12
Opportunity Areas
examined across the platform
$40M+
Annual Opportunity Identified
using conservative estimates
47
Sources Cited
each conclusion traceable
7
MoR Competitors
profiled in depth
Earlier this year, Tebex brought me in to look at their platform and help answer a hard question:
What should move first?
If you do not work in gaming payments, Tebex is a Merchant of Record (MoR). It handles the money behind purchases made in and around games. Over fourteen years they have built a strong position in game-server commerce and the storefronts attached to the communities around games like Minecraft. Tens of thousands of clients, billions processed, and a seat inside the Overwolf ecosystem alongside CurseForge.
This was never a turnaround. Tebex had a capable team, a profitable platform, and a roadmap that already reflected years of work with their clients. What they did not have settled was the order: which opportunities deserved attention first, which ones mattered more now that the market had moved, and which early calls would make the later work worth more. Mature platforms like this rarely have an idea problem. They have an ordering problem.
Why an outside read helped
Tebex knows their platform and their customers better than I ever could from the outside. They did not bring me in to replace that. They brought me in because I was not inside it.
My read came from the other side of the decision. I have spent years on the monetization architecture behind direct-to-consumer game commerce, including the web-store systems a major publisher ran (the work is here). That gave me a way to look at Tebex not just as a product, but as a platform a studio would have to choose, integrate, and lean on for years.
There is also a simpler reason an outside read helps: time and distance. A team running a live platform cannot put the roadmap down for weeks to read the whole competitive field, chase every public claim, and check which ones survive contact with evidence. An outside review has no history with anything on the list, so every idea gets weighed on what it is worth, not on where it came from.
An outside review has no history with anything on the list, so every idea gets weighed on what it is worth, not on where it came from.
A platform team sees the systems it has built, the constraints behind them, and the requests coming in from the customers it already has. A studio sees something else:
- What does this platform let us do that we cannot easily do alone?
- Where does it take friction off?
- What does it help us recover, automate, or actually understand?
- Which of these matters more as our direct relationship with players grows?
- Where might picking one provider over another quietly box us in later?
The research did not start cold. The first workshop with Nathan Holliday, Tebex’s Head of Product, and his team gave me the internal context to research correctly: where the platform had history, what customers kept asking for, which constraints were real. Without that grounding, an outside read is just guessing at which questions are worth asking.
From there I paired the studio-side read with a look across the Merchant-of-Record field: where customer expectations were shifting, which public claims were worth checking, and where Tebex’s position was stronger than its market visibility let on. The work spanned every facet of an MoR, including competitive positioning, and the order all of it should land in.
Finding things that could be enhanced was the easy part. The real task was working out which findings mattered now, which were already handled well enough, and which early move would make several of the others land better.
A collaborative decision
One claim in the research stood out. A competitor was advertising strong numbers on a piece of the checkout experience. From the outside, it looked like it exposed a real gap. A public comparison only goes so far: a competitor’s public positioning tells you what to go check, not what is actually true inside another platform. So the question went to Tebex instead of being asserted as a finding.
I brought that question back to Nathan and the team in our next workshop. Tebex was further along there than the outside view suggested; the capability existed and it worked. The competitive standard had moved, and the conversation clarified what was already in place, how much was still on the table, and whether that was enough to move the opportunity up.
The final priority was neither my first hypothesis nor the team’s existing assumption. Competitive research raised the question; Tebex’s internal knowledge changed the answer. The better priority came from having both in the room.
Competitive research raised the question; Tebex’s internal knowledge changed the answer.
The point of an outside lens is not to walk in already knowing the answer. It is to notice what deserves a fresh question, test it against the client’s reality, and improve the call when the evidence shifts. That is why this kind of engagement has to stay collaborative.
Why the order matters
The engagement kept pointing back at one thing about order: some capabilities matter mostly because they raise the return on several later investments. The best first move is not always the one with the largest value on its own.
