Grand Theft Auto VI took eight to ten years to make, with a budget rumoured at close to $2bn, while the price of a game at retail has barely moved. So studios hand content creation to their own players, and those players want to get paid. Money used to flow only from gamers to the games developer, and now it has to flow back as well. And that makes now the moment for embedded finance in gaming.
In today's episode of the Embedded Finance Review podcast, I speak with Ben Cousens from ZBD. He came out of the games industry rather than fintech, starting as a game tester and moving into game production. When he met the ZBD team a few years ago he invested as a VC, led the seed round and the Series A, and eventually joined the company.
ZBD builds what it calls the money layer for games. Gamers open a payment account inside the game and get a virtual IBAN or a routing number with it. That account lets them take part in money flows the game could not support before. They can sell an item they own, a decorative skin on a weapon for example, to another player for game currency that converts instantly into real money, and the publisher can put its own branded debit card on top. Ben walks through what the full flow looks like inside a big title, and why ZBD went after its own licences rather than building on someone else's.
Key Takeaways:
- The players asked to be paid, comparing themselves to influencers on Instagram and promoters on YouTube, and many studios agreed.
- On Roblox the top ten creators are companies rather than teenagers: teams of 70 to 80 people making tens of millions in EBITDA a year, according to Ben.
- Player marketplaces are not new. EVE Online and RuneScape grew them decades ago, but regulation kept the value locked inside the game, because an open player-to-player economy is also a money laundering funnel.
- ZBD holds EMI and MiCA in the EU and money transmitter licences in the US, and partners elsewhere. The Lightning Network runs underneath for payments down to a thousandth of a cent, but the asset stays invisible: ZBD has never sold Bitcoin to players, and stablecoin demand in games is still zero.
- Roblox is working with Airwallex on embedded payouts and cards, which Ben reads as the first domino among the large publishers.