The category-defining Creator Program platform for gaming publishers experienced a huge relief in resources and time spent managing international payments and anti-fraud.
“We didn’t want to handle being a merchant of record anymore. Over time, we moved to different payments options as different needs came up, but it was always a hassle. That was just not a world we wanted to be in; that wasn’t our strength. We really needed a merchant of record service that covered PayPal and card payments, anti-fraud, and international sales taxes — all in one place, all in one UI, that was easy to use. FastSpring fit that bill.”
Zak Steltz, Co-Founder and Director of Product
Nexus is the leading platform for building holistic Support-a-Creator programs to serve live service PC, console, and mobile video games. Their mission is to make it easy for game devs to build and manage a world-class creator program, which can drive significant growth in conversion ARPPU, retention, and LTV. Their Support-a-Creator Program is a creator code system that allows game developers and publishers to reward and pay content creators for promoting their games and driving sales.
Nexus was founded by three friends who met while working at a gaming media company. After years of working closely with content creators and seeing how much momentum major publishers unlocked with creator codes, they noticed a gap in how most studios were supporting and rewarding creators. What stood out wasn’t just the visibility creators brought, but the measurable impact: higher conversion, stronger retention, increased ARPPU, and deeper player engagement. Creators weren’t just marketing channels; they were driving real business outcomes. So they set out to build a platform-agnostic solution that any game publisher or developer can use to reward creators for the content they’re already making and the sales they’re already driving, turning creator activity into a consistent, scalable growth engine.
As the Nexus platform succeeded and grew, those same founders found out firsthand that they did not want to maintain their own payments, taxes, and compliance systems as the merchant of record (MoR).
The Nexus team had never run their own “bare metal” full payment processing stack — they always used companies such as Stripe, PayPal, and Braintree, moving between payments platforms to cover whatever payments features they needed as the needs arose. This was always a hassle, first because their team was remote, but especially because they began selling their product in many different states, which created different sales tax nexuses that were also constantly changing as laws changed.
According to Co-Founder and Director of Product Zak Steltz:
“Tax compliance was becoming a real operational burden. Between changing U.S. nexus rules and international requirements, there was more complexity than we wanted to manage internally. Even with experienced tax compliance partners involved, it was still pulling our team into work that wasn’t core to our business. FastSpring helped us simplify that side of things.”
Having to deal with all the legal and tax compliance of selling into other states and countries became the first reason the team at Nexus wanted to find a better solution.
International legal and tax compliance was becoming a huge headache for everyone.
Back in 2016, when Nexus first started, the team chose to run payments through Stripe. Over time, they ran into a practical issue: Stripe didn’t integrate smoothly with PayPal.
Even though the founders weren’t heavy PayPal users themselves, it quickly became clear that a large part of the gaming community preferred it. That pushed them to expand and diversify payment options to better match how gamers prefer to shop.
(Ten years later, whether from a customer standpoint or a developer standpoint, the Nexus team still hasn’t had good experiences with PayPal, especially when managing fraud — more on that below.)
To sell internationally, the Nexus team also wanted to ensure they had enough payment types and currencies available for international buyers without having to deal with bank transfers, so they switched to Braintree, which was later purchased by PayPal. That at least allowed them to have card payments and PayPal wallet payments all in one nice checkout experience.
Managing all of this added up to the Nexus team spending around 10%-20% of their engineering time on just managing their payment processor(s).
But then there was the issue of anti-fraud tooling in the gaming space. The sale of digital goods involves a certain level of risk, but being in the gaming category increases that risk further. The Nexus team was spending an estimated 10% of their total work time just dealing with fraud concerns, including creating their own custom risk rules.
PayPal was a “black box” when it came to fraud concerns, leaving the Nexus team totally in the dark when it came to figuring out what the problems specifically were — they had no insights, no signals to look at, no rules to tweak, and trying to contact PayPal “was like talking to a brick wall.” This often left them with no choice but to turn off PayPal for a short period of time until a particularly bad fraud wave passed.
“We’d go through periods where we didn’t have to think about fraud much, and then we’d go through periods where it was the primary concern of the company to stop the fraud that was happening.”
Between card payments, anti-fraud, and international sales taxes, Nexus resources were being taken up by a lot of needs that weren’t their top priority: creating a platform that makes it easy for game devs to build and manage a world-class creator program.
“So that’s when we started to look for a solution to resolve this — how could we not be in that world? And that’s when merchant of record services and FastSpring came up.”
To get the burden of managing international payments, the right variety of payment methods, international VAT and sales taxes, and fraud and risk concerns off of their own list and onto someone else’s, the Nexus team knew they needed an experienced, trusted merchant of record like FastSpring.
FastSpring was an easy option to consider in the first place because of its reputation as a leader in the merchant of record space, including managing international payments, VAT and sales taxes, anti-fraud and compliance, and even consumer support.
Additionally, once the Nexus team realized that the answer to their complex needs was an MoR, one of their biggest concerns was finding a payments partner that could work with them on all their specific fraud requirements. Since they had spent so much time and energy building out many custom risk rules to suit their payments needs, they didn’t want to completely start over with a new payments vendor.
Because FastSpring maintains a best-in-class custom fraud prevention model for gaming, the Nexus team was relieved to find out FastSpring was able to implement custom fraud rules. This meant the Nexus team could hand off their own list of custom rules to FastSpring and have them implemented — and they wouldn’t lose any of the effort of all that previous work or the effects of their own custom rules.
“When we met and started talking about anti-fraud, FastSpring’s answers were ‘best in breed.’”
After switching to FastSpring, the Nexus team saw significant relief from dealing with payments struggles.
For one, the estimated 10%-20% of engineering time they spent managing payments was reduced to single digits.
For another, the estimated 10% of their total company work time spent on fraud management was reduced to around 0%!
Now when they have any concerns about fraud — which is much rarer than it used to be — they can reach out to their FastSpring support team to have FastSpring handle it for them.
According to Zak:
“Since then, if we’ve run into any fraud issues — which have been very few and far between — it’s been as simple as us just saying, ‘Hey FastSpring, we noticed this fraud come in. Looking at our rule set, we think that if you tweak this a little bit, that might help.’ And we’ve been able to send that over, and everything’s been handled.”
Nexus COO Jack Inscoe adds:
“We now spend nearly zero time dealing with fraud. FastSpring support makes it easy to track down and investigate issues through our support process, and we don’t need to be on high alert at all times.”
Are you looking for a merchant of record that will partner with you to stay compliant while growing your business internationally? FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for video games, SaaS, software, and other digital goods businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself. To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg/.
Nexus is more than just a customer of FastSpring — they’re also a partner! Check out how FastSpring partners with Nexus to help game publishers and developers get the web stores they need to monetize games directly to players.
Buyer Support
Seller Support
