Something shifted in 2025, and gaming companies started backing themselves in a way that felt different from previous years.
Two things drove it. First, the evident success of companies like Supercell, who proved that owning your player relationship creates real value – for players and for the business alike. Second, the Epic vs. Apple ruling, which now allows studios to direct players to their own ecosystems without platform interference.
Together, those two developments have produced something the industry has been waiting for: realistic evidence and genuine opportunity, and the confidence that building your own ecosystem will actually pay off.
Level 1: the core investment in web stores
Many gaming companies now have their own web store and player ID, and the original case for building them was straightforward – lower commissions and access to first-party data. Both still matter.
But from a player value perspective, the picture is less flattering. Nobody wants another ID, and nobody wants to navigate to an external web store that feels disconnected from the game they love. What the industry has largely built so far is friction, and friction shows up clearly in the numbers: typically only 10 to 20 percent of players actually divert to your own services.
That's not a technology problem. It's a value problem, and it points to where the real work needs to happen.
Level 2: value for players is your ultimate ROI driver
The next step is extending the engagement players already have with your games toward the services you build around them, and that means moving up the maturity curve from basic web stores and ID solutions toward something more intelligent.
Creator programs can build a genuine link between gameplay and your store, while loyalty programs reward players for their engagement rather than just their spending. These aren't incremental improvements – each step up the maturity scale produces a meaningful leap in value, for players and for the business. The return on investment from data-rich, intelligent services is significantly larger than the initial investment in web store and ID infrastructure.
But capturing that return requires a shift in thinking. Stop thinking purely like a gaming company and start thinking like a retailer in how you present your offering, like an airline when you design for loyalty, or like a sports club when you want to engage a fanbase.
At Reaktor, we've done that work across all three. We work with major gaming companies including Epic and Supercell, retailers like Adidas and Zalando, sports organizations like Liverpool FC, and a dozen major airlines. That breadth matters because there is no one-size-fits-all solution in value creation – different markets, different game genres, and different player bases all require different approaches.
Level 3: AI in gaming is inevitable. Disengagement isn't.
There's no avoiding AI in 2026, and the healthy skepticism you hear in gaming circles is well-founded. The risk is real: years of careful work building player engagement can be undermined quickly if AI is rushed in without judgment, and all that investment in trust and connection goes to waste.
On the services side, AI is moving beyond support into marketing technology, recommendations, matchmaking, live operations, and intelligent player profiles – a meaningful shift that touches almost every part of the player experience. But navigating it well requires a conscious decision about what AI is actually for: quality and engagement, not shortcuts that erode the very thing players showed up for.
The broader conversation in 2026 is moving in the right direction, with less focus on infrastructure and technology for its own sake and more on the value we create for players and for the companies that serve them. That's the shift worth making, and the studios that get there first will have a real advantage.
