For most of the game industry’s history, capital has funded companies, teams and projects. Investors backed studios, publishers financed development, platforms paid for exclusivity, and founders sometimes mortgaged the future of their companies just to get a game into the market. The financing was generally tied to the business or the product being created, with investors taking on a combination of creative, commercial and execution risk.
Now we’re seeing a different model gain ground. Capital is beginning to fund the acquisition of specific groups of players, with financing tied to the revenue those players are expected to generate. At first glance, this might seem like a relatively narrow development in mobile user acquisition, but I think the implications could be much broader. Once player cohorts become assets that can be financed, retention, lifetime value and marketing performance begin influencing the capital structure of the business, rather than simply serving as internal operating metrics.
This is the idea behind the new capital stack of play, and it could fundamentally change how game companies think about financing growth.
From Financing the Company to Financing the Customer
According to InvestGame, committed user-acquisition facilities across mobile games and consumer apps reached $398 million during the first three quarters of 2026, compared with $254 million in early-stage equity rounds over the same period. On the headline numbers, UA financing accounted for 61% of that combined capital. That’s a meaningful comparison, although the underlying figures need some context before we draw too many conclusions.
Eleven PvX facilities totaling $232 million didn’t identify their recipients, and removing those facilities reduces UA financing to approximately 39.5% of the adjusted total. We’re also talking about committed facilities, which doesn’t mean every dollar has actually been drawn and deployed. Even allowing for those qualifications, the direction is meaningful, particularly when you look at how quickly some of the providers are growing. PvX, the most active among them, reported more than $250 million in commitments in December 2025, more than $750 million by April 2026 and more than $1.3 billion by late October.
To understand why this matters, it’s worth looking at the difference between the financing structures themselves. Traditional equity financing provides capital to a company in exchange for ownership and exposure to its broader future performance. Cohort financing is much more targeted, funding a defined commercial activity based on the expected performance of newly acquired customers. Instead of underwriting everything a studio might do over the coming years, the financing partner can evaluate the economics of a specific investment in player acquisition.
PvX, for example, provides capital through a credit line that’s repaid from a share of the revenue generated by the cohorts it finances. Its return is capped at a level agreed in advance, after which the remaining lifetime value belongs to the game company. According to PvX, the facility is secured against the funded cohorts rather than the company or its previously acquired players. This creates a more direct relationship between the capital being provided and the revenue-generating activity it’s intended to support.
Plan A Games uses a different structure, with financing supported by funds managed by affiliates of Fortress Investment Group. Developers draw capital when they’re ready to deploy it, pay a fixed rate of interest only on the amount drawn, and can repay and reuse the facility as the game develops. Plan A also earns a success fee if the game reaches agreed long-term revenue targets. Its August agreement with Qiiwi Games begins with a three-month initial phase, after which a facility of up to $10 million becomes available if Wordington Solitaire meets its targets, allowing the studio to scale marketing across multiple ad networks.
For a studio that’s already established reliable retention, monetization and acquisition economics, these structures create an interesting alternative. Instead of giving up ownership in the entire company every time it wants to scale a successful game, it can finance that growth against the expected performance of the players being acquired. Equity still has an important role, particularly in funding new IP, product development, talent, technology and longer-term investments where outcomes remain uncertain. What’s changing is that studios have more options for matching the type of capital they raise to the work they actually need to fund.
The Capital Stack Is Becoming More Specialized
Game financing has traditionally bundled very different risks into the same investment. A studio raising capital to develop and launch a game might be asking investors to finance everything from creative development and production to marketing and user acquisition. Those activities have very different risk profiles, yet they’ve often competed for the same pool of capital and been evaluated as part of the same investment decision.
The emerging capital stack begins to separate those risks into more specialized financing categories. Equity can support the studio and its long-term ambitions, while publisher advances and project financing can fund production. That production layer is becoming more specialized as well, with Griffin Gaming Partners and Denmu both launching funds this year to finance individual games against their revenue. Platform agreements can support distribution or exclusivity, while cohort financing can fund measurable acquisition once a game has demonstrated that its unit economics work.
I see a practical efficiency argument in this specialization. Investors can focus on the types of risk they understand, while studios can align the duration and cost of capital with the activities being funded. Founders also gain the ability to preserve ownership rather than selling permanent equity to finance marketing expenditure that might repay itself within months. The result is a more flexible approach to capital allocation, with different financing instruments serving different stages of the business.
