The Business of Games

Welcome to The Business of Games Podcast, powered by Xsolla.

When we talk about the business of games, most of the conversation lives on the upside: monetization models, player acquisition, live ops, new platforms. But there's a set of risks growing just as fast as the industry itself, and most studios aren't treating them with the same urgency. In this episode, host Lia Ballentine sits down with MK Palmore, CEO and founder of Apogee Global RMS, to explore what security really means in an industry defined by live services, in-game economies, and an ever-expanding web of third-party partners.

MK brings a career that spans the Marine Corps, the FBI, and executive roles at Palo Alto Networks and Google, giving him a rare vantage point on both public and private sector security. He's advised C-suites and boards across some of the most complex threat environments in the world, and now he's turning that lens on gaming, a space where the stakes, he says, are rising fast.

The conversation traces MK's throughline of service across every chapter of his career, then digs into why gaming has become such an attractive target for adversaries. The answer, in a word: interconnectedness. Between player data, live economies, third-party SDKs, payment processors, and the networks games run on, every touchpoint that makes a game feel real is also a potential attack surface, and adversaries have gotten remarkably good at monetizing every step of the chain it takes to exploit one.

MK also makes the case, using a surprising analogy from bank robbery data, for why friction isn't always the enemy of security, and why the real signal of a mature security culture isn't a compliance checklist. It's whether leadership is thinking strategically about tomorrow's threats instead of just reacting to today's.

We dive into:

• MK's path from the Marine Corps to the FBI to the C-suite, and the thread of service that ties it all together
• Why interconnectedness makes gaming platforms an especially attractive target for adversaries
• How attackers monetize every step of the "cyber kill chain," not just the final breach
• The bandit barrier: what bank robbery prevention data reveals about the tradeoff between security and friction
• Why risk profiles differ by game type, and why "less risky" never means "not targeted"
• The case for external security assessments, and why internal teams struggle to grade themselves honestly
• What separates a company that's merely compliant from one where security is actually cultural
• MK's rapid-fire take on the biggest breach risk facing gaming companies in 2026

Whether you're a studio founder, a security lead, or a business executive who's never thought about your organization's attack surface, this conversation reframes security as a leadership and cultural decision, not just a technical one.

Let's get into it.

For more insights and resources, visit xsolla.com/podcast. Want to join the conversation? Follow and comment on our LinkedIn page at The Business of Games Podcast. That’s where we’ll be sharing updates, highlights, and continuing the discussion. And don’t forget to subscribe, rate, review, and share the podcast with friends who want to learn more about the business of games.

Welcome to The Business of Games Podcast, powered by Xsolla.

Not long ago, getting a game into players' hands meant working through publishers, retailers, and a shelf space war at stores like GameStop, Best Buy, and Walmart. Today, that world is gone — but in its place is something more fragmented, not less. In this episode, host Ed Lin sits down with Emrah Kara and Julian Migura, co-founders of VaultN, to unpack how third-party game distribution actually works now, and why solving it might be one of the industry's biggest untapped opportunities.

VaultN builds infrastructure that automates distribution, payments, and marketing for publishers across thousands of retail and sales channels worldwide, working with partners including Team17, Microsoft, Take-Two, and GOG. In November 2025, the company closed a $3.5 million funding round led by Sony Innovation Fund and London Venture Partners. Emrah and Julian trace their path from watching publishers manage million-dollar key distributions over Excel spreadsheets and email chains to building a real-time, API-driven system designed to replace that entirely.

The conversation covers how physical-era distribution habits carried over into digital, why China is quietly the largest PC gaming market in the world, how the shift from pre-order hype to long-tail, post-launch sales has changed what "success" looks like, and why discoverability — not distribution — is now the real battle publishers are fighting.

