How a consumer is charged and what payment methods are available is becoming increasingly important in driving traffic and conversions – and a new study by direct-to-consumer (DTC) mobile games publisher Appcharge shows just how important it is.
The publisher has published new analysis of a year of DTC transactions across its payments stack, representing more than $1bn processed annually. It finds that three decisions most studios treat as plumbing are moving approval rates, order value, and how often players come back.
It finds that when two identical players buy the same item on the same web store with the same card they do not get the same result. Routing the payment through a bank in the player’s own country rather than cross-border raises the approval rate by 8.4 percentage points. On $10m of annual volume in a single market, that is $840,000 that would otherwise be lost at authorisation.
The analysis identifies three separate layers where DTC payment performance is won or lost. In each one, the biggest gains come from somewhere publishers would not expect.
- Where the transaction is acquired: Local acquiring wins in 17 of 20 combinations of processing entity and payment method with meaningful volume. The effect tracks network structure: Visa gains 8.1 points from local acquiring and Mastercard 5.3. Visa and Mastercard are four-party networks, so acquirer and issuer sit in different countries on a cross-border transaction, which is exactly the signal issuer risk models are built to catch.
- Which local method sits on the checkout page: The case for a local payment method usually rests on early conversion, which is the wrong place to look for it. Across a cohort of close to 44,000 Brazilian players, Pix, credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay finish within roughly three points of each other at a second purchase, with Apple Pay marginally ahead of Pix. Purchase three is where it flips. Pix pulls to a 1.5x lead over Apple Pay, 1.7x lead over Google Pay, and 2x lead over credit card. By purchase four, that lead grows to 2.3x, 2.2x, and 3.1x respectively. In other words, Brazilian players who pay with Pix complete third and fourth purchases at a higher rate than those using credit cards, Google Pay, and Apple Pay.
- Whether buy now pay later is offered: Average Order Value is higher on BNPL, providing a strong retention and user LTV signal for publishers. On matched storefronts, compared to credit cards, Klarna orders run 25.7% higher and Afterpay 11.7% higher, while Apple Pay and Google Pay run 11.3% and 15.1% lower. The practical value here is timing. A player who checks out with BNPL has already told you something useful about themselves before any behavioural data exists to work with. Most retention signals arrive weeks or months in, once a spend pattern has formed. This one arrives immediately, costs nothing to collect, and is sitting in data every studio already has. Offering BNPL is not only about converting the first purchase. It is also about being able to recognise, from that purchase, which players are worth investing in keeping.
“Acquiring geography, payment method mix, and payment flexibility each take real work to get right, and none of them look like priorities until you see what they cost you,” said Chen Aspler, Director of Payments at Appcharge. “The gains from each individually will be modest at first, but combined as a whole – that’s where we see publishers making major uplift to their transaction success rates and ultimately, revenue.”
DTC leads the way in app games
The analysis follows Appcharge’s January 2026 industry report and the company passing $1 billion in annualised DTC transaction volume in March. The report produced in conjunction with GDC Festival of Gaming – and reported by us here – predicts that there is huge potential for consumer app publishers to achieve major revenue uplift amounting to tens of billions of dollars across the app economy – if they embrace DTC. The research also highlights app publishers’ biggest challenge to maximise DTC value – lack of a clear strategy.
For app publishers, the scale of the DTC opportunity is significant, with the global in-app market across all consumer apps projected to reach $290Bn by 2030. The mobile gaming industry has already embraced the DTC model, with direct-to-consumer (DTC) monetisation a $17bn market and still growing. Consumer app sub-categories such as fitness, education, lifestyle, entertainment, and subscription services are now set for a surge in growth.
However, success could be compromised, as more than half of professional game developers surveyed (52%) admit to not making significant changes to their DTC strategy. Only 25% of respondents say their organisation has increased investment in DTC channels and 58% remain in the exploring or testing stages of their strategy. Just under half (45%) claim that less than 10% of their current revenue comes from DTC.
