Vertigo Games, the studio behind the hit mobile shooter game Critical Strike, saw a 175% boost in revenues for its game one month after switching from their old web shop to the Aghanim Game Hub.
The company partnered with Aghanim as part of a plan to meaningfully scale its direct-to-consumer (DTC) business and cut dependence on high platform fees of 30%. It’s the latest company to do so after Epic Games won the right to promote alternative web shops in the app stores to avoid the 30% platform fees of Google and Apple.
Vertigo Games said their previous DTC efforts had delivered limited upside: low engagement, and minimal live-ops flexibility held back meaningful growth.
Partnering with Los Angeles-based Aghanim, Vertigo Games launched a fully personalized, globally compliant Game Hub that transformed how players engaged, purchased, and returned.
The result: a frictionless, high-performing DTC channel that enables fully compliant link-outs cross platform, globally.
The challenge
Platform costs have been rising. First-party stores charged up to 30% fees, reducing margins and limiting reinvestment in growth.
Aghanim said the previous off-app webshop produced little recurring revenue, with minimal retention and poor conversion.
And Vertigo’s previous DTC provider was unable to offer a compliant path to link players from in-game to their webshop, limiting visibility and revenue. With Aghanim’s Game Hub,
Vertigo Games unlocked fully compliant in-game link-outs, routing players directly into a personalized game-hub experience.
Aghanim introduced its Game Hub framework, combining personalization, live-ops, loyalty rewards, and global Merchant-of-Record services and a lowercase framework in Game Hub framework.
Aghanim said it offered personalized live ops. It triggered offers based on player activity — login streaks, abandoned carts and purchase history — and these increased re-engagement and upsell rates.
And it said tiered loyalty rewards and instant cashback encouraged repeat purchases and kept the hub top-of-mind for players. The company handled VAT, FX and regional payment coverage across every country to ensure frictionless compliance.
And it offered seamless in-app deeplink flow, with a single “store” button inside the game that directed players to exclusive hub content and offers. There were no redirects, no extra SDKs and players were automatically logged into the game hub.
It took 30 days from kickoff to launch. The game saw a 19% higher average check, and 40% of player visited the game hub in the first week. The app saw zero downtime across all markets.
“Aghanim didn’t just replace our web shop, it rebuilt our DTC approach into a real growth engine. Faster returns, cleaner operations, and materially more revenue. And it wasn’t just lift from moving spend off-app: our per-player earnings and average check increased in a way that finally made DTC scalable,” said Fatih Cakmak, community manager at Vertigo Games, in a statement.
Founded in 2023, Aghanim has 52 employees and it raised funding from Andreesen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Point72 and QED. The game hub debuted in 2023.