Gaming today is big business, and not just for studios and publishers. Producing a video game involves a whole ecosystem of associated industries and talents, from animators to cinematographers to voice actors to coders to sound designers from around the world.
Then, there is getting a game to market. Compared to just a decade ago, more video games are distributed digitally on online marketplaces, while studios and publishers are turning to creators to promote their games instead of purely relying on advertisements.
When it comes to payments, this interconnected web of gaming studios, publishers, and creators can make it challenging for ecosystem players to pay and be paid seamlessly, securely, and importantly for creators – on time.
How should business-to-business (B2B) payments in gaming evolve for today’s gaming world?
eSports continues to accelerate
The increasing share of live service multiplayer games across all platforms, such as first-person shooters, battle royale games, and massive online battle arena (MOBA) games is creating a new industry – eSports.
It is not a passing fad: The eSports market in Asia is expected to cross half a billion players by 2029¹, and is especially popular in Mainland China and South Korea. In fact, eSports is now increasingly professionalised as eSports enterprises spring up to employ competitive eSports players and earn revenues through sponsorships, partnerships, merchandise, and tournament winnings.
Studios and publishers, especially those that create live-service games, regularly hold tournaments like the EA SPORTS Mobile Asia Series, which boost the profile and player base of their games. These tournaments are often organised and run across different countries and coordinated across a wide range of vendors, agencies, and talents, which can require more agile business-to-business payment solutions.
Game production is increasingly complex
Creating a game today is serious work, both in scale and diversity. Gaming devices, from consoles, PCs, to mobile phones, are much more powerful today and players now expect much more from the games they play.
In response, publishers and studios are massively increasing the production quality of their games, not just in terms of graphics but also artwork, storytelling, and voice acting. But they rarely have these capabilities in-house and prefer to work with third-party partners around the world to create better games cost-effectively. Indeed, the game outsourcing market is set to grow at a 9.2% CAGR to US$7.8 billion globally by 2032².
As larger production networks become the norm, studios and publishers must navigate a whirlwind array of vendor and partner payments. Many may find themselves spending more resources sorting out invoices, reconciling payments, and monitoring budgets, leaving less time to focus on their games.
The creator economy boom continues
Lastly, Asia Pacific accounts for most of the world’s video gamers³ and are the most engaged globally. Before buying or playing a game, they want to know how a game feels, what others are saying, and how their favourite creators think.
Put simply, creators do what advertising doesn’t by offering authentic first-hand guides, playthroughs, reviews, and targeted content that immerse potential players deeply and help them decide whether to purchase a game.
This is why studios and publishers often partner with creators to promote their games. Yet current payment systems can fall short of expectations. As micro businesses, creator incomes can be unpredictable, worsened by invoice systems that can take up to 90 days to process, or longer when cross-border hurdles impede payments to overseas creators.
Visa: Make B2B payment challenges a thing of the past
Let Visa transform your payments while you perfect your game. B2B payment solutions today often still run on manual processes, such as invoicing or payment reconciliation, or simply cannot pay the way partners and creators want today. With Visa, you can:
- Streamline business payments: Visa and our partners can help you to automate payments, simplify payment reconciliation, and offer embedded payments to your growing network of partners around the world. By saving you time and energy, it means more time to focus on creating your next great game.
- Pay and be paid almost instantly, with anyone: With Visa Direct, you can pay, track, and manage payments to esports and gaming key opinion leaders (KOLs), creators and marketing agencies at the tap of your finger. Connecting over 11 billion payment endpoints in over 195 countries and territories and integrated with more than 160 currencies, Visa Direct brings your game to the world with ease.