"The Fee Was Never the Story": Appcharge CEO Maor Sason on the $17 billion DTC Market and What Comes Next
Appcharge partnered with GDC Festival of Gaming to survey 1,200+ game industry professionals on the state of direct-to-consumer monetization in mobile gaming. The results — including a documented $17 billion DTC market, a 7x revenue gap between leading and lagging studios, and a striking organizational divide — are published in full in the GDC x Appcharge DTC Report, available here.
We sat down with Maor Sason, CEO and co-founder of Appcharge, to go deeper on what the data reveals — and what it doesn't.
Five things the data tells us
Before the conversation, here are the findings that frame it.
1. DTC is already a $17 billion market. Based on survey data from 1,200+ game industry professionals, DTC accounts for roughly 15% of the $113.3 billion mobile gaming IAP market in 2025.
2. The revenue gap between leaders and laggards is 7x. Studios that are ahead of the industry — Innovators, in the report's segmentation — have a median DTC revenue share of 35%. Late Adopters have 5%. Same market. Same players. The gap opened in under 12 months.
3. 54% of studios have zero dedicated DTC employees. Among Innovators, the median is 14. The organizational gap between those two numbers largely explains the revenue gap.
4. 92% of publishers expect DTC revenue to grow in 2026. But only 25% describe their DTC strategy as scaling or mature. Most of the industry expects the channel to grow while simultaneously admitting they're not ready for it.
5. Only 14% of publishers consider themselves ahead of the industry on DTC. 62% say they're behind. The adoption curve is heavily skewed — this isn't a normal distribution. The race has already started, and most of the field is watching from the back.
The interview
You started building Appcharge before the Epic vs. Apple ruling changed everything. What were you seeing that made this look like a real opportunity?
As an economics student, macroeconomics 101 — monopolies are the worst outcome in any capitalistic market. A 30% cut was always unreasonable. That was obvious to me from the start.
But there were real signals on top of the conviction. The Epic Games trial was laying out the evidence. Playtika had already been pioneering direct-to-consumer sales for nearly a decade — and succeeding. Their DTC wallet share was already running at 30–40%. That's not a pilot. That's a proven model.
The regulatory environment was also moving in one direction. iOS 14 changed the UA economics overnight — targeting became harder, costs went up, and the return on app store dependency looked worse every quarter. I was very certain these forces were going to converge. The ruling accelerated the timeline, but the destination was already clear.
The report found a 7x revenue gap between Innovators and Late Adopters. Is that gap surprising to you?
Not at all. You see this pattern everywhere in technology. The pioneers who move early and commit fully have the steepest learning curve — and their progress compounds. They're not just ahead on revenue. They're ahead on knowledge, infrastructure, data, and organizational capability. All of it.
What I do think will change is the size of the gap going forward. Companies like Appcharge exist specifically to narrow it. The studios at the back of the curve don't need to rebuild everything the leaders built — they can partner with infrastructure providers who've already solved the hard problems. Most of this will get outsourced. That's the natural endpoint.
You talk to publishers every day. What do they actually care about that doesn't show up in a public survey?
It depends on where they are — both geographically and in their company's lifecycle.
In the East, pricing [of third party vendors] dominates the conversation. I find this misplaced, because if your DTC wallet share is small, the fee rate barely moves the needle. The bigger lever is growing the channel, not negotiating the rate.
For smaller studios, the dominant concern is friction — integration complexity, internal bandwidth, how much this will demand of the team. Every publisher wants low touch. But for smaller ones, it's an existential constraint. They simply don't have the headcount to absorb a complicated implementation.
For enterprise clients, it's about feature parity. They want the DTC experience to match what they have in-game — the same offers, the same economy, the same feel. The technical bar is high, and rightly so. These publishers have built sophisticated in-game monetization systems and they're not going to replace them with something inferior.
Where do publishers still hesitate, even ones who've already bought into DTC?
I'd push back on the framing slightly. Three years ago there were holdouts. Today, I don't know a single publisher that isn't bought in on DTC as a concept.
The hesitation now is operational, not ideological. Regulatory uncertainty is real — what's happening with Google's ECL program creates genuine unpredictability around creative approvals. That slows momentum.
But the bigger blocker is internal. DTC isn't a one-department decision. It cuts across product, payments, customer success, finance, legal. You need leadership sponsoring it at the top and pushing it across the organization. When there's a management change — a new CPO, a new CEO — DTC projects stall. Not because anyone opposes it, but because you need someone in the room with the authority and the intent to keep it on the roadmap. I've seen this happen. It's frustrating, but it's real.
