Own Your Players, Don't Rent Them — D2C, Creator Codes & the Shadow Server Economy | Liam Wiltshire, GM of Tebex — GameMakers

Epic spent five years and over $100M breaking the platforms' 30% tax — then cut V-Bucks by 20% to "pay the bills." If the company that won the fee war still gets squeezed, what does that say about everyone else?

The answer isn't about fees. When AI makes content infinite and attention stays finite, the only asset that appreciates is the direct relationship with your players — the one distribution channel that gets cheaper the stronger it gets. And a nearly invisible economy of community-run game servers has been proving its dollar value for fifteen years.

I sit down with Liam Wiltshire, GM of Tebex — the merchant-of-record platform behind direct payments for Rockstar, Take-Two, Hytale, and FiveM — to unpack it.

In this episode:

Why "is 30% dead?" is the wrong question
Creator codes: how trust drives 50–227% more spend
The BNPL and crypto data that surprised even Tebex
Why 35% of desktop game purchases happen on a phone
How Hytale launched off Steam and secured two years of runway from pre-orders alone
The £20, 16-year-old origin story behind a company that's processed $1.5B

Read the full breakdown and subscribe at gamemakers.com.

Chapters
00:00 — Epic cut V-Bucks: why it's really a margin story
03:47 — When content is infinite, what's actually scarce?
07:38 — The shadow games industry: Hypixel, FiveM & a $1.5B economy
10:13 — The data: creator codes, BNPL & buying on a second screen
13:33 — Liam Wiltshire joins: the state of the industry
16:35 — Why every player purchase is a "CapEx decision"
18:50 — Is the 30% platform fee dead?
21:00 — Who really owns the player relationship?
23:27 — D2C across mobile, web, PC & console
34:59 — Treating the platform as an acquisition channel
42:57 — UGC servers & what a "merchant of record" actually does
1:00:40 — Creator codes: how trust drives more spend
1:19:04 — BNPL & crypto: the numbers that surprised Tebex
1:31:20 — Payment optimization & one-click checkout
1:40:43 — The £20 origin story & the $29M exit