How Do Game Payouts Work? ZBD's CCO on 27 Steps

Games have spent two decades getting good at taking money from players. Gordon Thornton, Chief Commercial Officer at ZBD, argues the harder problem is everything after that: moving money around inside a game and paying people out. He says becoming a creator on one major game takes 27 steps, and every hurdle drops people out.

Thornton comes from PlayStation and now sells payment infrastructure for games. That makes him an interested party, so the figures below are his claims, not Player Driven's. The argument is still worth a studio's time.

Every extra step costs you creators

Thornton says that if you want to become a creator on one of the bigger games, you go through 27 steps, split between the game platform and a separate third-party payment platform. He does not name the game. His view, from running a store, is that every hurdle drops people out of the process, and the same holds for payouts as for checkout.

Whether it is four steps or seven, he says, the number of barriers changes the whole paradigm. ZBD's answer is to verify a creator through their bank account, since the bank has already done the identity work.

Money moves in three directions, and games only solved one

Thornton frames the missing piece as a money layer with three parts. Money in is the part games know: cash arrives through a platform or the game's own website, becomes virtual currency, then skins and passes. Money around is a wallet that holds dollars and virtual currency so players can trade items with each other. Money out is paying creators and contributors for what they add to the game.

His argument is that most studios have built the first and left the other two to corporate payment systems designed for other industries.

A sword in your locker is dead value

Give that item a dollar value, Thornton says, and it moves from intangible enjoyment to something a player can trade, and the game becomes stickier. He is candid that this is not a simple call. Whether to allow trading is a question about what a game is for, not about genre, and it trades progression purity for a new business model.

The $20 creator never gets paid

Thornton's example is the person in their garage making a first game who earns around $20. He says that person does not get paid out in any game, because most platforms set a payout floor near $100. ZBD built its platform from the bottom up for that long tail, and pays out at far lower amounts.

Roblox graduates will expect to be paid

One shift Thornton took from Gamescom is players graduating out of Roblox. They are used to creating and being rewarded for it, he says, and it will be interesting to see what they expect as they move into other live service games, whether that is the Roblox and Fortnite model or modding with contributions to creators.

Players notice when a payout feels off-brand

Thornton says studios spend years building a game's identity, then send creators through a long, intrusive process that ends on someone else's site. He expected cost to be the main concern when he started. Instead, he says, studios mostly ask how it feels for their player, which is why he argues the best version of a money layer is one players never see.

What studios should understand before they build

Asked for the one thing game teams should understand about payments before they start building, Thornton says to understand the money flow properly, including what comes in through platforms, where the platform takes its share. If you want loyalty and engagement, he says, this is a really important and untapped area.

He plans to come back in six to nine months with results from ZBD's launch. The company's address, per Thornton, is zbdpay.com.

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