Xsolla is a company that helps publishers and developers distribute and sell games. Chris Hewish has been CSO at Xsolla since January 2024; before that, he held roles as interim CEO and President for the last four years.
Chris Hewish is also the CEO of Long Tale Games, a global publishing business and gaming platform for mobile and PC games. Chris has worked in companies such as Activision, Dreamworks Animations, Survios, and SkyDance. He has experience managing over 300 employees and generating over 1 billion in 50 games.
The video version of the interview is available on Mobidictum’s YouTube channel.
You have been in the industry for many years. Throughout the years, what shaped your career? What were the pivotal moments for you?
One of the first pivotal moments was when I got into the industry. When I got out of University, I really wanted to get a job in the games industry. I had no connections, but I had a great passion.
So, I wrote a letter to one of my favorite game companies, Games Workshop. I wrote a fictional letter of recommendation because I had nobody in the industry to recommend me. This letter was from an Orc War Boss who recommended this human as a great candidate to hire and work at the company because of his passion for the games and the industry.
Little did I know that, and this was the first lesson, that Games Workshop was looking for people who were passionate about their products. They told me they could teach new people to do pretty much anything. What they cannot teach is a passion for the industry, and I’ve carried that forward to this day.
It really is a good lesson that if you’re passionate about what you’re doing, it gives you such a great advantage. It allows you to get through a lot of the difficult times that any job or career brings and allows you to really go that extra mile to create something amazing. So that was a very early pivotal moment, and certainly, there have been many others.
I was at Activision for 13 years. I got there when the company was about 100 people and grew to thousands, and I really had the honor of working with many talented people. I spent a lot of time there honing my experience and technical skills around the business, learning the importance of managing the business through more of a profit and loss (P&L) approach, and treating that passion with a bit of a business element.
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How did you encounter Xsolla?
I had heard about Xsolla throughout my years in the industry, and the company has been around for 19 years now. I had just wrapped up a failed startup, an attempt, as many of us have had, at starting something sort of unique. This was after working at Sky Dance, Survios, and some other companies.
I was looking around like, “Okay, what do I want to do next?” Do I want to go back into a big corporate company, or do I want to try another startup? I had some friends at Xsolla who reached out to me, and we were talking, and they said, you know, you should come to talk with our founder. It’s a great company, it’s growing, and we’re really looking for somebody who has experience running studios, working with cross-discipline teams, and all of this.
I was not sure because I’ve always been on the content creation side. I went in and spoke with our founder, and I was really impressed. Right out of the gate, not only with his vision and what he was doing with the company but personally for my career journey, I had really thought that I had worked on all sides of the industry.
I came to Xsolla, and I started talking with people, and I realized, oh my goodness, there’s a whole side to the industry around empowering developers to go directly to their players to take control of their businesses. Payments, commerce, and all of that I had never really thought about. I had been a client right a user of these products, but I never thought much about them, and it really opened my eyes to an opportunity where I could learn a lot about a whole another piece of the business and also could work within the industry at a scale that I had never dreamt of before.
Where Xsolla works with thousands of games and developers globally, all over the world, in all genres, and on all platforms, I said wow, this is cool, right? Given my development background, I can learn a lot here and contribute as the company continues to grow and build relationships with developers.
You have managed more than 300 employees throughout your career. Xsolla is also a big company. What critical qualities make an effective leader?
Xsolla is now over 1,000 people. I don’t directly manage all of them, but I get to work with this massive team. I’ve had the very good fortune to work with many, many talented teams, large and small.
I think there are a few key things that are important to do this effectively, and for me, it really is embracing that sort of servant leadership mentality, where I view my role as a leader as coming in and helping my teams perform at their best by listening to them, helping to build consensus, and providing vision.
I’ll caveat this with the fact that there are many different styles of leadership. I think, first and foremost, as a leader, it is important to find a style that is authentic to you. Authenticity is super important. A lot of people try to use leadership styles that don’t match their personality, and that doesn’t really work out very well.
