Chris Hewish, President of Xsolla – Interview Series

Chris Hewish is President of Xsolla, bringing more than 30 years of experience across game development, studio leadership, and the business of interactive entertainment. His career includes leadership roles at Activision, DreamWorks Animation, Survios, and Skydance, and involvement in designing or producing more than 50 console, PC, mobile, and VR games. That background spans both the creative work of making games and the operational challenges of bringing them to market. He is the author of Durable Advantage: Five Pillars of the Modern Game Business and hosts The Business of Games podcast, exploring how studios build lasting businesses and stronger relationships with players.

Xsolla is a global video game commerce company that provides tools and services to help developers fund, distribute, market, and monetize their games. Its platform supports studios ranging from independent teams to major publishers, with payment solutions, web shops, player login, catalogs, and other infrastructure for direct commerce. The company also develops tools for building and validating commerce integrations, including its AI Toolkit, which works with AI coding assistants in developers’ existing workflows. Xsolla’s work addresses the business systems around a game, helping teams reach players across markets, support local payment preferences, and manage the infrastructure behind ongoing player relationships.

What changes in the business of making and selling games feel most significant to you right now?

The biggest change is what a game actually is as a business. For most of gaming’s history, you sold through a gatekeeper, a retail shelf or an app store, and the sale essentially ended your relationship with the player. Today the biggest games run as living businesses for years. The game isn’t the whole business anymore. It’s the foundation.

I saw an early version of this at Activision, where I started embedding marketing teams directly with development teams so the player’s voice was at the table from the start. Distribution has changed too. It’s becoming account-centric rather than device-centric, and players now expect cross-play, cross-save, and shared progression on day one.

I learned why this matters the hard way. I shipped a mobile game that passed 100 million downloads in months and still watched it collapse once promotion stopped, because the business never owned its relationship with those players. The downloads were real. The durable business was not.

Where is AI already creating meaningful improvements in game development, and where is the industry getting ahead of itself?

Used properly, AI is a force multiplier, not a replacement. It’s already taking repetitive work off developers’ plates and freeing them to focus on what they’re passionate about: creativity. It also cuts one of development’s biggest time sinks: testing lots of different ideas. Studios won’t double their team sizes, but a team that works well with AI can multiply its output several times over.

We’ve gotten ahead of ourselves with overconfidence. Some believe a few minutes of prompting makes anyone creative. There’s also a temptation to ship at 80 percent of the fidelity players used to get because it’s “good enough.” If that happens, I hope the market punishes it. The right goal is to use AI to build at 120 percent: richer worlds, more detail, and ideas we simply couldn’t have built before.

What did building the AI Toolkit teach you about the gap between AI-generated code that looks correct and software that is actually ready for production?

Developers using AI coding tools to integrate Xsolla kept hitting the same wall: the code looked right but failed in production. These tools write syntactically correct code, but they don’t understand a platform’s specific integration constraints. In commerce, that gap means broken implementations, production failures, and long debugging cycles that eat sprint capacity.

The biggest lesson was that you have to validate the whole path, not just isolated API calls, including edge cases, not just the happy path. Correctness also has to come from the people who actually build the APIs, so it stays current as the platform evolves. And developers have to stay in control, able to review exactly what they’re shipping before it goes live. Get that right, and developers go from weeks of reading documentation and debugging to an hours-long, guided build, and they get it right far more often on the first try.

How does your concept of “structured play” help studios preserve quality and player perspective as development cycles accelerate?

Speed only matters if what you ship is right. Across my career, the healthiest projects I’ve worked on used a strong greenlight process as a gate for each phase, so teams didn’t get derailed by endless iteration or lose sight of clear objectives.

AI makes it much easier to move fast, so someone has to own the player’s experience from beginning to end. That’s what structure gives you: clear gates, clear objectives and the player’s perspective built into every phase. Moving faster should never mean losing sight of who you’re building for.

Do you think AI meaningfully changes the balance between smaller studios and large publishers, and which advantages can indie developers realistically gain?

Yes. The biggest impact is on who can compete. AI levels the playing field by scaling what smaller teams can achieve, and it supports the shift toward “forever games” by making ongoing content production more cost-effective.

