Twitch cofounder Justin Kan picked a good time to reveal his new webshop company Stash.
The firm breaks cover amid controversy over Apple’s interpretation of a US court ruling on in-app payments, and not long after Epic won its case against Google, which found that Google’s Play store and its billing system represents an illegal monopoly.
Cofounders Justin Kan, ex-Googler Dan Borstelmann and Zynga veteran Robin Chan had previously helped run web3 storefront Fractal, but have now switched focus to build Stash, a new webshop and payments service.
Kan pitches it as the ‘Shopify for games’, which will also, in time, host loyalty programs, dynamic pricing, sales and all of the other things you’d expect from a modern ecommerce outfit, all tailored to helping drive off-store mobile game IAPs.
“We talk to game companies in general, both in web3 and in traditional games, and this clear need emerged for Stash,” Kan tells us. “The biggest market in gaming is in-app purchases, but it’s gotten harder and harder for mobile game companies…the margins are super competitive and then after IDFA you no longer own your customer relationship.”
“And then you’ve seen the court rulings happening, the rulings in Japan, and what’s happening in Europe – I think it’s just pretty clear that, regulatorily, it’s going to open up for games companies to own their own direct customer relationship again by pushing people to interact on a webshop.”
The fee Stash takes on each transaction is still to be locked down, but Kan’s cofounder Dan Borstelmann tells us the Stash team is “talking about it as 5%, which is less than or similar to everybody else in the industry”.
“We are committed to not only being transparent with how easy it is to integrate Stash but also how easy it is to know what you’re getting, and what relationship you’re getting with us,” Borstelmann says. “So as soon as we have final pricing, that will be on our website – it will be very clear in a way that I think you could argue some of the other players in the space are not.”
As controversy around how Apple and Google run their stores rumbles on, Kan adds that – besides concerns over market competition – the stores are simply not keeping pace with what you’d expect from a digital storefront in 2024.
“Loyalty programmes, dynamic pricing, discounts – all these things you can’t really programme in Google Play and on Apple,” Kan tells us. “And so the promise of Stash is that we want to help game companies do all of that.”
“That’s what my whole career has been, helping the industry – with Twitch, it was on the marketing side and awareness and getting social videos out there, and with Stash it’s helping to monetise and generate more revenue from the players and owning the customer relationship.”
“The other part of it is not just the ecommerce store, which is kind of like building the Shopify for these game companies,” Kan adds. “It’s also helping them understand how to programme the stores, how to do sales, customer analytics, drive whales to those stores…we have a bunch of work we’re doing on that side.”