You need to learn what your sort of authentic style is. Embrace that and use that with a team, but then also support yourself with people who can fill in. Maybe that style has some gaps because every style has pros and cons, but generally, like I said, it gives you real visionary thinking, and if you are able to clearly communicate that to teams, empowering the teams can achieve that vision.
Then, obviously, being adaptable. One of my favorite sports teams and sports coaches here in the U.S. is a team called the New England Patriots. for many years, they were a dominant player in American football, and their coach, Belichick, had an approach that was a little different than other coaches.
Where other coaches would come in and say here is my system, and I’m going to force everybody to follow it, whether it works for the individual players or not. Well, he had an approach that was much more: I’m going to learn what my players are good at and what they’re bad at, and I’ll build a system that takes advantage of their strengths right and minimizes their weaknesses.
So he adapted to the team, and for me, that very much is an important lesson as a leader.
Photo by AlexanderJonesi
Over the last four years, you have held various positions, including president, CEO, and CSO. Can you discuss the differences between these roles and what you are doing in your current position?
When I came into Xsolla, I came in as president of the company, and at that time, the company was just beginning to experience some real dramatic growth. As it happens often in companies, the teams are getting misaligned as the company grows rapidly and you have a core group of people who have been with the company and gotten it to that point.
As companies start to succeed, they bring in more experienced people from the outside. That often can cause a little bit of a culture clash. So one of the things I was brought into to tackle right away was to help provide a culture and an environment where everybody still felt empowered.
The team that had gotten the company there, the new people that came in and helped everyone sort of work together and bring one another up, that was something that I’ve done a lot at game studios, where you have to work with very different groups of people and build consensus and get them all to align, and perform and create something great. It was a great opportunity to help provide that framework for the team internally.
It was also a great opportunity to come in and be a voice for the company. Not only with our partners but also with somebody who could go and speak authentically to partners about hands-on game development or managing studios or slates or whatever it might be. Someone who could speak publicly about the company and share what we’re doing to help that message out. Those were two key things that were the drivers for me coming in as president and what the role was all about.
Then, as the company grew, it doubled the business in my first four years there. We got to a point where I became the interim CEO role. There’s a lesson here as well. We got to a point where the company had grown quite a bit and, as I said, over doubled in size with staff and partners and everything, and we really needed to look at our leadership team and retool it for that next stage of growth.
We needed to do that in a respectful way, not just to the company and the team but also to our partners. So that’s when the founder asked me to step in as interim CEO, which was always agreed upon for a short period of time to help transition through this period, rebuild the leadership teams, and provide stability to our partners and the public.
It was really fun, and it leaned on a lot of my skills. During that period, we rebuilt our leadership team. We have a new CTO, a new president, some other executives that we’ve brought in, as well as globally with a lot of the regional heads that we’ve put in place.
We kind of got past that and reached a point where it was like, okay, the leadership team is retooled, we’re good. There’s a new venture that we really need someone to look at and build up because it still has a lot of opportunity, and that’s what led to the transitioning over to the CEO of Long Tale Games while still maintaining that CSO role at Xsolla to sort of bridge between these different initiatives.
What is the current strategy for Xsolla, and what are your plans at Xsolla over the next five years?
There is so much opportunity over the next five years. It’s still all about providing all the tools and solutions that any game developer needs to engage directly with their players and go directly to the consumer. We continue to build upon all of those tools.
But you know, part of this is also really taking everything that we’ve built for a lot of the biggest companies in the world and not losing sight of the fact that we still want to provide all of this to the small and mid-sized game developers out there as well. One key part of our strategy that we have sort of rearticulated internally is how we manage KPIs, and all of this is that we want to make sure that we’re focusing on the entire industry, not just a few big companies but everybody.
Most people know us in the first area that I would call commerce, and that’s where we do our payments and our merch of record business. We help run the business of your game, sell things, and handle your taxes and VAT and all of that. So that’s commerce, and we continue to build that up. That’s an incredible part of the business, but we have three other parts of the business that we’re really building up at this point.
