Estimated read time: 10 minutes, 20 seconds
Market options have been opening up for both publishers and players in the mobile games industry thanks to shifting laws and regulations around the world. (More details on those below.)
Because of these developments, mobile game companies are investigating more options for monetizing their games than just the App Store or Play Store.
So where do you start if you want to provide more global payment solutions to your player base while chipping away at the hefty 30% fees that mobile marketplaces charge?
With a merchant of record like FastSpring.
Read on to find out more about:
FastSpring is how gaming publishers sell in more places around the world, and for nearly two decades, we’ve been a payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you. To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg/.
What Is a Merchant of Record?
Very simply, a merchant of record (MoR) is a legal entity that sells services or goods to a customer. This means that companies can choose to be their own MoR, but they can also outsource this work to a company that takes on those legal liabilities and handles the financial setup behind the scenes for them.
With the merchant of record model, you can let your MoR provider worry about payment processing, regulatory compliance, and global tax compliance, because the MoR will be the entity accepting global payments and selling the product.
That leaves gaming businesses like yours free to focus on developing great games instead of worrying about payment methods, currency conversion, fraud prevention, tax collection and remittance, and more.
How Is an MoR Different From a Payment Service Provider?
Payment service providers (PSPs) do some of the same things MoRs do, but only up to a certain point.
Both PSPs and MoRs bridge the gap from businesses to the specialized financial services and networks that are needed in the background to sell a product and process payments, including payment gateways, payment processors, and merchant accounts.
Both options will also likely include ecommerce platform tools and/or integration functionality; the options will vary from provider to provider.
But PSPs don’t go that extra step of taking on the liabilities of card brand rules, risk and fraud, taxes, or the regulatory rules that differ across regions and countries the way that MoRs do.
Some PSPs may have options that allow you to upgrade their services closer to that of an MoR, but that will mean their fees will go up, and the options may be bolted on rather than built in. (For example, Stripe’s fraud prevention upgrade, Radar, costs additional fees per transaction.)
Monetizing Your Mobile Game Outside of App Marketplaces
Thanks to various legal changes around the world, mobile game developers are finding that the mobile game market is beginning to open up in terms of how they can sell and monetize their games.
(If you’re not yet familiar with them, you can read up on various U.S. cases against Apple and Google, the EU Digital Markets Act, and recent regulatory laws in Japan, for starters. These are all in some way related to the exclusive, “gatekeeper”-like relationships that smartphone companies like Apple and Google have maintained between smartphone users and app developers via proprietary smartphone marketplaces.)
There are probably many ways game developers could approach this burgeoning freedom to sell direct to consumers (D2C), but one of the easiest is to partner with a merchant of record that can help you sell items or premium currency in game, on your website, or in your web shop.
How to Use an MoR to Monetize Your Mobile Game
Using an MoR to monetize your mobile game starts with integrating it into your web shop to sell in-game currency, skins, battle passes, etc. It’s easy to integrate FastSpring into your existing web shop, or we can help you build one that’s optimized for your players and your game’s brand.
Integration only takes a few simple steps:
- You set up your products in FastSpring (we’ll take care of currency and payment method localization for you).
- Drop a few lines of our modern customizable Javascript library code onto your site.
- Use our orders webhooks to grant in-game item access when a purchase is made.
Read more details about using an MoR to monetize your game in How to Sell a Mobile App or Game Outside App Stores, or check out our FastSpring specific walkthrough guide, How to Implement Direct to Consumer Sales for Video Games With FastSpring.
Why Game Studios Love Using FastSpring as Their MoR Provider
FastSpring has been a payment provider since 2005, and we’re the merchant of record that gaming publishers can use to sell games or in-game items on their websites, in their web shops, or even embedded directly into their games.
Here are just a few of the reasons mobile game and video game developers trust us to help them sell their games all over the world.
Avoid App Store Transaction Fees
By using an MoR like FastSpring to sell games or in-game items D2C, game developers can avoid or lower high marketplace transaction fees, which commonly hover around 30%.
This is many times higher than what a merchant of record like FastSpring charges, which means you’ll be able to keep much more of the revenue your game generates.
