Complete Guide to Gaming Payment Solutions: Choosing a Payment Gateway Provider

TLDR – Why Payment Infrastructure Determines Global Success

• Going global as a game publisher requires more than a simple payment gateway. You need solutions for coverage, compliance, fraud, marketing, and conversion.
• Each stage of expansion demands a different capability: market entry, risk protection, and checkout optimization.
• Coda provides end-to-end gaming payment solutions that includes Codapay, Codashop, Coda Custom Webstore, Merchant of Record (MoR) Services, Coda Distribution and more, built specifically for gaming growth.
• This guide explains exactly which payment solution fits which stage of your global strategy.

Choosing the Right Payment Partner

Expanding a game globally is no longer just about content localization. Success hinges on whether players can access trusted local payment methods, enjoy a frictionless checkout, and discover top-up opportunities.

But the payment landscape is complex. Conversion depends heavily on local preferences and not every gateway is built for gaming payment systems.

This guide walks you through the real-world scenarios of going global, explaining which payment solutions support each stage and how to choose the right gaming payment provider.

1. Entering New Markets & Making Your Game Accessible Worldwide

When publishers want to scale beyond their home market, the question quickly becomes: “How do we make it easy for players everywhere to pay us?”. Traditional payment gateways help you process transactions, but they don’t solve for:

• Local payment coverage
• Distribution reach
• Market visibility
• Cross-border operational hurdles

That said, to truly enter new markets, you need both local payment access and channels where players already spend. Here’s how Coda provides exactly that:

1. Codapay: A single integration that unlocks 400+ local and global payment methods, built specifically to solve for market fragmentation.
2. Codashop & Coda Distribution: Players in 70+ markets already visit Codashop to top up their favorite games. Publishers who tap into this ecosystem gain immediate presence without needing a local entity or months of groundwork.
3. Coda Custom Webstore: For publishers who want a direct channel but lack the resources to build one, Coda offers instant, customizable store deployment with liveops control and loyalty programme features.

2. Managing Compliance, Tax, and Fraud

Once transactions begin to rise, publishers face an entirely new challenge that is the administrative and regulatory weight of operating globally. Compliance is particularly stringent for gaming too as gaming transactions tend to be high frequency, low value, fraud-targeted, and regionally diverse. 

That combination makes the compliance landscape unusually complicated but Coda’s MoR model was designed specifically around gaming’s nuances. It acts as the responsible merchant, shielding publishers from administrative overhead while managing:

• Regulatory compliance across all operational markets
• Transaction risk
• Fraud detection
• Secure processing

3. Driving Market Visibility & Player Engagement

After solving access and compliance, the next challenge is demand.

Payment coverage is meaningless if players aren’t aware of where to top up, or if your local presence is too quiet to compete.

In many mobile-first economies, players habitually top up through multiple platforms. However, a marketplace like Codashop can increase reach and serve as a discovery funnel. Having your games listed on a popular platform can help not just with visibility but player engagement.

4. Maximizing Revenue Through Checkout Experience

Even with reach and visibility solved, conversion can break down at the very end. Checkout is where intent becomes revenue but it’s also where global friction peaks.

That said, a gaming payment gateway offers conversion performance. It’s an optimized checkout experience that usually tailors payment options by region, making it highly intuitive for players, which means a better checkout experience.

And Coda’s checkout is accessed by billions of gaming transactions.

We know which methods should appear first, which flows convert best, and how local payment behavior shifts seasonally. Publishers typically see meaningful revenue lift from checkout optimization alone, sometimes more than any content update or campaign.

How to Choose the Right Gaming Payment Provider

Now that we’ve learnt of all the different scenarios for a gaming publisher to succeed, it’s time for decision-making.

Ask yourself some of these questions:

• Am I entering markets or scaling existing ones?
• How much regulatory complexity am I willing to shoulder?
• Do I need visibility as well as processing?
• Do I have the internal resources to manage fraud and chargebacks?

A gaming payment gateway provides connectivity. An MoR provides compliance. A marketplace provides reach.

Coda provides all three, tied together with gaming-first optimization.

Keen to explore? Get started now.