The partnership between Unity and PvX, announced on October 27, illustrates how quickly this model is moving into the operating infrastructure of mobile games. Eligible studios that pass PvX’s underwriting requirements can receive non-dilutive financing tied to cohort performance, along with Unity Ads credits, enhanced support and consideration for more favorable invoicing terms. To qualify, studios must also participate in Unity’s Developer Data Framework, making the data relationship part of the financing arrangement itself.
Consider what this means operationally. Within connected systems, a studio can develop its game, acquire players, measure how those players behave and finance further growth. Unity is bringing development technology, advertising infrastructure, targeting, data and access to capital into a more integrated ecosystem. For studios looking to reduce friction and accelerate growth, the appeal is understandable, although that convenience also creates a concentration of influence that deserves attention.
When the same ecosystem has a hand in measurement, acquisition, attribution and access to financing, its underlying policies and definitions begin to carry direct financial consequences. We’ve already seen how disruptive changes to those systems can be. Apple’s App Tracking Transparency reshaped mobile attribution in 2021 and reset acquisition economics across an entire category. Under a cohort-financing model, a comparable change could affect more than campaign performance or marketing efficiency. It could directly influence how much capital a studio can access and the terms on which that capital is offered.
Intelligence Becomes an Asset That Can Be Underwritten
This development connects directly to the Five Pillars of the Modern Game Business, particularly Intelligence and Time. In Durable Advantage, I describe Intelligence as the ability to turn player behavior, transaction data and operational insight into better decisions. What’s interesting about this new financing model is that the same intelligence can also help lower a studio’s cost of capital.
Think about what a lender needs to understand before financing a player cohort. How consistently can the game acquire players, and how quickly do they convert? Is retention stable, is spending predictable, and how long does it take to recover the acquisition cost? How do those results change across channels, geographies, platforms and creative campaigns? These are questions studios should already be asking to improve their operations, but now the quality of the answers can also influence their ability to raise capital.
A company that understands its player economics and can demonstrate consistent performance presents a stronger case for financing. Another studio might have an equally enjoyable game, but disconnected data, unstable attribution or limited understanding of player behavior can make that business much harder to underwrite. The difference extends beyond the quality of reporting because lenders are effectively evaluating the studio’s ability to produce predictable commercial outcomes.
Time becomes equally important in establishing that predictability. One strong month doesn’t tell a financing partner very much, while a sustained history of reliable cohort performance creates greater confidence. Each successful cycle produces more data, improves forecasting and makes the next investment easier to assess. Better player understanding improves acquisition and LiveOps decisions, which in turn produce more predictable cohort economics. That predictability can attract lower-cost, less-dilutive capital, allowing the studio to acquire more profitable players and generate additional data and operating experience.
Viewed through a financial lens, this is the Five Pillars working together. Relationships create the sustained player behavior that a lender can evaluate, while Commerce turns that behavior into revenue. Intelligence makes the value measurable, and Trust matters both to players and to financing partners who need confidence in the underlying data. Time determines whether the results are repeatable and whether the business can continue improving its performance over successive investment cycles.
As these capabilities mature, the systems surrounding the game begin influencing the terms on which the business can finance its own growth. That’s a meaningful evolution in how operational performance translates into financial value.
Where Players Pay Changes What a Cohort Is Worth
There’s another important connection between cohort financing and the economics of game commerce. Lenders underwrite net revenue rather than gross bookings, which means every point of payment cost between the player and the studio directly affects how quickly an acquisition investment pays back. Two games generating identical gross revenue from their acquired players can therefore present different financing opportunities depending on how their transactions are processed.
Consider a cohort that generates $1.40 in gross bookings for every dollar spent on acquisition by month 12. If all those transactions flow through an app store charging a 30% fee, the studio receives $0.98 and hasn’t yet recovered its acquisition cost. Now move 30% of those bookings to a direct web shop with an all-in cost of around 8%, and the same cohort returns $1.07. The game hasn’t changed, the players haven’t changed, and the acquisition spending hasn’t changed. Yet the cohort has crossed the payback threshold and can potentially qualify for better financing terms because of where the transactions occurred.
