Behind the Buy Button: How VaultN and Tebex Get a Game to a Player
The demand for games is huge. The work is in reaching players wherever they like to buy, and that list keeps growing. In August, we announced a partnership with Tebex that adds one more route: publishers using VaultN can now sell directly to their players through Tebex-powered storefronts (GamesBeat covered the announcement). It’s also a good example of how we built VaultN to work.
Every channel comes with its own work
Online stores, e-commerce platforms, influencers, streaming, loyalty and membership programmes, payment providers: players buy through all of them, and each one has its own requirements. Another integration to build, another set of price and promotion rules to keep in sync, another DRM or platform to supply keys for. Any one of those is manageable. Add several and the workload grows with every channel.
One integration, every channel
We built VaultN the other way around. We’re the tech layer between a publisher and the channels players buy through: a publisher integrates once and keeps a single vault, with inventory fulfilled on whichever DRM or platform they choose. Our aim is to connect that vault to every channel players buy through, with price, promotion and placement automated, so a new channel doesn’t add operational overhead on the publisher’s side. One vault, n channels, and n keeps growing.
Tebex brings direct-to-player
Through our partnership with Tebex, the game monetization and commerce platform and a division of Overwolf, publishers using VaultN can activate Tebex-powered storefronts and sell directly to their players. We provide the secure distribution and entitlement layer, and Tebex operates commerce, payments, and compliance, running the storefront end to end from checkout and payments through compliance and support.
“We’re obsessed with a simple idea: PC distribution that runs itself. Our job is to get publishers’ games on every channel - and direct-to-player is one of the most valuable channels there is. Partnering with Tebex makes that channel available to every publisher on VaultN, with the same automation and protection they already rely on,” says Julian Migura, COO at VaultN.
Going direct has historically meant building payment processing, tax handling, compliance, secure key delivery, and player support in-house. Now a publisher on VaultN can activate a Tebex storefront and begin selling to players directly, alongside the other channels they already use, while we issue keys and entitlements on demand at the point of sale.
“At Tebex, we act as an extension of the studio, removing the complexity of payments, compliance, and support so teams can focus on making great games. Going direct gives studios a closer relationship with their players and a clearer understanding of what they want and need, which is what drives greater trust and long-term value. Bringing Tebex to VaultN’s publishers means they can launch direct-to-consumer storefronts quickly and confidently, while we handle the commerce behind the scenes,” says Liam Wiltshire, Vice President and GM of Tebex.
What happens at the point of sale
On a retail storefront, a sale runs through our infrastructure in five steps, and the publisher doesn’t have to act on any of them. The player finds a game and adds it to the cart. We check the order against the publisher’s own rules, including retailer authorization, price, region and inventory. When the player completes the purchase, we retrieve a key or generate a direct entitlement on demand, and decryption happens only at fulfilment. We confirm fulfilment and report the sale back to the publisher in real time, key by key. The player gets a key or is entitled to the game directly, and it unlocks on the platform the publisher chose.
The direct-to-player route follows the same principle: we issue keys and entitlements on demand at the point of sale. Because keys are released on demand and only at fulfilment, publisher inventory stays under the publisher’s control instead of sitting in a channel, and grey-market protection works at the infrastructure level, on every channel.
Be where players are
Joe Kreiner, a distribution veteran who has seen every corner of the distribution maze, from scaling a major store to advising industry players, put the logic plainly when we talked to him: “The most important shift is already occurring, and that’s a default to shipping on all possible platforms… You have to go where the consumers are, and they all have a platform of choice.”
Tebex is one of many partners we work with to reach players, and each one makes the rest more valuable: more places for publishers to be found, more games for every channel to offer.