Direct-to-consumer web store adoption hits 96%

Direct-to-consumer web store adoption has reached a point where not having one is now the minority position. FastSpring and Omdia's Annual State of D2C Game Monetisation Survey, published this week, found 59% of game publishers and studios already operate a direct-to-consumer store, and of the 41% that do not, 91% plan to launch one, two-thirds of them within twelve months. Add those together and the vendors' 96% headline is a fair read of the data, even allowing for the fact that both organisations sell tools into exactly this market and have an obvious interest in a strong number.

The survey drew on 110 senior management and executive-level respondents collected between April and June 2026, which is a small and self-selecting sample for a figure this widely quoted, and the methodology section does not specify how those respondents were recruited. Treat the headline as directionally credible rather than a precise industry census. It is a different measure from the one we covered in Xsolla's Web Shop Ecosystem, which put direct-to-consumer revenue at roughly 15% of global mobile in-app purchase spend; this survey counts studios running a store, not the dollars flowing through it. What is more useful than the topline adoption number is the detail underneath it, because it tells you where your own web shop plan sits relative to peers who have already built one.

What changed in direct-to-consumer web store adoption since last year

D2C adoption itself only moved modestly, from 57% to 59% year on year. The bigger shift happened among the studios still on the fence: last year 60% of non-adopters said they planned to launch a store within twelve months, and that has risen to 67% this year. FastSpring's own framing is that "these legal outcomes are directly prompting swift action among cautious developers," and the survey backs that up with a specific figure: 93% of non-adopters say recent court decisions have made them more likely to adopt a web store, against only 6.7% who say the rulings changed nothing for them.

The rulings in question are the Epic v Apple and Epic v Google outcomes that opened external payment links on iOS and Android in the US and EU, plus similar movement in Japan and Brazil. The survey found 95% of existing D2C operators increased their investment after last year's Epic v Apple ruling, and 88% plan to increase investment again in 2026 following Google's decision earlier this year to reduce Play Store commissions, with 42% planning a significant increase, up from 33% a year ago.

Why studios still hesitate

The barriers have not disappeared, they have just shrunk. Technical complexity remains the top concern at 56%, though that is down sharply from 67% last year, which suggests the tooling problem is genuinely getting easier to solve rather than merely less top-of-mind. Concern about damaging the platform relationship with Apple or Google sits at 51%, and legal or regulatory uncertainty at 47%. Doubt about whether D2C can move the revenue needle at all has fallen from 49% of non-adopters last year to 38% this year, which is the clearest signal in the whole survey that the argument for web shops has shifted from speculative to proven inside the industry's own peer group.

For studios that have made the jump, the revenue contribution is not trivial. Operators report D2C channels generating between 10% and 29% of total revenue, with roughly a third of them at 20% or more, and 75% say that share grew over the past twelve months. Eighty-four percent are hitting or exceeding their 2025 D2C targets, 66% are exceeding them outright, and 65% have set higher targets again for 2026.

A readiness check against the benchmark

If your studio has not built a direct-to-consumer store, the survey's own numbers give you a rough scorecard to check yourself against before assuming you are behind or ahead of the curve:

• If you are not live and have no plan, you sit with a shrinking 9% of non-adopters who see no reason to launch, worth a real gut-check on whether that reasoning still holds given how the barrier numbers moved this year.
• If technical complexity is your stated blocker, note that it dropped 11 points as a concern industry-wide in a single year, which points to maturing off-the-shelf tooling rather than a problem unique to your stack.
• If your worry is platform relationship risk, weigh it against the fact that just over half of respondents share that concern and have still gone ahead and launched a store.
• If you already run a web shop generating under 10% of revenue, you are behind the third of operators clearing 20%, and the gap is worth investigating rather than treating as normal.
• Budget for investment growth, not just maintenance, since a plurality of existing operators are increasing spend behind their web shop again this year rather than holding flat.

Reading the vendor incentive honestly

FastSpring sells the infrastructure that many of these web shops run on, and Omdia's research arm works commercially with platform and payments vendors across the industry, so a survey commissioned and published by the two of them arguing that D2C adoption is nearly universal deserves the same scrutiny any other vendor-funded number gets. That is not a reason to dismiss the findings. The individual data points, the shift in non-adopter intent from 60% to 67%, the drop in technical-complexity concerns from 67% to 56%, the decline in revenue-scepticism from 49% to 38%, are all directional movements in the same plausible direction as the regulatory changes that opened external payments over the past eighteen months. A vendor with a commercial interest in a strong topline number can still publish an accurate survey, and the internal consistency of these figures, several independent metrics all moving the same way at similar magnitude, is more persuasive than the 96% headline on its own.

What this settles and what it does not

What this survey settles, at least directionally, is that D2C is no longer an edge case worth debating in principle. What it does not settle is execution quality: a store that exists is not the same as a store that converts, and the survey's revenue-share figures for underperforming operators suggest plenty of studios have launched a web shop without giving it the acquisition and creative support that would let it approach the 20% mark. The next competitive question for a UA team is not whether to have a web shop, since that argument is largely over, but whether the one you have is actually being resourced like a growth channel rather than treated as a fee-avoidance side project.

Related archive reading

These articles provide related context and remain subject to their stated review status.

• Web shops change the maths of paid UA
• Web shops are 15% of mobile IAP. Xsolla's ecosystem play and the D2C creative brief