The report shows a stark divide in DTC staffing — 54% of studios have zero dedicated employees, while Innovators have a median of 14. But you have a nuance on that number.
I do. The 14 figure likely reflects enterprise studios that chose to build a significant portion of their DTC capability in-house. That's one approach, and it made sense for some of them given when they started and what was available at the time.
But I don't think 14 is the right benchmark for the industry going forward — particularly in an era where AI is expanding what small teams can do. If you're fully working with Appcharge, you don't need 14 people. You need two or three dedicated people who understand the channel and can coordinate across the organization. Many departments will contribute time — product, customer success, monetization — but the dedicated headcount is smaller than that number implies.
The real point isn't the number. It's more about the commitment. The studios performing worst on DTC are the ones who assigned nobody to it and expected the channel to deliver anyway.
What does a winning DTC operation actually look like, day-to-day?
There are a few things that are consistent across the publishers doing this well.
First, there's an owner. One person who reports to a C-level and is accountable for DTC as a function — not as a project that sits across multiple teams with no clear home.
Second, DTC is embedded in the business operating system. It's on the roadmap. It's in the budget. It's in the revenue projections. There are annual targets and KPIs. It's not being evaluated quarter by quarter on whether it "deserves" more investment — it's treated as a core channel.
Third, the incentive structure is right. The monetization team, the AMs, customer success — they're incentivized by the success of DTC, not just by app store performance. When the people closest to the player relationship have a stake in DTC growth, the whole organization pulls in the same direction.
And fourth, there's real resource allocation. Not necessarily large headcount — but dedicated time from the people whose decisions actually shape the player experience. Development, product, customer success. DTC touches all of them.
On the infrastructure side — where do you think DTC payment infrastructure is heading?
Merchant of record is the model. Full stop.
This is what Apple and Google were doing for developers all along — handling payments, fraud, tax, compliance, global currencies, chargebacks. Developers didn't have to think about any of it. The app store handled it and took 30% for the privilege. The merchant of record model replaces that infrastructure without the 30%.
FinOps is genuinely heavy. The moment you take payments out of the app store, you inherit everything the platform used to handle. Authorization logic. Token management. Dispute handling across dozens of markets. Tax and VAT across territories. Most studios have never built any of this, because they never had to. The PSP model asks them to handle most of it themselves, then charges separately for the pieces they can't. The MoR model wraps it all in one relationship.
I understand now, more than ever, that this model isn't just right for mobile games — it's the right model for AI apps, for SaaS, for e-commerce. Any high-velocity consumer business with global users and complex tax implications. The DTC shift in gaming is the first proof point. The rest of the app economy will follow the same logic.
What's your read on the growing competition between Payment Service Providers (PSPs)?
We're a merchant of record, not a PSP. We work with PSPs — we're upstream of that layer. So a PSP price war doesn't directly affect the model we operate.
But here's what I'd say about PSPs generally: they're excellent at marketing their rate card. "2.9 plus X cents" sounds simple. What it doesn't show you is the full picture — fraud prevention, dispute costs, chargebacks, subscription billing fees, tax infrastructure, global coverage gaps. Developers who integrate a PSP often only understand the real cost after they've done it. That's when the comparison with a merchant of record becomes honest. And when the comparison is honest, we're competitive on price, simpler to operate, and better on bottom line performance.
Price competition at the infrastructure layer will happen. But the studios that build DTC seriously won't choose their payment infrastructure on rate alone. They'll choose it on what it costs them in total — time, money, risk, and reliability.
The report argues that gaming is the proving ground for the rest of the app economy. How far along do you think consumer apps actually are?
It's already happening — more than most people realize.
The Apple-Google tax hits consumer apps just as hard as it hits games. And you're already seeing smart operators find their way around it. The pattern is UA campaigns that deliver an almost complete experience on the web — and convert the user there, on a subscription, before ever touching the app. Spotify built this model. It works.
What's different about gaming is the complexity. High-frequency micro-transactions, virtual economies, global player bases, real-time LiveOps — games are the hardest version of this problem. If DTC infrastructure can work at scale in gaming, it can work anywhere.
Appcharge's debut in the consumer apps space is planned for next year. We're building for it now. The mobile gaming playbook is transferable — and the market waiting on the other side is enormous.
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The full GDC x Appcharge report — Direct-to-Consumer is Already a $17 billion Market for Mobile Gaming — is based on a survey of 1,200+ game industry professionals conducted January–February 2026. Read it in full →
Maor Sason is CEO and co-founder of Appcharge, the leading direct-to-consumer platform for mobile games. Appcharge powers stores for over one-third of the top-grossing mobile games.