The second one is game tech. We’ve made a number of acquisitions over the past year, and this has also been part of my role; that’s where the CSO piece comes in. These acquisitions are helping to build up these new lines of business. We acquired a company called AcceleratXR to help focus on cross-platform technologies and cross-progression, and that is sort of the core of our game tech business. We have a whole host of other game tech solutions and products in there.
We are also building a strong marketing tech or mtech business. It’s really anchored around being able to help our partners work with creators and influencers at scale. We took a product that we had a partner network, which is a platform where you can post a campaign as a game developer or publisher to this platform, and there are thousands of influencers of all sizes, small and medium-sized influencers, who then run those campaigns, and we handle all of the business in between.
We handle the attribution, payout, KYC, and all of that. We brought in Lightstream, which is a technology that allow creators to get up and streaming right away through the cloud, audience management, and all of this. So there’s a whole bunch of cool stuff going on in marketing tech, as well as retargeting partnerships and all kinds of things.
And then the final thing that we’re spinning up or have spun up and built is a bloc initiative, which can be found at x.la, and it really is one place where players are something that we’ve built gamers can come and engage everything they would want they do in their gaming life.
If you’re a player now and want to buy or download a game, you go to Steam or Epic Game Store; if you want to get sort of a cool drop or new skin, you have to go to Amazon Prime Gaming. Here, at least in the States, if you want to stream a game through the cloud, you have to go to Nvidia or Xbox. You’re getting the idea.
So we’ve brought all that together under one roof, one destination, and you know, really trying to make gamers’ lives easier where there’s a single login, and you can do all this cool stuff.
What are the current challenges Xsolla faces in the industry?
I think some of the challenges are that the industry is always evolving and changing, so it’s always a challenge to stay up to date on the latest technology and the latest regulations and laws. That’s always been a challenge for us, and it continues to be a challenge, but one that we are happy to take on. We have a large team of people who are always keeping an eye out for these things, whether it’s new technology, new regulations, or whatever it might be.
New laws that can impact the business so that we can adapt and help our partners navigate those things. We continuously innovate always every quarter. We’re kind of updating all of our solutions with new features that are in response to our partner’s needs. We also really rely on our partners. We engage with them regularly to understand what challenges they’re facing so that we can help them address them.
I think some of the other challenges we’re facing are that we’ve grown to a certain size and scale as a company, which always presents its own challenges. But we’ve been able to navigate that by bringing in that really talented leadership team that I’ve spoken about.
Growing competition is always a challenge, but fortunately, we have a first-mover advantage against that. We are always adapting to new features and offerings. I think the final challenge, which again is fun, is that these are challenges, but they’re opportunities, and the fun is growing the business through ongoing mergers and acquisitions (M&A).
What do you think about the current state of the industry?
I actually run a monthly confidence sentiment survey on LinkedIn, and I pull the games industry around ten different questions related to how people feel about the industry. I’ve done this for a few months now, and then I’m still running the one obviously for June.
I can go through some of the highlights of May. In May, I have asked the types of funding that people are seeing or what they’re looking for and where they see opportunities. 47% of the industry respondents were still looking for Venture Capital had come down from 60% in April. So there was a little bit of a shift where they felt VC opportunities were dying up.
45% of them were reporting difficulties. Interestingly that was down from 56% in April. There is a shift to private equity and other forms of funding in May that developers and games professionals were looking for. There is a reduction in VC but an increase in the ability to find funding.
And then obviously there is the employment trends we all know. There has been some challenges going on there. There was a little uptick in optimism in May compared to April. In April 38% of the companies that I spoke with expected to increase their workforces. Where as in May that increased to 47%. This shows there is a slight increase in the number of companies that are now looking to expand, although there’s still over half that are expecting reductions.
When it comes to general economic outlook there was a feeling that the overall economic conditions for the industry would continue to rise. In April, 47% of the respondents felt that things would get better over the next year. This jumped into 72% percent in May. Something is happening where people are feeling much more confident about the year-long outlook for the video game economy.
We haven’t crossed that bridge to where people are fully optimistic. There’s some light at the end of the tunnel but we’re not through the tunnel yet.