Sign-on is one example. Carried cleanly, it removes friction at the moment of purchase and gives later features a player the platform already recognizes. Dropped, every feature that comes after pays that cost again.
This is not the same as a technical dependency. Tebex could build most of its candidates in any order, and nothing strictly requires sign-on to exist first. The argument for moves like this is leverage: doing one of them early makes the rest cheaper to build, more useful once they exist, or worth more across the platform. The question was not only what a move is worth on its own, but what gets easier, stronger, or more valuable if it happens first.
Doing one of them early makes the rest cheaper to build, more useful once they exist, or worth more across the platform.
What the outside cannot know
The financial side asked for the same discipline. I did not have every internal metric needed to put a hard number on each opportunity, and a precise-looking figure built on incomplete inputs would have made the analysis less credible.
Instead of a single number to take on faith, I built conservative, base, and aggressive scenarios around what could be responsibly supported, and defined the calculations Tebex could run on its own internal data. The questions became:
- Which internal metric actually sets the size of this opportunity?
- What would have to be true for the investment to pay back?
- What does the conservative case look like, and what changes under a stronger one?
- How does the value move when an improvement touches many sellers on the platform at once?
- Which move improves the economics of the later work?
The goal was not to hand Tebex a number to believe. It was to give the team a grounded way to reach its own.
The goal was not to hand Tebex a number to believe. It was to give the team a grounded way to reach its own.
| Input | Conservative | Base | Aggressive |
|---|---|---|---|
The outcome
The most useful result was not another document or a longer feature list. It was a clearer basis for deciding what deserved to happen first. The engagement helped separate kinds of opportunities that look alike on a list:
- Questions raised by changes out in the competitive market
- Areas where Tebex was already stronger than its profile suggested
- Improvements with direct value for the studios on the platform
- Capabilities whose importance came partly from what they would make possible later
- Worthwhile ideas that still did not deserve to displace a stronger first move
The workshops with Nathan and the team are what made those separations possible. Their experience showed where customer pain was persistent, where platform history changed what gaps actually meant, and where an external comparison needed better context before it could become a recommendation. My job was to bring the market, studio, and monetization views together. Theirs was the product knowledge no outside researcher could infer. The work was more accurate because both were there.
The sequence itself, what Tebex chose, in what order, on what timeline, stays out of this piece. That is theirs, and a client’s roadmap stays confidential here no matter how good it would look in a case study. What can be said is that the team finished the engagement with a clearer way to revisit the order as the market, the roadmap, and the evidence keep changing, and that is worth more than a longer feature list.
The sequence itself, what Tebex chose, in what order, on what timeline, stays out of this piece.
“The opportunity assessment from LootRate came in at exactly the right moment for us. It gave our leadership team a clear, evidence-based view of where the real opportunities sit and helped us prioritise with much more conviction than we would have had otherwise. Mario’s real-world experience allowed us to plan and prioritise our product direction with greater clarity and confidence.”
The order is the work
It is not enough to hypothesize and study the few ideas that already seem strongest. The field has to be broadened first: lay out every credible opportunity, grade it, put a rough ROI against each, and only then select what is most valuable now. That is the crux of the order conversation, and it is why the numbers on this page look the way they do.
Sequencing a platform like this is not untangling a dependency chain. A dependency chain tells you its own order: this cannot happen until that is done, read directly off the page. Almost nothing here worked that way. The strongest first move did not lead because everything else depended on it. It led because doing it first made the rest cheaper to build, more useful, or worth more once they arrived. Not what has to come first, but which first move buys the most value from everything that comes after.
Not what has to come first, but which first move buys the most value from everything that comes after.
Strong teams already have ideas: customer requests, roadmap candidates, technical opportunities, and competitive pressure. Sequencing them well is the harder problem, and the one worth solving.
Most of what leaks on a platform like this is not in the payment rail. It is in the store: the friction before the cart, the offer at the wrong moment. Finding that, and fixing it in the order that pays back fastest, is the work.