Welcome to Game Biz Institute

Starting this week, you'll have access to a new resource on xsolla.com: Game Biz Institute (GBI). This is where you'll find deep-dive knowledge and interviews about the parts of the industry nobody teaches, the parts you're often expected just to 'figure out' on your own.

You can study game design at a hundred universities. Engines, pipelines, production, narrative: all of it has a curriculum. The business of games, the machinery that decides whether great work becomes a durable company, is still learned the old way. Expensively. Alone. Usually after it is too late to matter.

Not because the industry lacks data. There are benchmarks for every genre and dashboards that update hourly. A benchmark can tell you retention in your genre is down four points, but it can't tell you what to do about it on Monday morning. Data is abundant. Judgment is scarce. That's what GBI gives you.

How it works

Every article here follows one rule. A named voice in a chosen field, someone who has actually done the thing, signs every piece. Some articles pair an outside practitioner or academic with an Xsolla expert who sees the same question from the infrastructure side, across the 1,500+ game teams whose commerce runs on our rails. Others come straight from the Xsolla team itself. Either way, no anonymous insight, no wisdom laundered through a brand account.

That bar produced a first wave worth your time. It opens with Skystone Games' Andrew Naicker on indie publishing in a market flooded with more than 21,000 new releases a year, already the most-read piece in the collection. Richard Bartle, who helped invent the virtual world, writes on virtual economies and why lasting worlds need purpose before monetization. Lexi Sydow maps the attention economy every game now competes inside.

Around them, more from the field: Machaiah Kalengada of GDAI on why India's gaming boom is just getting started, Gaggle Studios on staying lean while building the world's biggest social deduction game, ZiMAD on what 15 years of game partnerships teach you about player trust, Mark Caplan of Xsolla Agency on the IP licensing revenue studios leave on the table, and GAM3S.GG on how game discovery actually works, and fails, in 2026. And with SEGA, a look at how the publisher approaches player engagement in a game that has been running for 24 years.

Our promise to you

The people in these pages will disagree with each other. Some will disagree with us.

If you run a studio, own a P&L, lead growth, or take this industry seriously as a business, this was built for you. Start with Andrew Naicker on the 21,000-game problem, then read whatever question is keeping you up at night. And if you've done work the rest of the industry should learn from, the next byline could be yours.

Game Biz Institute is a publication by Xsolla on the commercial side of game development. Articles come from named practitioners in the gaming industry, researchers, and Xsolla experts, drawing on the 1,500+ game teams that run their commerce with Xsolla.