This is why direct-to-consumer commerce and player identity belong in a discussion about capital. When a studio controls the payment relationship, it can retain more of each cohort’s value, recognize that value sooner and provide cleaner first-party data to a financing partner. Payment mix has traditionally been evaluated primarily through the lens of margin and commercial flexibility. In this model, it also becomes a variable that can influence a studio’s ability to finance growth.
The Model Will Reward Proof, but It May Narrow Experimentation
There are good reasons to be optimistic about more specialized financing, but I wouldn’t assume that every consequence will be positive for the industry. Cohort financing works best when performance is measurable and relatively stable, which naturally favors established games, proven monetization models and teams that already understand how to operate at scale. It’s considerably less useful for a studio creating an original game, developing a new audience or experimenting with an unfamiliar business model.
This could lead to a more divided capital market. Games with predictable retention and lifetime value may gain access to increasingly efficient growth capital, while earlier-stage, less conventional or harder-to-measure ideas continue competing for a more selective pool of risk-tolerant equity and publisher funding. We could end up with more money available to scale the games that already work, while the creative risks required to discover what works next become harder to finance.
There’s also the problem of relying too heavily on historical performance. Forecasts remain forecasts, and cohort behavior can change as a game expands into new markets, increases acquisition spending, exhausts its strongest audiences or encounters rising acquisition costs. Platform policies, privacy restrictions and attribution changes can also weaken the historical data behind an underwriting decision. Even a game with a strong operating history can find that the economics supporting its financing no longer behave as expected.
Capital can help a studio scale an effective economic model, but it can also allow a company to scale a temporary advantage faster than management recognizes the deterioration underneath it. That’s particularly important when financing decisions are being made against models that assume historical player behavior will continue. The more closely capital availability becomes tied to cohort performance, the more important it becomes for leadership to understand when those assumptions are beginning to change.
For executives, this means looking beyond the headline cost of capital and understanding the full financing arrangement. Repayment mechanics, return caps, success fees, performance definitions, data rights, downside protections and what happens when cohorts miss their targets all deserve careful attention. Leadership should also establish whether a financing partner has any influence over marketing, pricing, LiveOps or product decisions. Non-dilutive financing may preserve ownership, but that doesn’t make it consequence-free.
A Different Way to Think About Game Value
Perhaps the most important implication of this emerging model is how it changes our understanding of what makes a game business valuable. We’ve traditionally thought about a studio’s assets in terms of intellectual property, people, technology, contracts and cash flow. Cohort financing brings another capability into focus: the demonstrated ability to turn a dollar of acquisition spending into a predictable stream of value from players.
That capability isn’t contained within a single marketing campaign or department. It depends on how the organization operates across creative testing, product quality, data systems, pricing, payments, LiveOps, community management and the trust required to retain players over time. Each of those functions contributes to the economics of the player relationship, and together they determine how reliably a studio can acquire players and generate a return on that investment.
Once those capabilities perform consistently, a game company has an opportunity to finance growth through the economics of its player relationships rather than repeatedly selling ownership in the business. That doesn’t eliminate the need for equity, publishers or project financing, and I don’t think it should. It gives each source of capital a more specific role. Risk capital can fund invention, project capital can finance production, and cohort capital can support proven growth.
For game industry leaders, this introduces some practical questions about how they’re financing their businesses today. Are you using expensive equity to pay for marketing activity that has already demonstrated predictable returns? Are you borrowing against a player model that hasn’t been tested long enough to establish reliable economics? And does your organization understand cohort performance well enough to make informed decisions about which type of capital should fund the next stage of growth?
The new capital stack of play won’t make every game financeable, nor will it eliminate the uncertainty that has always been part of this industry. What it will do is create a clearer distinction between businesses that can demonstrate how they create, measure and retain player value and those that still rely on less predictable outcomes. As this financing model matures, that distinction could become increasingly important in determining which studios can access capital, what they’ll pay for it and how much ownership they’ll retain as they grow.
Find the book here: Durable Advantage: Five Pillars of the Modern Game Business
Sources
InvestGame Weekly Digest #43, 2026
Qiiwi Games: Strategic Growth Partnership with Plan A Games (August 19, 2026)
Unity and PvX Launch Partnership (Business Wire, October 27, 2026)
PocketGamer.biz: Unity Partners with PvX
mobilegamer.biz: Unity Partners with PvX
PvX Surpasses $250M in Commitments (December 2025)
PvX: Cohort Financing Secured by the Funded Cohorts
GamesBeat: Drake Star Q2 2026 Repo