Increase Global Reach Quickly
The barriers to entry for selling games, SaaS, and other digital products into even one new country can be high if you want to do it all in house. That can include establishing a legal entity, getting up to date on local taxes and regulatory rules, set up financial details like payment processing and merchant accounts, learning what preferred currencies and languages you need your checkout to show to local buyers, and more — and you can multiply that times the number of countries you want to sell into.
With FastSpring, all of that is handled for you, for 185+ countries. You’ll only need to set up FastSpring to immediately start selling into new markets and geos. And if you need help, our award-winning support teams are here to help.
Award-Winning Customer Support
Whether it’s for initial setup, ongoing technical support, or even consumer support for your players, FastSpring works hard to cover you.
In fact, we’ve upped our support game so much that awards are starting to roll in!
In 2024, our support team won a Silver Stevie® award for Front-Line Customer Service Team of the Year in the “Technology Industries – Computer Software” category, and our customer success team won a gold Globee® award for Customer Excellence in the “Achievement in Team Customer Success” category!
Don’t take it from us alone. Read more about why TestDome has considered FastSpring a partner for many years, or find out why Stardock knew FastSpring would be a valuable long-term partner.
Customizable Checkouts
FastSpring offers multiple types of checkout options to help accommodate your vision and gamers’ convenience.
Whether you want a seamless embedded or modal pop-up checkout experience in game or on your website, we’re flexible and offer many tools to help you customize the experience. FastSpring’s developer tools include extensions, webhooks, APIs, a WordPress plugin, the FastSpring Store Builder Library (our JavaScript library), AI-assisted documentation search, step-by-step developer project videos, and more.
Payment Method, Language, and Currency of Choice
Besides enabling you to customize and brand your checkout to best suit your business in general, FastSpring will handle the price localization details. This includes which payment methods are offered, which languages are displayed, and which currencies customers can buy in.
FastSpring will automatically select the best region-specific payment methods and currency to display, but you can also customize which currencies are supported when you configure your store.
To ensure buyers have the smoothest buying experience possible, FastSpring supports 23+ currencies, 21+ languages, and 98% of the top payment methods used globally. That includes debit and credit cards, digital wallets like Google Pay and PayPal, and preferred regional payments like Pix and AliPay.
When your game is monetized, the buying experience is part of the gaming experience, and a familiar checkout experience will help ensure your player base doesn’t have to think twice about supporting your game.
Read more about the importance of pricing localization with examples from Twitch and Out of the Park Developments.
Tax Compliance
Worrying about the international taxes that come with selling globally? Or which U.S. states have recently changed their sales tax nexus? Or if you’re staying current with all the different VAT regulations in the EU?
With FastSpring, you don’t have to.
As the merchant of record, we’re responsible for handling sales taxes and VAT. That means that not only will we calculate how much tax needs to be collected, but we’ll also collect it and remit it.
With FastSpring, you’ll automatically be tax compliant.
Read a story from our senior tax director about how she helped a European software company in a situation with an African taxing authority.
Fraud Prevention and Risk Management
Fraud prevention and risk management are intrinsic to the merchant of record model, and FastSpring is committed to protecting your software or game company from risk while managing global regulatory compliance.
We partner with global leaders like Sift for risk analysis and fraud prevention, and we comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
Additionally, we have advanced, gaming-specific fraud protection and risk management features built specifically for video games, and for the types of transaction fraud that game developers are likely to encounter. Specific fraud rules can be applied just for your games, and risky behavior patterns can be learned and applied across all our video game customers to help proactively prevent chargebacks and loss of revenue. We even provide you with the ability to dynamically flag players as not trusted (e.g., new players) or safe (e.g., whales).
Chargeback Management
Chargebacks are returns that levy a fee, and as the MoR, FastSpring is responsible for keeping fraud rates and chargebacks under specific thresholds that card networks set. When chargebacks inevitably happen, FastSpring has built-in chargeback management features to help manage and reduce chargebacks on your behalf.
This includes our Chargeback Overview Dashboard, which allows you to see and react to chargebacks and enables you to take proactive steps to limit fraudulent chargebacks and resolve valid ones.
Read more about our policies and procedures regarding refunds and chargebacks in our documentation.
Partner With FastSpring
FastSpring is how gaming studios sell in more places around the world, and for nearly two decades, we’ve been a payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you.
FastSpring allows you to offload the complexity of global payments, sales tax and VAT compliance, player payments support, subscription management, and many other aspects of payments management. Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time making great games!
To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg/.
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