What you'll hear:

• How VaultN's founders met and turned a shared frustration with spreadsheet-based key distribution into a company
• Why physical-era distribution logic still shapes digital game commerce today
• Data on China's Steam dominance, including its 19.3% user share and $61.5 billion gaming market
• How VaultN's platform validates, reserves, and fulfills a purchase in real time, with no floating keys or spreadsheets
• Why pre-orders persist even though the original scarcity problem they solved no longer exists
• How retail marketing budgets have historically gone unmeasured, and what changes when they can be tracked
• Why an estimated ~24,000 new games launching on Steam in 2026 alone makes discoverability the industry's defining challenge
• Where VaultN sees distribution heading next: hyper-targeted, AI-driven, and centered on giving publishers direct access to player data

Whether you're a publisher, indie developer, or anyone trying to make sense of where a game actually gets sold today, this conversation offers a clear-eyed look at the infrastructure most players never see — and why it matters more than ever.

Let's get into it.

For more insights and resources, visit xsolla.com/podcast. Want to join the conversation? Follow and comment on our LinkedIn page at The Business of Games Podcast. That’s where we’ll be sharing updates, highlights, and continuing the discussion. And don’t forget to subscribe, rate, review, and share the podcast with friends who want to learn more about the business of games.

Welcome to The Business of Games Podcast, powered by Xsolla.

What lies at the intersection of e-commerce, fandom, and community in games? In this episode, host Ed Lin sits down with Garrett Mills, who has spent the last 15 years living at exactly that intersection — first at Loot Crate and most recently at Riot Games, where he served as Director of Global Consumer Products and E-Commerce across League of Legends, Valorant, and Arcane.

Garrett and Ed start where their own history together began: Loot Crate, the subscription box that pitched itself as "Comic Con in a box." Garrett shares how the company scaled to hundreds of thousands of subscribers, the operational realities of forecasting consumer products nearly a year in advance, and what he believes ultimately caused the mystery-box boom to lose its shine.

From there, the conversation turns to his years at Riot, where Garrett's team built a consumer products strategy around a single guiding principle he keeps coming back to: authenticity. He shares standout examples of products that dramatically outperformed expectations, how the team thought about catering to superfans without losing everyone else, and a memorable lesson in why a champion's popularity in-game doesn't always predict what merchandise will actually sell — especially once you factor in regional differences.

Garrett wraps up with his read on where fandom-driven commerce is headed next, from deeper ecosystem plays across games, entertainment, and physical products, to how AI could (and shouldn't) shape product recommendations for fans going forward.

What you'll hear:

• The Loot Crate origin story and what its rapid rise revealed about the limits of scale
• Behind-the-scenes realities of forecasting and manufacturing at a fast-growing startup
• Why authenticity, more than price point, determines whether a collectible resonates
• A standout product story from Garrett's time at Riot that beat every internal expectation
• A surprising case where a champion's in-game popularity didn't translate to merchandise sales
• Why global fandoms can't be treated as a monolith — and what that means for regional strategy
• Garrett's outlook on ecosystem plays and AI's role in the next era of fandom commerce

Let's get into it.

For more insights and resources, visit xsolla.com/podcast. Want to join the conversation? Follow and comment on our LinkedIn page at The Business of Games Podcast. That’s where we’ll be sharing updates, highlights, and continuing the discussion. And don’t forget to subscribe, rate, review, and share the podcast with friends who want to learn more about the business of games.

Welcome to The Business of Games Podcast, powered by Xsolla.

There are two kinds of game companies. One ships through someone else's storefront, someone else's rules, and hopes the algorithm is kind. The other builds something the first can't easily copy.

In this episode, host Ed Lin sits down with Chris Hewish, co-host of the podcast and President of Xsolla, to talk about his new book, Durable Advantage. Drawing on 30 years in the industry, from Games Workshop to the retail wars at Activision to mobile and VR publishing, Chris unpacks why the old build-launch-move-on playbook stopped working, and what actually separates studios that compound value for decades from the ones that keep rebuilding from scratch.The conversation traces the throughline of the book, including a hundred-million-download mobile hit that taught Chris the difference between an audience and a relationship, and the single question he says changes how a studio makes every decision.

