What $1B in Mobile Game Transactions Reveals About Where Payments Actually Move Revenue
Let’s imagine we have 2 identical players - they both buy the same digital item (let’s say - 1,000 coins), on the same web store, using the same credit card. Is it possible that one of them gets a higher payment success rate than the other?
Well, it turns out that if you route the payment through a bank in the player's own country instead of cross-border, the approval rate rises 8.4 percentage points. If you process $10m in that country in a year - that’s $840,000 of revenue that could have been lost right there. That's the first of three findings from a year of DTC transactions across Appcharge's payments and Merchant of Record stack, more than $1 billion processed annually.
All three describe decisions most studios file under infrastructure: where a transaction gets acquired, which payment method sits on the checkout page, and whether Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) is one of them. All three move approval rates, retention, and order value more than the infrastructure label suggests.
The Power of Local Entities
An approval rate is the share of attempted payments a bank says yes to. Local acquiring routes that payment through a bank in the same country as the one that issued the player's card, rather than across a border. Doing that means building a licensed local entity there: its own banking relationships, tax registration, and ongoing compliance work, market by market. That's real legal and operational lift, which is exactly why most studios don't do it everywhere their players are.
Unsurprisingly, our research shows that payments that go through local entities get higher approval rates - and this ultimately means higher revenue for the publisher. The 8.4-point approval rate gap isn't a fluke of one market or one processor. Checked across 20 combinations of processing entities and payment methods with real volume, local acquiring wins in 17 of them.
Broken down by payment method, card entry gains the most from local routing, 9.4 points higher than cross-border routing. Google Pay gains 7.1, while Apple Pay gains just 3.6 over cross-border routing.
Break it down by card network, and a clearer mechanism shows up. Visa gains 8.1 points from local acquiring, and Mastercard 5.3 points. Visa and Mastercard carry the overwhelming majority of the volume we studied, so this isn't a technicality.
Network architecture drives it. Visa and Mastercard are four-party networks: the acquiring bank and the issuing bank are separate parties, and on a cross-border transaction, they sit in two different countries. That's precisely the signal an issuer's risk models are built to catch.
If your studio runs DTC payments through a vendor, or through your own in-house stack, a concrete question to check is: do you have enough local entities in the markets where your players actually are?
2. Why Local APMs Are Key: The Pix Case Study in Brazil
Brazil gives the cleanest test of whether a local payment method earns its keep, because Pix, Brazil's real-time bank transfer system, sits next to credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay on the same checkout page for the same players.
Across a cohort of close to 44,000 Brazilian players, Pix, Apple Pay, credit card, and Google Pay all land close to each other in reaching a second purchase, and Apple Pay is actually marginally ahead of Pix at that stage.
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 3rd and 4th purchases at a higher rate than those using credit cards, Google Pay and Apple Pay.
The mechanism is structural, not behavioral. Pix connects directly to a player's bank account, with no card issuer in the middle to add a decision point, a fraud check, or a decline. That's also why the gap widens instead of flattening the deeper you go: a player who already cleared that direct connection once keeps clearing it, while card-based methods reintroduce the same friction at every purchase.
If Brazil is one of your markets, the question worth asking is whether your vendor supports the direct, no-intermediary method that's standard in each of your top markets, the way Pix is standard in Brazil.
The Truth About BNPL
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.
The Pattern Underneath All Three
Acquiring geography, local payment methods, and payment flexibility for players each take real work to get right, and none of them look like priorities until you see what they cost you. The payment method at first purchase is, in fact, the earliest read on lifetime value a publisher can get.
The gains from each individually will be modest at first, but combined as a whole – that’s where we see publishers making major gains to their transaction success rates and ultimately, revenue.
This is also the ground our own Merchant of Record stack is built on. We run local entities across the markets that matter in mobile gaming and support numerous payment methods including BNPL. That combination is part of how partners get to a 96% Order Success Rate across their transactions - which translates to the highest DTC margins.
