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Xsolla is a leading merchant of record (MoR) payment provider that serves the video game industry. The platform includes a broad feature set that provides game developers with the infrastructure needed to sell online and accept payments globally. You can read more about Xsolla’s features and benefits on their website, but if you’re looking for additional choices to consider for the best payment provider for you, we hope you find this article helpful.

In this guide, we share four Xsolla competitors, starting with an in-depth look at our solution, FastSpring. 

Xsolla alternatives in this list:

Are you shopping for competitors of Xsolla that can help you expand your video game monetization strategy? FastSpring is an experienced merchant of record that provides an all-in-one payment platform for video games, SaaS, software, and other digital products businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and player payments support. Learn more about FastSpring for video games.

FastSpring

FastSpring is an MoR and D2C payment platform for video games and in-game purchases that’s  similar to Xsolla. Our solution enables game publishers to collect direct-to-consumer payments for your video games and in-game purchases, embed payments in your game or on your webshop,  and enjoy many of the benefits of selling on a game marketplace for a fraction of the cost.

Video game publishers that work with FastSpring can instantly accept localized D2C payments from across the globe, with gaming-specific fraud protection and support for the top payment methods in 200+ regions and 21+ languages. Our solution not only gives you global reach on payments, but it also automatically handles sales tax and VAT compliance for you, including calculating, collecting, paying, filing, and audits from global tax authorities. 

Beyond payment processing, FastSpring also helps you create a seamless checkout flow with customizable checkout experiences in game and on your website, ensuring player experience is consistent and easy across multiple touchpoints.

FastSpring’s Advantages for Monetizing Your Video Games

The biggest advantage to working with FastSpring is our experience. We’ve been an MoR for nearly two decades, and we have a long history of working with video game companies. We’re also committed to working in partnership with game developers to help you grow.

For example, we worked hand-in-hand with Out of the Park Developments to localize checkout for their benchmark game in South Korea — a change that helped them grow sales in the region by 4x.

“We have been delighted with everything about FastSpring — from the robust platform to the helpful customer service that supports our company growth goals.”

Richard Grisham, CMO + COO, Out of the Park
Developments (makers of OOTP Baseball)

FastSpring gets gaming.

FastSpring is trusted by video game companies from around the world, from smaller publishers like DITOGAMES to major brands like Rovio. 

FastSpring was founded in 2005 to enable D2C payments for downloadable software, PC games, premium mods, and digital products. Today, our platform delivers extensive payments infrastructure with local payment methods around the world, a highly-optimized video game risk model, easily embeddable components for your webstore, specialized data signals to help your whales transaction seamlessly, and developer-first APIs/webhooks to support your live service systems and in-game entitlements. 

Our extensive video game experience and capabilities combined helps make FastSpring an MoR that gets gaming.

FastSpring is a provider you can trust.

Originally founded in Santa Barbara, California, FastSpring has continued to expand globally, including two offices in the U.S. and additional offices in Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, and Singapore. Our global presence means we’re always here when you need us, and our strict adherence to compliance regulations and sanctions means you can rest easy knowing that such a critical part of your business is in safe hands.

FastSpring is a profitable company with plenty of proceeds available to support our business, and we’re backed by top-performing and highly reputable investment firm Accel-KKR. FastSpring has the resources to help you scale and the excellent corporate, privacy, and security governance to give you peace of mind.

FastSpring provides amazing support for you and your players.

If you need assistance, our award-winning customer support team is always happy to provide hands-on help — whether that’s for setting up initial integrations, ongoing maintenance, extra support for your whales, or localizing your checkout for a new region — and we’re always working to improve the customer experience. Our new AI-assisted documentation, for example, makes it easier than ever to get the help you need when you need it, or you can work with a real human at any time to help you troubleshoot and find a resolution to more complex questions.

Additionally, FastSpring provides friendly and direct support for your players who have payment issues related to their purchase experience. This means your team doesn’t have to provide that support, saving you time and helping your players get the right help faster.

FastSpring delivers outstanding approval rates and advanced gaming-specific fraud protection.

