay, what its numbers truly indicate, why users should feel safe dealing with it, and how it sustains those capabilities over time.

The five pillars, explained

Relationships

Relationships concern the connection between a game company and its players. In practice, that can mean understanding who the players are and having a direct enough connection to communicate with them. When a platform owns the main touchpoint, the company behind the game may have a more limited role in that relationship.

This is not simply a marketing concern. Relationship ownership affects how a business interprets player needs and how much it can act on them. A company cannot build a useful long-term connection from a player base it can only partially see.

Commerce

Commerce is the buying side of the business: the systems and choices involved when players pay. Hewish’s perspective is shaped by his role at Xsolla, which provides game-payment software including PayStation integration tools, so payments are a central part of his case.

In technical terms, payment integration is the connection that lets a game business accept a particular payment method. If an accepted method changes, becomes more popular or is missing from the available checkout choices, that can alter purchasing behavior. A revenue decline, then, is not automatically evidence that the game’s content, price or audience appeal changed.

Intelligence

Intelligence is the book’s most concrete and potentially most useful pillar. It means having sufficiently complete information to make sound decisions, especially where player behavior and monetization are concerned. Monetization is the process by which a game earns money from its users. In this discussion, it includes the commercial data associated with how players pay.

Most companies already have dashboards listing measurements such as active users, total revenue and revenue per user in a country. Those measurements are useful. But Hewish’s point is that a dashboard is not synonymous with full intelligence. If transactions pass through another platform and the payment-level detail remains there, the company can see an outcome without understanding its cause.

Trust

Trust is a less numerical pillar, but it becomes especially important when relationships and purchases are mediated by third parties. Hewish argues that relying on other parties for core functions can make it harder to build trust directly with players. The implication is not that trust is a decorative brand value. It is a business capability shaped by how clearly a company can serve, understand and interact with its audience.

The supplied framework does not prescribe a single measurement for trust, nor does it establish that direct systems automatically make players more trusting. Instead, it places trust among the areas companies need to deliberately govern, rather than assume will take care of itself.

Time

Time completes the framework. The point is not elaborated as specifically as commerce or intelligence, but its position is meaningful. Durable businesses are not built solely around a moment of release-day attention. They require ongoing attention to the systems that connect the game, the player and the business.

That emphasis fits the book’s rejection of a hit-only mentality. The next major launch may matter enormously, including the anticipated arrival of Grand Theft Auto VI, but one release cannot substitute for a company’s ability to make informed, repeatable decisions.

Why incomplete data can produce the wrong fix

Hewish offers a useful example: a company sees revenue fall in a particular country. With only a high-level dashboard, leaders might conclude that local players no longer find the game relevant. They could respond by commissioning more content for that market or allocating more resources to localization.

Localization generally means adapting a product for a particular region or language. It can be a valuable response when local relevance really is the obstacle. The warning here is against treating it as the obvious answer before diagnosing the underlying issue.

In Hewish’s scenario, the actual explanation could be payment friction. A newly popular payment method enters the market, a significant group of players switches to it, and the platform handling purchases has not integrated that option. Players have not necessarily rejected the game or lost interest in its content. They may simply be unable to use the method they now prefer.

The difference matters because the two diagnoses require radically different action. One sends people toward producing content or expanding localization. The other points toward a commerce and integration issue. The first route can consume money and time while leaving the payment barrier untouched. The second may address the cause more directly.

“You need a complete picture of what’s happening,” is the core of Hewish’s intelligence argument.

His illustrative example uses a new payment method and a 20% player shift to show the scale of a blind spot. It should be read as an example, not proof that every regional revenue decline stems from payments. Revenue can move for many reasons, and the material does not claim otherwise. Its lesson is methodological: a result seen in aggregated reporting should not be mistaken for a confirmed explanation.

Moving beyond the hit-driven hamster wheel

Hewish describes the industry’s dependence on the next hit as a “hit-driven hamster wheel.” The phrase captures a business pattern in which the search for the next breakout product dominates planning. The five-pillar model proposes a different source of resilience: better governed relationships, commerce, intelligence, trust and time can improve the decisions made around every game, not just the rare title that becomes a phenomenon.

That is an appealing proposition in an industry experiencing contraction and layoffs, but it should not be simplified into a claim that better payment data can remove creative or market risk. The framework does not say that business infrastructure guarantees a hit, eliminates the need for good games or solves every structural problem. Its more credible claim is that a company can avoid some preventable errors when it has a fuller picture of what is happening between players and its products.

For developers and publishers, the immediate practical takeaway is an audit rather than a slogan. When a metric changes, teams can ask what information sits outside their visibility. When a platform performs a core function, they can ask which player-facing capabilities are being rented. And when a proposed solution demands substantial work—new content, additional localization or a regional strategy shift—they can ask whether the observed data actually supports that diagnosis.

  • Check the data boundary: identify what a dashboard includes and what transaction or commerce information may be absent.
  • Separate observation from explanation: a revenue drop is an observed result, not automatically evidence of a content issue.
  • Map the intermediaries: understand which outside platforms handle relationships, payment and behavioral data.
  • Test the player journey: consider whether a new or preferred payment method is unavailable before redirecting creative resources.
  • Think beyond launch: assess whether decisions strengthen the company’s ability to understand and serve players over time.

A business framework, not a substitute for games

Durable Advantage ultimately places an unfashionably practical proposition next to the industry’s fascination with blockbuster releases: durable advantage may come from governing the unglamorous pieces of the business as carefully as the game itself. The book’s pillars are intentionally high-level, and not every company will be positioned to bring every function in-house. But the owner-versus-renter question has force because it asks executives to be precise about what they know, what they do not know and who controls the missing pieces.

For players, much of this can sound distant from the games they play. Yet payment options, communication, trust and regional accessibility are all parts of the experience surrounding a purchase. When those systems fail, a company may see a number move before it understands that a player encountered friction. Hewish’s argument is that avoiding that disconnect is not merely an analytics exercise. It is part of building a game business capable of lasting beyond its next hit.