External payment links are legal now — what to do

For most of mobile gaming's history, "buy this" inside an app meant one payment path: the platform's own billing system, taking its own cut, with no legal way to point a player anywhere else. That constraint is gone in major markets now, and the question it leaves behind isn't "can we do this" — it's "should we, and for which players."

What changed, specifically

Court rulings stemming from major platform litigation now require app stores to permit developers to link out to external payment pages from inside an app — a real, in-app "buy elsewhere" button, not just a mention in an FAQ. Separately, under the EU's Digital Markets Act, designated platforms are required to permit alternative billing systems and external pricing links across the region, with fee structures shifting to a layered model where the final cost depends on the payment path, whether the user is new or existing, and how much platform infrastructure the transaction actually used. Japan's Mobile Software Competition Act, in force since December 2025, opened the door further still, enabling alternative marketplaces and third-party payment processing there too.

The net effect: in the US, EU, and Japan, a studio can now legally place a link inside its app that sends a player to a web checkout page the studio controls, processed by a payment provider the studio chose, at a fee structure the studio negotiated — instead of the platform's flat cut on every transaction.

Why this isn't an automatic yes

It's tempting to read "lower fees are now legal" as "route everything external immediately." That reasoning skips several real costs the platform fee used to cover invisibly.

The platform handled payment processing, fraud protection, refund logistics, and regional tax compliance as part of its cut. An external checkout page means the studio — or a payment partner it hires — now owns all of that directly. Refund disputes route through your support team and your payment processor's dispute process instead of the platform's built-in refund flow. Regional tax handling, which the platform absorbed as part of its infrastructure, becomes the studio's responsibility across every jurisdiction it sells into.

There's also a conversion cost to sending a player out of the app. Every additional step between "I want this" and "I have it" loses some percentage of players, even when the destination is trustworthy and the price is identical. A lower processing fee on a transaction that converts at a meaningfully lower rate than the in-app flow can net out worse than the platform's higher fee on a flow that just works.

The decision isn't all-or-nothing

The realistic shape of this decision for most studios is routing, not replacement. High-value transactions — a season pass, a large currency bundle, anything where the fee difference is meaningful in absolute dollars — are the strongest candidates for an external link, because the conversion-rate cost is spread over a bigger transaction and the fee savings are worth more in real terms. Small, impulse-driven purchases are the weakest candidates, because the friction of leaving the app costs more, proportionally, than the fee difference saves.

Player segment matters too. A returning player who already trusts the studio and has purchased before is a better candidate for an external flow than a first-time buyer making an impulse purchase inside a session — the trust gap that an unfamiliar external checkout page introduces is smaller for someone who's already spent money with you once.

What this changes in your architecture, not just your policy

Supporting an external payment path means your backend needs to reconcile purchases that arrive through a completely different channel than the platform's own purchase-verification API — a different receipt format, a different fraud signal set, a different refund-notification mechanism. If your entitlement and inventory systems assume every purchase event arrives shaped the same way the platform's IAP callback shapes it, an external checkout breaks that assumption the first time it's used.

This is also where analytics quietly goes wrong if it isn't planned for. A purchase made through an external link needs to be attributed to the same player record and cohort as an in-app purchase, or your revenue reporting starts undercounting real spend the moment external checkout volume becomes non-trivial. Tag the purchase path as a first-class field in your event schema from day one, not as a patch after the first reconciliation discrepancy shows up.

Compliance is regional, and it's not optional to track

The legal basis for external payment links differs by region — US court order, EU regulatory mandate, Japan's competition law — and the specific terms platforms attach to using them differ too. A studio operating globally needs to know, per region, whether external links are currently permitted, what disclosure requirements apply on the in-app link itself, and what fee structure the platform charges even on a transaction it didn't process, since some frameworks still apply a reduced fee to external transactions rather than none at all.

Treat this as a standing compliance check, not a one-time decision. The terms platforms attach to external payment links have changed multiple times already since the underlying rulings landed, and a studio that implements once and stops checking will eventually find itself out of compliance with an updated term it never saw.

Where to start

Don't build an external payment flow for your entire catalog on day one. Pick your highest-value, lowest-frequency purchase — a season pass or premium currency bundle — and route it through an external link for a subset of returning players, with clean tracking on conversion rate and net revenue per transaction against the in-app baseline. That gives you a real comparison instead of a policy debate, and it tells you whether the fee savings actually survive contact with real conversion behavior before you commit engineering time to a broader rollout.

If you're weighing web checkout against in-app purchase for the first time, see how gamemantra's holdout-based measurement applies the same rigor to a pricing-path decision as it does to any other offer test.