Neon

🚨Google was just hit with a $1B fine for abusing its power in Europe, including for its restriction of alternative payments. 📣 Relevant excerpt from the notice: “Under the DMA, app developers that distribute their apps via Google Play should be able to inform customers – free of charge – of alternative, often cheaper, offers, and to direct them to those offers to make purchases, for example on websites or alternative app stores. The Commission found that Google failed to comply with that obligation. In particular, Google prevents app developers from freely communicating and promoting offers and concluding contracts with users in distribution channels of their choice, including third-party app stores. While Google can receive a fee for facilitating the initial acquisition of a new customer by an app developer via Google Play, the level of the steering-related fees charged by Google and the length of the charging period for these fees went beyond what is considered compliant with the DMA. The Commission has ordered Google to bring the non-compliance to an end. Google must implement measures to allow app developers distributing their apps via Google Play Store, both technically and contractually, to freely communicate, promote offers and conclude contracts with users not only within but also outside the Google Play app store. The fines imposed today on Google take into account the gravity and duration of the non-compliance.

Merchants Eye gets it 💡 “Neon Commerce is making a high-stakes play to dismantle the "gatekeeper" economy in gaming. By focusing on gaming commerce infrastructure that prioritizes publisher autonomy over platform fees, they are hitting a massive pain point for developers tired of the 30% app store tax. This $13M round, backed by a heavyweight like KRAFTON, suggests the industry is finally ready to move from simple payment links to sophisticated, sovereign commerce ecosystems.”

“Neon provides branded webshops, checkout, global payments, and merchant-of-record services designed specifically for games. The proposition is straightforward: publishers should be able to sell directly to players without having to build a multinational payments, tax, fraud, compliance, and support operation from scratch. The larger signal is about ownership. As alternative purchase flows become more viable, game companies are treating direct commerce as a core revenue and customer-data channel, not a side project hidden behind a promotional button.” Great analysis DevCuration !

Our own Chris Faught sat down with fintech and commerce luminary Karen Webster to discuss our Series A and vision for the future. In her own words... "If that arc sounds familiar, it should. It’s the eCommerce playbook, run in fast-forward. A brand starts out selling on Amazon because Amazon has the traffic. Then it stands up its own storefront. Then, over time, it builds the muscle to run its own customers, its own payments and its own distribution across a dozen channels at once. Gaming is now speed-running that same graduation. The trap is graduating straight into a new dependency. Traditional merchant-of-record providers will happily take payments, taxes, compliance and the rest of global commerce off a publisher’s plate. In doing so, plant themselves right between the publisher and the player, in the exact seat the app store used to occupy."

Today we're proud to announce our $13M Series A, and welcome KRAFTON Inc. as both an investor and partner alongside returning investors A16Z GAMES and Renegade Partners. This support is validation of our two fundamental beliefs at Neon. First, that the future of games belongs to publishers and their players, not intermediaries and their app stores. And second, that this future only takes shape if publishers own the relationships and economics that make it theirs. Before Neon, publishers faced a hard choice: build a global payments and commerce operation themselves, or hand their players to a new middleman whose very business model depends on owning them. Choose the latter, and nothing changes. We'll be right back where we started, except with one more app store at the table. We started Neon because someone had to build the alternative. We give publishers strategic autonomy over their players, their data, and their economics, while running the pipes and managing the operational load. No ulterior motives or black boxes, just the infrastructure and expertise to help you succeed. To our investors, our team, and the publishers building with us: onward.

Today is a historic date in the Epic Games vs Apple / Google Play saga for two reasons, but Neon's two key points for publishers remains the same. ❓What's happening❓ 1️⃣ Google Play opens external payments in the US, UK, and Europe under its new fee structure, in which it splits its "service fee" from its "billing fee". 💡 Insight → Google will levy a 20-25% "service fee" on purchases that happen in-app AND app-to-web, such that most developers will pay 30% for in-app purchases, or ~25% for app-to-web purchases depending on their MoR. 2️⃣ Today marks the first time the Supreme Court of the U.S. has agreed to hear Apple's appeal in its fight with Epic, but it's been brought in to resolve a very specific question: what fee, if any, can Apple charge on app-to-web purchases? 💡 Insight → Until the ruling is finalized (~mid-2027), there is no fee on app-to-web purchases for iOS in the US. ❓ What do we do❓Neon's guidance to publishers: 🔍 Prioritize reach + data > fee savings. The power of A2W is giving as many players as possible an onramp to your ecosystem. Even if fee savings erodes, the long-term value comes from converting unknown users to known players. ⏳  Move fast. On iOS in the US, the fee savings are real while the rate sits at 0%. Every month you wait is money left on the table, and a missed chance to start moving players toward your own web channels. The longer this runs, the more those habits set in, and habituation is the part that compounds. #dtc #mobilegames #appstores #payments #ecommerce https://lnkd.in/gPGQe_6h

