Neon Wants to Hand Game Publishers the eCommerce Playbook

It turned out to be the easy part.

Getting out was never really the obstacle. Regulators have been busy prying the app stores open, and alternative payment channels have multiplied. But walking out of the store and building a real direct-to-consumer business on the other side are two very different things. One is an exit. The other is a company. With all the payments, identity, fraud, loyalty, data and customer-trust machinery that any serious merchant has to run.

That gap is the whole opportunity, and it is where Neon has planted its flag. The gaming commerce infrastructure company just raised $13 million in a round led by Krafton, on the back of 200% growth over the prior year.

Neon was first sold to the market as the “Shopify of gaming,” and Chris Faught, founder and CEO at Neon, told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster that the label still fits. It just no longer fits the whole of the ambition.

“What we’ve been building, and what our vision is set on now, is being the infrastructure on which these publishers build more scalable direct consumer channels,” Faught said, “and also a commerce ecosystem around their business in general.”

In other words, the toll booth was never the point. The point is the business a publisher gets to build once it has driven past it.

Direct Commerce Is Outgrowing Fee Arbitrage in Gaming Payments

The first pitch for direct gaming commerce was a spreadsheet argument. Route purchases through a web store instead of the app store, skip the platform’s cut, keep more of every dollar. Simple math.

The math has held up better than the skeptics expected. Faught said Neon partners have pulled 30%, 40%, 50% — and in some cases more than 70% — of gross revenue off Apple’s and Google’s purchasing channels. But fee arbitrage was only ever the opening move. The question that decides the next few years is whether a publisher can own and keep the relationship wrapped around all those transactions, not just the transactions themselves.

“They’re finding themselves in a transition period,” Faught said. “‘I feel like I’m overpaying to the existing partner. I feel like I need to better understand payments and the cost of payments and how international payments fees work.’”

If that arc sounds familiar, it should. It’s the eCommerce playbook, run in fast-forward. A brand starts out selling on Amazon because Amazon has the traffic. Then it stands up its own storefront. Then, over time, it builds the muscle to run its own customers, its own payments and its own distribution across a dozen channels at once. Gaming is now speed-running that same graduation.

The trap is graduating straight into a new dependency. Traditional merchant-of-record providers will happily take payments, taxes, compliance and the rest of global commerce off a publisher’s plate. In doing so, plant themselves right between the publisher and the player, in the exact seat the app store used to occupy.

“If you zoom out, it ends up looking exactly like the structure the market did with the app stores in the first place,” Faught said. “Just a new intermediary.”

Webster has watched this movie play out across a lot of markets.

“The new thing is great because it’s new and it’s different and it’s better than the alternative,” she said. “And then over time, the new thing becomes the thing that people love not to like anymore.”

Neon’s bet is that the biggest publishers have outgrown the need to hand the commercial relationship to anyone. What they need is infrastructure that hands them the controls, without becoming the next thing they resent.

The Real Prize in Gaming Commerce Is Knowing the Player

Ask what gaming commerce looks like a few years out, and the answer starts to resemble omnichannel retail. Publishers keep distributing through Apple and Google, but they also run web stores and sell into the moments that already surround the game. The livestream, the community forum, the esports event.

Here’s the part that survives even a world where app-store fees fall to nothing. Customer ownership. Retailers have spent decades hoarding purchase histories, email addresses and attribution data. Game publishers are often starting from almost none of it, Faught said, because the platforms have “purposefully obfuscated who that user is to the publisher.”

That is why, for Faught, the direct channel pays for itself on data alone.

“Even in the case where the fees end up being equivalent,” he explained, the ability to acquire customer data, market directly, cross-sell future games and increase lifetime value “is worth doing.”

Reframed that way, the discounts and the exclusive digital items and the cash back and the loyalty rewards stop looking like promotions. They start looking like the cost of admission to a relationship the publisher has never actually owned.

Which leaves trust as the genuinely hard part. Apple and Google have spent years teaching players that tapping “buy” is safe. A publisher rerouting that player to an unfamiliar web checkout gets no such grace period.

“You get one shot to build trust in a scaled way with that end consumer,” Faught said. Neon’s answer, he added, is to hand publishers the levers. Payment routing, fraud screening, fees, local payment costs. Without reaching out and grabbing the player relationship for itself.

“Our view is the moat here is reimagining what a merchant of record should be in 2026,” Faught said.

The app-store fights were about whether publishers could leave. That question is largely settled. The next one and the one Neon just raised $13 million to answer, is who owns the customer once the sale moves outside the store.

Watch the exclusive PYMNTS TV interview with Neon Founder and CEO Chris Faught to hear more about:

• Why gaming’s direct-to-consumer shift is moving beyond app-store fee avoidance. Faught explains why publishers are increasingly treating web stores as permanent commerce channels that demand real payments, fraud, loyalty and customer-data infrastructure — not just a cheaper way to check out.
• How publishers risk trading one gatekeeper for another. The conversation digs into why the traditional merchant-of-record model can quietly recreate the same intermediary structure as the app stores, leaving publishers without real control of the player relationship.
• Why customer identity and trust are becoming the real competitive edge. Faught argues that direct channels let publishers personalize offers, build loyalty and grow lifetime value — but only if they can deliver the secure, trusted checkout players already expect from Apple and Google.