The Video Game Company That Learned to Sell Everywhere

There is a peculiar humiliation in losing a sale after the customer has already decided to buy. The product works. The price is acceptable. The buyer has arrived at checkout. Then the card form asks for a kind of payment they do not use. What looked like a global business becomes a local misunderstanding, compressed into a tiny error message.

Emergent Payments built a business around that moment. Its original name, Live Gamer, suggests a rather narrower ambition. Founded in 2007 by Andrew Schneider and Mitch Davis, it helped game publishers sell virtual goods to players around the world. A sword or a bag of coins may be imaginary; the money required to buy it is emphatically real. Games exposed the company to customers in markets where credit cards were hardly the default instrument of commerce.

The game was the rehearsal

Live Gamer lived in the awkward economics of virtual goods. One small transaction might be easy to dismiss; thousands of them demanded storefronts, payment processing, merchandising, analytics and customer support. In 2011, its technology handled virtual goods transactions for the Facebook game Civilization World. The company also worked with Asiasoft to let players in Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam buy Facebook Credits using @Cash, a prepaid product available through retailers and online. This was an expensive education: Live Gamer raised $24 million in its first financing in 2007 and another $8.5 million in 2011. The infrastructure to make small purchases routine was anything but small.

That partnership says more about the future Emergent Payments than a dozen abstract market reports. A player could want a digital object, have money for it, and still lack the card assumed by the platform. A prepaid card sold at a local shop bridged the gap. The lesson was not that every country needed more credit cards. It was that the checkout needed to understand the country.

The company’s management sold the Live Gamer microtransaction platform in 2014. In June 2015, Live Gamer relaunched as Emergent Payments, taking the payment expertise it had gained from games into wider digital commerce. Its flagship product was Pay+. At launch, the company advertised more than 200 payment methods across 180 territories, from cards and bank transfers to mobile payments, e-wallets and cash-based transactions. Those were company claims at the time, rather than a promise of present-day coverage.

“Credit cards are not the standard form of payment in many of these markets.”Andrew Schneider, co-founder and president, 2015

One integration; many small sovereignties

The Pay+ pitch was simple enough to fit on a sales slide: one merchant agreement and one point of integration. Its work lay in the details outside that slide. A merchant entering a new market might need to support a familiar local payment method, collect and remit tax, deal with foreign exchange, investigate fraud, manage chargebacks and get the proceeds home. Emergent packaged those jobs as a service for digital merchants rather than asking each merchant to assemble its own network of local providers.

The named clients at relaunch tell us who found this useful. Samsung said the team helped it launch applications in Southeast Asia. Daybreak Games and Wargaming.Net were also listed as clients. These are businesses selling digital experiences, where a failed payment is not a delayed shipment. It is usually a customer who has closed the tab.

This positioned Emergent among payment service providers serving international merchants. Its distinct origin was gaming, a business that had already learned to sell small digital items across borders. A merchant could instead build local payment connections itself or work with other cross-border providers. Emergent’s argument was that its mix of coverage, regulatory work and merchant support saved that effort. Public material does not establish a measurable cost advantage over competitors.

Nigeria was a better explanation than a slogan

In December 2016, Emergent announced a local office and payment offering in Nigeria. The release named the rails: Verve bank cards and Quickteller transfers. It also promised transactions in local currency, tax compliance and remittance in major currencies. There is a useful honesty in that list. “Expansion” sounds grand from headquarters; on the ground it means knowing which button a buyer expects to press and which rules the merchant must follow.

By March 2017, the company said it had also opened an office in Bangladesh during the preceding year. It announced more than $5 million in equity financing from existing investors and Responsible Gold Holdings LP, intended for market expansion, research and development, and payment-method optimization. Chief Payment Officer Rossini Zumwalt described the company as part of a merchant’s extended payments team. That is a service business as much as a software platform: someone has to understand the exception when a payment fails or a regulation changes.

The numbers were reported at different times and describe different things. They should not be treated as one continuously measured growth curve. Still, they show the shape of the company’s ambition: accumulate payment access, then make that complexity feel like one product to a merchant.

A larger umbrella

In January 2018, Emergent Payments announced that it was part of Emergent Technology Holdings. The group said the payments business operated across more than 60 high-growth markets and planned to extend its footprint and services. It also discussed a separate Responsible Gold supply-chain platform and a gold-backed token. Those initiatives belonged to the broader holdings company; the concrete record for Emergent Payments remains its merchant payments work.

The company’s path is a useful reminder that a niche can teach a general lesson. Game players buying virtual goods were early witnesses to a problem that would eventually confront any digital merchant with international customers. What failed first was often the payment, not the desire to buy. Live Gamer saw that failure repeatedly enough to make a new company out of it.

For a merchant, the copyable move is to examine abandoned checkouts by market before assuming demand is weak. Ask which local methods buyers use, what tax and currency rules apply, and whether the volume justifies a local integration or a partner. Where buyers already pay easily with a merchant’s existing setup, another intermediary has less work to do. Emergent Payments sold one answer: outsource much of that work through a single platform. Its story is less a tale of frictionless globalization than of the labor required to make one ordinary purchase go through.