What you'll hear:

● Why the hit-driven model that built the industry no longer guarantees a durable business 

● The real difference between renting an audience and owning a community 

● How a hundred-million-download mobile game changed Chris's thinking on success 

● Why trust breaks faster than it builds

Durable Advantage by Chris Hewish is available now on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Durable-Advantage-Pillars-Modern-Business/dp/B0HCGJ9XN5

Let's get into it.

For more insights and resources, visit xsolla.com/podcast. Want to join the conversation? Follow and comment on our LinkedIn page at The Business of Games Podcast. That’s where we’ll be sharing updates, highlights, and continuing the discussion. And don’t forget to subscribe, rate, review, and share the podcast with friends who want to learn more about the business of games.

Welcome to Coffee.Press.Play., brought to you by The Business of Games Podcast, powered by Xsolla. Recorded live at GDC 2026 inside the Xsolla Clubhouse, this series puts a twist on the traditional interview format: guests play a round of a classic video game against our Xsolla host and the outcome determines whether they face an easy question or a hard one.

In this episode, host Ed Lin sits down with Derek Rathbun, CEO and co-founder of Gamers.bet, who takes on a round of Super Smash Bros. and earns himself the easy question.

Derek's path into games didn't start in games at all. He spent about 20 years in technology, primarily in the automotive space, before an acquisition sent him looking for what was next. Through a mutual friend, he found himself in conversation with a former president of Atari and Sega, who brought in none other than Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari himself, to talk through where gaming might be headed. What came out of those conversations was the idea that real-money gameplay had never been made truly native to games, and Derek realized he had the technology background to build it. That idea became Gamers.bet, and he hasn't looked back since.

What you'll hear:

• How two decades in automotive tech led Derek to an unexpected introduction to Nolan Bushnell
• Why Derek landed on "fortuitous" as the one word that captures his path into gaming
• How a casual conversation about the next evolution of competition turned into a business
• Why Derek believes real-money gameplay can benefit both players and the games themselves as a new monetization layer

Coffee.Press.Play. is an ongoing mini-series, and more conversations with our GDC guests are on the way. Listen on your favorite podcast platform or watch full episodes on our YouTube channel. Missed us at GDC 2026? Stay tuned to our LinkedIn page for announcements on where we'll be next. And catch up on recent episodes at xsolla.com/podcast.

For more insights and resources, visit xsolla.com/podcast. Want to join the conversation? Follow and comment on our LinkedIn page at The Business of Games Podcast. That’s where we’ll be sharing updates, highlights, and continuing the discussion. And don’t forget to subscribe, rate, review, and share the podcast with friends who want to learn more about the business of games.

Welcome to Coffee.Press.Play., brought to you by The Business of Games Podcast, powered by Xsolla. Recorded live at GDC 2026 inside the Xsolla Clubhouse, this series puts a twist on the traditional interview format: guests play a round of a classic video game against our Xsolla host and the outcome determines whether they face an easy question or a hard one.

In this episode, host Ed Lin sits down with Xander Agosta, Director of Marketing and Partnerships at Upptic, a growth marketing company working with the world's top games.

Xander takes an easy round of Super Smash Bros. against Ed and earns himself an easy question, but his answer opens up a career path that wasn't easy at all. Raised in San Francisco and surrounded by the tech industry his whole life, Xander spent years feeling like an outsider looking in. A construction job, an unlikely mentor, and a leap of faith later, he found his way into web development, marketing, and eventually the games industry he'd wanted to be part of since childhood.

What you'll hear:

• Why growing up next to Silicon Valley didn't make the tech industry feel any less intimidating
• The mentor who convinced Xander to bet on himself
• How a detour through construction became the unlikely start of a marketing career
• Xander's take on why persistence, not pedigree, is what gets you into the games industry

Let's get into it.

Coffee.Press.Play. is an ongoing mini-series, and more conversations with our GDC guests are on the way. Listen on your favorite podcast platform or watch full episodes on our YouTube channel. Missed us at GDC 2026? Stay tuned to our LinkedIn page for announcements on where we'll be next. And catch up on recent episodes at xsolla.com/podcast.

