A game studio and an online casino look like opposite businesses, and on payments they are nearly the same one. Both take millions of small card payments from players who never appear in person, and both lose real money every time a bank refuses a legitimate charge. Casinos have spent years fighting that problem. Game publishers, newly in charge of their own checkout, are about to learn the same lessons the expensive way.
A Shared Payment Problem
The parallel is structural. A casino cashier and an in-game store both process high volumes of card-not-present transactions, often small, often repeated by the same player in a single session. Card issuers treat that pattern with suspicion, because it also describes card testing and fraud. The result is a higher decline rate than a typical online store sees, and a steady stream of good customers turned away at the moment they want to spend.
For a casino, a refused deposit is a lost bet. For a publisher, it is a lost sale of in-game currency or a battle pass. The mechanics behind the refusal are identical, and so are the fixes.
The Scale of In-Game Spending
The money at stake is large enough to make a percentage point matter. The video game industry took in about $183 billion in 2024, and small in-game purchases are the engine behind most of it. Mobile games alone took in $80.9 billion in in-app purchases that year, the first growth in the category since 2021. Across platforms the in-app purchase market reached $166.6 billion. On PC, microtransactions made up 58% of all gaming revenue at $24.4 billion, and on console they reached $13.9 billion. Microtransactions now account for roughly three-quarters of all online gaming revenue.
At that scale, payment performance is a revenue line of its own. A studio that loses 2% of purchases to avoidable declines is leaving tens of millions on the table across a hit title’s life.
The Real Cost of a Declined Charge
A strong card authorization rate is around 85%, which sounds healthy until the lost 15% is counted. Banks falsely decline a meaningful share of legitimate credit card orders, mistaking real buyers for fraud. For a merchant running 200,000 orders a month at a $50 average, a wrongful-decline rate in that range erases tens of thousands of good sales monthly and many millions a year.
The leverage works the other way too. Lifting an authorization rate by a single percentage point can add thousands of approved orders a month. For a large publisher, one point of approval is a measurable revenue gain that costs nothing in new players.
The Casino Payment Playbook
Casinos solved this first because they had to. A modern operator routes deposits through a hardened online casino payment gateway tuned for high-risk card traffic, paired with fraud screening, several acquiring banks, and constant decline analysis. The whole stack exists to push more good payments through without letting fraud in.
That combination is exactly what a game publisher running its own store now needs. The casino version is more mature only because the pressure arrived sooner.
Decline Recovery Tactics
Not every decline is final. Soft declines come from temporary causes like insufficient funds or a momentary issuer timeout, and they often succeed on a second attempt at a smarter time. Hard declines, from a closed account or a stolen card, should never be retried. Casinos learned to tell the two apart and to retry only what is worth retrying.
The other casino habit worth copying is routing. Sending a failed charge through a second acquiring bank can recover a payment the first one refused, and smart routing across providers has been shown to lift approval rates by as much as 10%. Network tokens and account updater services keep a saved card current when it expires or is reissued, which removes a whole class of avoidable declines. Cleaner traffic helps as well. Filtering out obvious fraud before it reaches the bank raises the share of genuine charges, and issuers reward a merchant whose traffic looks safe with higher approvals.
The Web Shop Shift
Publishers used to hand payments to Apple and Google and accept the 30% platform fee, which also meant they never saw the approval-rate problem directly. That has changed. After a 2025 ruling under United States antitrust law and parallel app-store reforms in Europe, developers can now send players to their own web shops and take payment directly. Roughly 72% of top-grossing mobile games already run one, and leading studios pull 25% to 50% of revenue through these channels.
Owning the checkout means owning the approval rate. A publisher that moves players to a web store to escape app store fees inherits every decline, every chargeback, and every fraud rule that the platforms used to absorb. Apple’s updated App Store rules now permit those outside links, and the platforms also handled compliance most studios never thought about, from regional tax to spending limits for minors. A studio that takes the checkout takes those duties too. The savings are real, around a 5% fee against the platforms’ 30%, but only if the new checkout actually approves the sale.
The Limits of the Comparison
The comparison has limits worth naming. Game publishers face a fraud type casinos see less of, the chargeback filed by a parent after a child spends on a console or phone without permission. That scenario is at the center of consumer protection complaints about games, and it is harder to fight than a stolen card, since the parent who disputes it genuinely owns the account. Publishers also issue far more refunds than casinos, since the platforms trained players to expect them, and a loose refund policy interacts with approval rates in ways a casino never had to model. The transferable lesson is the discipline of treating payments as a measured system. The specific rules each business writes will differ, because the players and the products differ.
The First Move for Publishers
The single most useful step a publisher can take is to start measuring authorization rate as a core metric, the way casinos already do. Track approvals across markets and card types, find where good sales are being refused, and treat each decline category as a fixable problem with its own root cause. The casino industry turned payment approval into a discipline because its margins forced the issue. Game publishers running their own stores now have the same incentive and a decade of casino practice to copy. Start with the number, and the rest follows.