I have folders full of design ideas, more than I could ever execute. There are many designers with even better ideas sitting on the shelf because they don’t have the team or the resources to bring them to market. AI can help test those ideas and get them into the world, which would be a boon for gaming.

The bigger point is that the infrastructure for owning your business is now available to everyone. Owned identity, direct commerce, and behavioral data are within reach for studios of every size. The barrier today is less about technology and more about knowledge. Warframe is my favorite example. Digital Extremes self-published it in 2013 and built its relationship with players directly from day one, and more than a decade later it’s still going strong.

From discovery and distribution to payments and monetization, which parts of the games business do you expect AI to disrupt most over the next few years?

Discovery is near the top of my list. Getting your game noticed is one of the industry’s biggest problems. Imagine if each of us had our own AI agent that understood our tastes, looked at every game being released, even played a little, then came back with recommendations. That’s a real shift in how players find games.

Quality assurance is another. AI-driven testing will change how quickly teams identify bugs and balance gameplay. We’re also already seeing AI change how studios build commerce integrations, which is why we built our AI Toolkit.

On growth, user acquisition can become far more measurable, tied to the player rather than the device. And payments will keep fragmenting as regional preferences and regulations evolve. In some regions, 10 to 40 percent of players can’t transact when platform payments are the only option. The developers who meet players where they pay will win.

How should studios decide where AI belongs in the development process without undermining the authenticity players expect?

Start from the principle that AI is a productivity enhancer, not a replacement for creative vision. Use it to go further and deeper, not to cut corners. That means keeping human oversight, investing in AI literacy so creatives know how to direct the tools, and setting standards that put human ingenuity first.

Transparency matters too. Much of the fear around AI comes from people not understanding how it’s used. The industry needs clear norms around attribution and how creative work is used.

Ultimately, players will judge the result. Trust isn’t a feeling players have about you. It’s a track record you build one decision at a time, and players update it constantly. If AI makes a game feel lower effort, that track record suffers. If it lets a team deliver more than it ever could before, players will reward it.

After the previous wave of Web3 gaming, what lessons did the industry learn about introducing blockchain technology without making the technology itself the focus of the game?

First, we have to be honest about why the first wave failed. Early blockchain games led with financial mechanics and treated gameplay as secondary. That’s backward, and players saw through it immediately. Many of those projects also tried to build infrastructure and entirely new platforms at the same time, while asking players to change their behavior.

The lesson is to start with the game. Forget trying to build a “Web3 game.” Any new technology should fit into the games people already love and the way they already play. Players shouldn’t have to learn new tools or change their habits to enjoy a game. You play because the game is great, and the technology should support the experience, not stand in front of it.

What needs to happen before digital ownership becomes genuinely useful to mainstream players?

Right now, when a player buys a skin, unlocks a rare item, or builds an inventory over years of play, they don’t really own it. It’s a license, and a revocable one. If servers shut down or terms change, that value can disappear.

For ownership to matter to mainstream players, the benefit has to be practical and obvious, without speculation or financial engineering. The good news is that players already care deeply about what they collect and build in the games they love. That’s the behavior worth respecting.

Regulation also has to catch up, and gaming needs a seat at the table when those rules are written.

Looking across AI, new payment models, digital ownership and changing distribution channels, what do you believe the most successful game studios will do differently over the next five years?

There are two kinds of game companies: renters and owners. Renters build good games, distribute through platforms they don’t control, and measure success by downloads and launch rankings. Owners govern their own player relationships, commerce, and data, and turn those advantages into value that compounds over time. The most successful studios will be owners.

In practice, that means three things. They’ll layer business models, including premium, subscription, bundles, and seasonal value, matched to different player segments rather than betting on one. They’ll prioritize reach before extraction by supporting the local payment methods players actually use. And above all, they’ll treat trust as something earned one decision at a time, treating players as long-term partners, not just customers.

The common thread is that competitive advantage is moving from whoever has the most technology to whoever has the strongest architecture. The next generation of successful game companies will be defined not only by game quality, but by the strength of the business systems that support it.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more about AI-assisted game development, direct commerce, and building lasting player relationships should visit Xsolla.