Aghanim, a direct-to-consumer commerce and payments platform for game studios, has partnered with Nexters Global to set up a D2C mobile game store.
Aghanim provides integrated commerce, liveops automation, community engagement, and a payments platform for video game studios.
Nexters, whose biggest hit is Hero Wars, is a game developer known for operating live-service games for long-term player engagement. Nexters is part of GDEV Holding, a Nasdaq-listed gaming and entertainment company headquartered in Limassol, Cyprus. GDEV went public through a reverse merger (SPAC) in 2023.
Through this partnership, Nexters will expand its mobile games’ direct-to-consumer (D2C) presence across key markets worldwide, providing the infrastructure needed to build stronger player relationships, optimize monetization performance, and unlock long-term growth beyond traditional platform ecosystems.
“We are thrilled to collaborate closely with Nexters, one of the global leaders in the gaming industry,” said Constantin Andry, co-CEO of Aghanim, in a statement. “By leveraging Aghanim’s DTC commerce infrastructure to tackle challenges such as global payments, web-based engagement, retention, liveops, and fraud prevention, Nexters expands its ability to capture more value across its DTC operations, driving greater monetization efficiency and stronger margins.”
Aghanim will support D2C commerce across all international card networks and preferred local payment methods, alongside web-based game hubs and AI-powered liveops personalization tools within Nexters’ D2C channel.
Together, these capabilities create a scalable operating layer for D2C commerce, player engagement, and long-term monetization, positioning direct-to-consumer as a core growth channel designed to create seamless player experiences, strengthen ownership, and unlock greater value across global markets.
“Aghanim’s superior product, professional team, and unparalleled expertise at the intersection of fintech and video games have already opened new horizons for our growth efforts,” said Anton Reinhold, CEO of Nexters, in a statement.
The Nexters deal moved fast after the companies tested an Aghanim solution that replaced another generic direct-to-consumer platform. Aghanim built a gaming hub for Nexters’ Hero Wars, and then a technical review showed the value of the D2C channel.
Nexters was able to manage offers, loyalty, player journeys and creator activations through one platform. At the same time, the store helped improve margins. The commerce is not just about improving profits by keeping money that would have previously gone to a game platform. Rather, it’s about increasing the net value of each paying player through experimentation.
Origins of Aghanim and D2C
Aghanim started about three years ago — founded by Konstantin Golubitsky (co-CEO), Andry, and Albert Tugushev (Co-Founder and CTO) — with a mission to create a place and destination that players would want to go to, outside of simply engaging in straight forward commerce.
It was more about creating a destination that was player first, more like a gaming hub, and how do you give publishers the opportunity to be able to engage with those players based on the foundation of the reasons for why they actually downloaded the game in the first place, McLaughlin said.
“Nobody really downloads a game for the store,” McLaughlin said. “The store is a feature that you can use, or that has items that you can use to progress. But how do you create a destination that caters to players in the same way and in the same vein as the reasons that they actually downloaded the game in the first place?”
The idea was to create a destination that had benefits associated with commerce, but gives players the chance to engage as part of a community. That incluedes leaderboards and achievement pages, as well as some of those more engagement-first features that allow players outside of just that whale cohort to engage with a destination off-platform that gives publishers the opportunity to create long-lasting strategic value-add relationships with their players, he said.
“That allows them to own those relationships long term, regardless of the erratic regulatory changes on the store side as it pertains to Apple and Google and the regional changes associated with those with those fluctuations,” McLaughlin said. “The whole goal was to create an engagement player-first destination that was the modern day answer to the one-dimensional web shop idea.”
In 2024, Nexters Global generated $403.6 million in revenue, underscoring its strong financial track record and continued contribution to GDEV’s broader games portfolio.
Aghanim helps studios expand their games to the direct-to-consumer web by launching
browser-based game hubs, monetizing players through AI-powered personalized offers, running hundreds of programmatic liveops experiments, and enabling seamless global payments through high-performing, secure, compliant, and fraud-resilient multinational infrastructure.
The creation of the gaming hub and off-store commerce site for game companies coincided with greater freedoms granted through antitrust lawsuits, like Epic vs. Apple and Google, as well as regulation in markets like the European Union and elsewhere. The result has been a change to the traditional app stores where developers and publishers can create their own alternative stores and keep more of the revenue for themselves and communicate with players in real-time.
“There’s one word for it, and that’s ‘exciting’,” McLaughlin said. “It was really exciting to be part of coming into play during these regulatory changes that had not been part of the ecosystem prior to this new industry surge.”
The direct-to-consumer stores have provided a new revenue stream for game companies, and McLaughlin sees a lot of game developers and publishers posting jobs for direct-to-consumer jobs. And to help Aghanim stand out, the company has built a full-stack direct-to-consumer business, including mobile payments around the world and metagames to improve engagement.
“It’s a game hub and not really a web shop. It’s much more than just a store,” he said. “Our game hub and our live ops platform gives monetization, CRM, and community teams direct control over their products, bundles, personalized offers, rewards and loyalty.”
The players can engage via progression, player journeys and creator-led campaigns. In that way, the direct-to-consumer channel is more like a living extension of the game, McLaughlin said.
The payment system handles the merchant of record capability, underlying payments, the antifraud tech, tax compliance, and more.
“We’re operating in a space where everybody knows what a web shop is, and people are less less informed as to what a game hub is. But these game hubs are so vast in terms of what we’re able to create that publishers, as soon as they see what we have, and that’s shared by you know all the web shop guys that we know,” McLaughlin said.
Disclosure: Aghanim is a sponsor for GamesBeat.