For more insights and resources, visit xsolla.com/podcast. Want to join the conversation? Follow and comment on our LinkedIn page at The Business of Games Podcast. That’s where we’ll be sharing updates, highlights, and continuing the discussion. And don’t forget to subscribe, rate, review, and share the podcast with friends who want to learn more about the business of games.

Welcome to Coffee.Press.Play., brought to you by The Business of Games Podcast, powered by Xsolla.

Recorded live at GDC 2026 inside the Xsolla Clubhouse, this series puts a twist on the traditional interview format: guests play a round of a classic video game against our Xsolla host and the outcome determines whether they face an easy question or a hard one.

In this episode, host Chris Hewish sits down with Ivan Carrillo, Managing Partner at Joystick Ventures — an investment fund and publisher supporting indie studios around the world.

Ivan's portfolio speaks for itself: a track record of successful releases, with more on the way. But before getting into any of that, he had to face Chris across a game of Super Smash Bros. — and came out on the losing end.

That meant the hard question. And Ivan's answer was more honest than most would offer in front of a camera.

What you'll hear:

• How Joystick Ventures operates as both an investment fund and a publisher for indie studios worldwide
• What happened when a portfolio studio wasn't delivering — and why Ivan chose not to write off the investment
• What it actually means to "take over" development as a publisher, and what that costs in time, money, and trust
• Why the studio Ivan stepped in to help is better off for it — and what that outcome reveals about how Joystick Ventures works

Let's get into it.

For more insights and resources, visit xsolla.com/podcast. Want to join the conversation? Follow and comment on our LinkedIn page at The Business of Games Podcast. That’s where we’ll be sharing updates, highlights, and continuing the discussion. And don’t forget to subscribe, rate, review, and share the podcast with friends who want to learn more about the business of games.

Welcome to Coffee.Press.Play., brought to you by The Business of Games Podcast, powered by Xsolla. Recorded live at GDC 2026 inside the Xsolla Clubhouse, this series puts a twist on the traditional interview format: guests play a round of a classic video game against our Xsolla host and the outcome determines whether they face an easy question or a hard one.

In this episode, host Ed Lin sits down with Wes Morton, CEO and co-founder of Creative Company — a marketing technology firm serving media, entertainment, and tech brands across three practice areas: brand PR, digital products, and consumer insights.

When we asked Wes who has influenced his decision-making most, he pointed to his own team — specifically the Gen Z employees who are bringing new technologies, new campaign strategies, and an entirely different relationship with work to the table every day. For a founder building a company from the ground up, that kind of bottom-up influence isn't just refreshing. It's structural.

The conversation gets specific fast. Wes shares how one of his youngest employees, with no formal technical background, coded a fully functional front-end interface for EA client work using Vercel's AI tools — then handed it to the CTO, who said they could use all of it. That moment kicked off a company-wide conversation about AI coding tools, enterprise licensing, and what it means when non-technical people can ship technical work.

What you'll hear:

• Why Wes looks to his Gen Z team — not industry veterans — as his primary source of influence
• How Creative Company is using large language models to reinvent consumer research in an industry that hasn't fundamentally changed since the 1940s
• What a single Vercel-powered prototype from a junior employee revealed about the future of technical work
• Why staying culture-forward matters as much in marketing technology as it does in the games themselves

Let's get into it.

Coffee.Press.Play. is an ongoing mini-series, and more conversations with our GDC guests are on the way. Listen on your favorite podcast platform or watch full episodes on our YouTube channel.

Missed us at GDC 2026? Stay tuned to our LinkedIn page for announcements on where we'll be next. And catch up on recent episodes at xsolla.com/podcast.

For more insights and resources, visit xsolla.com/podcast. Want to join the conversation? Follow and comment on our LinkedIn page at The Business of Games Podcast. That’s where we’ll be sharing updates, highlights, and continuing the discussion. And don’t forget to subscribe, rate, review, and share the podcast with friends who want to learn more about the business of games.

