It was a stellar year for online gaming, with revenue surpassing $190B and leaving music and movies far behind. Yet the way money moves through gaming platforms still feels primitive – caught between endless fees and players who expect it to clear as fast as their ping.
Mobile gaming took over the market, with $80 billion in in-app purchases in 2025, but typical card fees still range from 1.5% to 3.5% which makes a $2 skin purchase pointless to process. Microtransactions fit blockchain rails much better, especially now that regulators push for tighter checks on every payment.
It turns focus toward the path every dollar takes, and the coming year brings every flaw to the surface.
Payment Systems Failing Under the 152% Surge in Microtransactions
The reason most games force you to buy V-Bucks or Robux instead of letting you pay directly for items isn’t some clever monetization trick, but a workaround for a system that can’t handle small transactions efficiently.
But even that doesn’t solve the deeper problem – app store fees eat 23% of every dollar spent on platforms like Roblox before anyone else gets paid, and after platform hosting, payment processing, and support costs, developers walk away with around 29 cents on every dollar. For creators building experiences that millions play daily, there’s no logic – especially when faster payment rails would finally make the economics hold together.
Fintechs such as Tazapay now connect gaming platforms to local instant payment systems – India’s UPI, Brazil’s Pix, China’s Alipay – for half what cards charge. It’s not negligible, though, when you’re processing millions of microtransactions every month, lining things up for crypto to take over as the payment rail that actually scales.
Gaming platforms that support crypto can move money faster with smaller fees, and that’s led to an interesting shift – people now look at where they can pick up tokens early, before they land on big exchanges. Crypto communities know new tokens usually jump in their first few days, so many look at the next Coinbase listing as an easy shortcut to see trends and where momentum is building.
For gaming platforms, this isn’t just about adding payment options – players who already move assets in seconds won’t wait even a minute.
Risk Scoring Engines Against 2026’s Explosion of Small, Fast Transactions
Gaming platforms flagged over 12% of all transactions as potential fraud in the second half of 2025, but the bigger issue is how often those systems misread normal behavior. Tools that can’t tell a stolen card from a legit purchase on a new device end up blocking real players far more than actual threats, and such models still reject a quarter of valid transactions.
Account takeovers climbed 21% this year and now make up 27% of global fraud cases, helped along by campaigns like the 19 million malware attempts Kaspersky found through fake game files and currency giveaways.
At the same time, platforms are dealing with 96% more Layer 7 DDoS attacks, most of them hitting live events and peak spending windows, turning security pressure into a constant part of running a gaming business.
Roblox reported $110 million in chargebacks during 2023, and industry losses run much higher when you factor in the cost of manual review teams, delayed payouts, and platforms collecting money from creator accounts weeks after a transaction clears. Hackers buy in-game currency with stolen cards, sell it at a discount, and move before the chargeback hits – leaving platforms and developers facing the loss.
And the tools meant to stop this still lag behind – behavioral signals and device fingerprinting can cut false alarms by quickly confirming it’s you, but most platforms still rely on old rule sets that treat routine activity – late night shopping, VPNs, a new device – as high risk. It’s a constant uncertainty for regular people, while fraudsters are always two steps ahead, doing what they want.
Regulators Force Transparency as Virtual Currencies Face Banking-Level Oversight
The EU passed legislation in March 2025 that forces games to show real-money prices for every virtual currency purchase, so players finally see what an item actually costs.
In the US, on the other hand, the CFPB is working to bring virtual currencies under the same protections and refund rules that apply to bank transfers. Regulators are stepping in because gaming has become an easy place to move stolen money – anyone can buy and cash out through markets that rarely check anything. Banks screen every transfer; most gaming platforms don’t.
Some developers, like Linden Lab with Second Life, already follow full AML and KYC standards, but most are waiting to see how strictly these new rules get enforced before spending on compliance tools. And with 3.3 billion players around the world, the gap between what users expect and payment rails deliver is costing serious money – failed checkouts, abandoned carts, and fraud systems that scare away people.
Gaming doesn’t need to wait for cards to catch up when faster local rails already deliver what players expect. Speed wins, or someone else’s rails will.
