Neon, a commerce infrastructure startup for video game publishers, announced on July 22 a Series A round of $13 million to expand its direct-to-consumer web stores, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Renegade Partners, and video game studio Krafton as a strategic investor, according to GamesBeat.
Founded in 2022 and led by its CEO Chris Faught, Neon provides video game publishers with a tech infrastructure that integrates web stores, payment processing, tax and fraud management, and loyalty programs directly within their own ecosystem, without relying on third-party distribution platforms such as mobile app stores or consoles. With this round, the total capital raised by the company since its founding amounts to $27 million.
Neon reported that its gross merchandise volume has multiplied more than tenfold over the past two years, a growth that the company attributes to the increasing pressure that video game publishers face to reduce their dependence on the commissions charged by app stores and console platforms for each digital transaction.
The background of this trend is the long-standing dispute between video game developers and the major app stores over the commissions these charge for in-app transactions, a conflict that has already led to lawsuits and regulatory changes in various markets, and which has pushed several publishers to build direct sales channels that do not rely on those commissions.
Some of the studios we work with today generate between 50 and 70 percent of their gross revenue through their direct channel,Faught pointed out.
For ecommerce and digital entertainment companies in Latin America, the case of Neon confirms that the direct-to-consumer commerce infrastructure, already consolidated in sectors like fashion and physical retail, now finds specific demand within the video game industry, a market with its own payment and loyalty dynamics that still relied almost entirely on external intermediaries.
From the perspective of next+, Krafton's investment in Neon confirms that video game publishers themselves are no longer content with relying on app stores to monetize their players, and are willing to invest directly in the commerce infrastructure that allows them to capture that customer relationship without giving up a commission to an intermediary.