Tune into the MRC | Merchant Risk Council VAMP virtual summit tomorrow, June 9, where our payments risk expert Maxime Regh will be tackling one of the key questions in payments right now: are dispute tools still worth the investment after the recent Visa Rules changes? Proud to see Neon's perspective represented alongside panelists from Adobe and Whitepages, bringing a fast-growing startup's voice to the conversation on fraud prevention and chargeback strategy. Time: 7:45-8:55 PM GMT+2 (10:45-11:55 AM PT / 1:45-2:55 PM ET) Registration Link: https://lnkd.in/gjnCq-e5

How might we make a distributed group actually feel like a team? Last month, we found one answer - different starting points, same finish line. The Neon team is spread across the world, and with that comes a palette of personalities, perspectives, and yes, competitive spirits. We brought everyone under one theme: video games in real life. San Francisco annihilated the go-kart track. Let’s just say, our resident F1 superfan lived up to every expectation. The rest of us are still recovering. New York struck the bowling lanes. Our winner scored twice as many points as everyone else - and still insisted it was never about winning. Humility at its finest. Remote joined from Manchester, London, Germany, Ukraine, and beyond. Time zones were not going to stop them. They went head to head in a virtual word battle, and turns out, the ones who are seemingly soft spoken have the strongest voice. Different cities, one team. Our best wins are shared ones. #neonteam #toinfinityandneon

While every Friday at Neon looks different, there's one thing that always stays the same. Pizza Fridays have become one of our favorite traditions. A shared meal, good company, and the kind of conversations that remind us there are curious humans behind the work. We're people who take what we do seriously, but never ourselves too seriously. Since we started, Pizza Fridays have taken us places - from our San Francisco homebase, to the best pizza city in the world (yes, New York), to a sunny picnic toasting another month well spent. Oh, and it just so happens today is National Pizza Party Day! We’d say we planned this, but honestly, Pizza Fridays have always been the plan. What’s your team’s version of Pizza Friday? 🍕 #neonteam #pizzafridays #toinfinityandneon

Stripe Sessions 2026 confirmed something we've been seeing from the ground up: the payments infrastructure layer for digital commerce is being fundamentally rebuilt. Here's what it means for game publishers. The Merchant of Record (MoR) model is becoming table stakes, and depth is the differentiator. Stripe's launch of Managed Payments as a generally available MoR solution is a signal that global reach is no longer the bar. For game publishers, what matters is local payment method coverage, gaming-specific compliance, and a platform that understands how games are actually monetized. General-purpose MoR solutions are catching up on geography. They're not catching up on gaming. Game publishers have been dealing with offer exploitation, multi-accounting, and bonus stacking long before the payments industry started talking about upstream fraud prevention. Stripe Sessions put a spotlight on this shift with Radar's expansion into free trial and promotional abuse prevention. We've been working through what that looks like natively inside a gaming payments platform because our publishers need it, not because it's becoming an industry trend. Getting publishers paid reliably in markets where traditional banking rails are slow or unreliable is a problem we work on every day. Stripe's announcement of stablecoin payouts reaching 160 markets by year-end is validation that this is no longer a future bet. We're actively evaluating where stablecoin rails create genuine value for gaming publishers and where the friction still outweighs the benefit. Gaming economies are already among the most complex commerce environments on the internet. Virtual goods, real-time entitlements, player wallets, cross-border transactions at scale. Stripe Sessions made clear that the major platforms are building agentic commerce infrastructure now. We think gaming is the most interesting proving ground for what that actually looks like in practice, and we're working with that assumption today. At Neon, our job is to stay ahead of these shifts so our publishers don't have to. If any of this connects to challenges you're thinking through, we'd like to hear from you. #gaming #gamingpayments #merchantofrecord #payments #StripeSessions