FastSpring’s platform boasts higher-than-average approval rates for payment providers, likely higher than you can achieve on your own. This is thanks to the trust FastSpring has established with global payment processors and smart payment routing that routes FastSpring’s transactions between multiple payment processors based on the best approval rates, types of transactions, and regions in which transactions are processed. FastSpring’s multi-homed payment processing approach helps you achieve better processor uptime and approval rates globally than using a single payment processor like Stripe alone.

Our advanced and gaming-specific fraud protection and risk management features are built specifically for video games and the types of transaction fraud game developers are likely to encounter.

Any patterns in risky behavior, for example, are learned and applied across all our video game customers, and specific fraud rules can be applied just for your games. So if a nefarious transaction or buyer gets flagged by one customer, the flag applies to every video game customer of FastSpring, helping to proactively prevent chargebacks and loss of revenue.

Additionally, we give you the ability to dynamically flag players as safe (e.g. whales) or not trusted (e.g. new players), which we can use to make our fraud rules more or less strict.

Our multi-homed processor platform combined with advanced video game specific fraud protection helps make your player experience great and helps you deliver a great big GAME OVER to your payment cheaters.

Learn more about FastSpring for video games.

3 Additional Xsolla Competitors

Stripe

Screenshot of Xsolla competitor Stripe's home page, a diagonal colorful gradient with screenshots of their apps.

Stripe is a well-known DIY payment processor that enables businesses to accept credit cards, debit cards, and mobile payments. However, it’s important to note that Stripe is not an MoR. This allows Stripe to offer base pricing that’s lower than the managed services a merchant of record provides, because many of the tax compliance vendors, fraud management, and tax management time that are needed for you to be compliant internationally are not included. This means you’ll have to pay for all of those vendors and dedicate all that time yourself. 

For many organizations, the fees from additional vendors, accounting team time, tax consultants, and development team time to build and maintain complex integrations across multiple systems with Stripe has a total cost of ownership higher than that of a merchant of record like Xsolla or FastSpring. That said, the most common reason to go with a merchant of record rather than DIY payment providers like Stripe, is lost opportunity time. If your game development-centric engineering organization is distracted with back office financial systems and compliance as required with a DIY Stripe integration, they’re less focused on making your games better.

Go with Stripe if you’re looking to shave a couple of points off your transaction costs vs. an MoR — and if you feel you have the scale, available focus time, expertise, and efficiency in your engineering and finance teams to integrate and manage global payments and tax compliance on your own.

Coda Payments

Screenshot of Xsolla competitor Coda Payments' home page, mostly purple with a diagonal yellow stripe and overlaid with images of cell phones showing their app.

Coda Payments is a Singapore-headquartered competitor to Xsolla that enables video game companies to accept payments globally. Depending on the package customers choose, Coda Payments may or may not act as the MoR.

The company’s Codapay product competes most directly with Xsolla, offering embedded payment experiences to a publisher’s webshop or in-game experience, or use of Coda’s webshop. 

Appcharge

A screenshot of Xsolla competitor Appcharge's home page, mostly white with purple grid pattern showing screenshots of their app.

Appcharge is a merchant of record that has features similar to those of other merchants of record like Xsolla or FastSpring.

Newly formed Appcharge was launched in 2022, and as of the date of writing, it has a website that features a home page and only two other sections: their documentation, and a blog. As a gaming-focused merchant of record, this is one to keep an eye on and may be worth a try if you’d like the influence of being one of the first customers and are okay with some possible growing pains as Appcharge ramps up as a new payment provider. 

The Choice to Power Your D2C Is Yours

We’d love the chance for FastSpring to earn your business, but we know the choice is yours. As you continue your research for Xsolla alternatives, we hope you find these suggestions helpful, and we wish you all the best in making the right choice for you.

If you’d like more information about FastSpring, you can schedule a demo with one of our video game monetization specialists to explore pricing, answer questions, and get more details on the many great benefits of FastSpring.

We hope you make the best choice for you!

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gaming gaming industry mobile gaming payment gateway payment processing