Welcome to The Business of Games Podcast, powered by Xsolla.

Few companies in gaming carry more history than Sega. But in this special episode, the conversation isn't about the past — it's about what comes next.

In this extended cut, Xsolla President Chris Hewish sits down with Takaya Segawa, Sega’s Executive Vice President and Head of JA Studios 2nd Business Unit. The conversation is a rare look inside a company that has shaped the games industry for generations — and is now writing one of its most consequential chapters yet.

Sega's legacy speaks for itself. But what Segawa-san shares here is something less often discussed: the operational philosophy, the cultural conviction, and the business decisions that have allowed Sega to keep players engaged — in some cases, for over two decades — while building toward a more direct, data-driven relationship with a global audience.

From the development of SegaCon, Sega's emerging direct-to-consumer marketing platform, to a portfolio that spans Persona, Phantasy Star Online 2, Puyo Puyo Quest, and Project Sekai, Segawa-san walks through what it means to build for longevity in live services — and why the next frontier for Sega runs through esports, global commerce infrastructure, and a deeper connection with players worldwide.

We dive into:

• How Sega is approaching direct-to-consumer — and what's being built to support it
• What decades of live service titles reveal about Sega's long-term engagement philosophy
• What developers often get wrong about regional and cultural differences
• Why Japanese cultural identity can be a global asset, not a barrier
• How esports fits into Sega's broader growth strategy
• What it actually takes to operate direct-to-consumer at a global scale

This is a conversation that doesn't come along often — an honest, substantive dialogue with a leader who has been at the heart of one of gaming's most enduring companies.

Let's get into it.

For more insights and resources, visit xsolla.com/podcast. Want to join the conversation? Follow and comment on our LinkedIn page at The Business of Games Podcast. That’s where we’ll be sharing updates, highlights, and continuing the discussion. And don’t forget to subscribe, rate, review, and share the podcast with friends who want to learn more about the business of games.

Welcome to Coffee.Press.Play., brought to you by The Business of Games Podcast, powered by Xsolla. Recorded live at GDC 2026 inside the Xsolla Clubhouse, this series puts a twist on the traditional interview format: guests play a round of a classic video game against our Xsolla host and the outcome determines whether they face an easy question or a hard one.

In this episode, host Ed Lin sits down with Garry Edwards, Head of Business Development at Mindera — a global software services company helping game studios build back-end infrastructure, pipelines, and live ops without overloading their internal teams.

Garry has been in the industry for more than 20 years, with stops at Electronic Arts, TT Games, and Warner Bros., where he spent nearly a decade running business development. He's seen the industry transform from floppy disks to streaming and cloud — and he makes the case that what's happening right now, the convergence of AI, consolidation, and a fractured mid-tier, is the biggest transitional shift the business has ever seen.

What you'll hear:

• Why the current moment — AI, industry consolidation, and the shrinking mid-tier — is unlike anything Gary has seen in 20+ years
• How Mindera helps studios of all sizes build infrastructure without expanding headcount
• Why the democratization of game development shifted the challenge from creation to discoverability
• What Garry learned from his boss at EA about negotiating deals and leading without ego
• What it looks like to build an entirely new gaming vertical from the ground up

Let's get into it.

Coffee.Press.Play. is an ongoing mini-series, and more conversations with our GDC guests are on the way. Listen on your favorite podcast platform or watch full episodes on our YouTube channel.

Missed us at GDC 2026? Stay tuned to our LinkedIn page for announcements on where we'll be next. And catch up on recent episodes at xsolla.com/podcast.

For more insights and resources, visit xsolla.com/podcast. Want to join the conversation? Follow and comment on our LinkedIn page at The Business of Games Podcast. That’s where we’ll be sharing updates, highlights, and continuing the discussion. And don’t forget to subscribe, rate, review, and share the podcast with friends who want to learn more about the business of games.