“Stash built us exactly the kind of bespoke webshop we needed to compete with other studios. And their efforts immediately had a massive revenue impact.”
— Phil Brook, Game Director at Modern Times Group (Hutch)
About
Hutch, a subsidiary of Modern Times Group (MTG), is a London-based free-to-play mobile games developer focused on racing and car culture. Since 2011, Hutch’s leading titles F1® Clash, Top Drives, and Rebel Racing have driven more than 300 million downloads, anchoring a broader portfolio of 13 games supported by world‑class IP licenses.
Challenge
Launching an Off-Platform Revenue Stream Without Sacrificing Game Authenticity
Through his years at category-leading studios like Zynga and Take-Two Interactive, Phil Brook has had a front-row seat to every shift in the mobile gaming monetization landscape. He’s watched the best DTC channels evolve from static storefronts to live monetization systems. So, when Phil joined Hutch as Game Director, he decided to stand up a live ops-driven webshop for one of its flagship games, F1® Clash.
Phil and his team knew the final product had to feel authentic to both the game and the culture of F1 itself. “Our goal is to make F1® Clash the very best way to experience the sport outside of the races,” Phil explains. “We’ll lose players if any part of the ecosystem doesn’t reflect that.”
While game-native UX across visuals and offer display was non-negotiable, the team also had to ensure the offers themselves were as dynamic and personalized as the in-game experience. For example, a bundle featuring a driver who’d just won a Grand Prix would be irrelevant a week later. Or, if a bundle containing beginner-tier parts was served to a veteran player, it’d be unlikely to convert.
What Phil needed was a way to push live ops updates, apply segmentation rules, and run pricing experiments across both the game and the webshop—without maintaining separate systems.
The team’s to-do list didn’t stop at optimizing the player experience. They understood that operating an owned payment channel comes with steep tax obligations, increased fraud liability, and complex payment regulations. And because many offers in F1® Clash’s catalog carry legally mandated odds disclosures, each one surfaced in the webshop had to meet strict, game-specific regulations. “Without the compliance guardrails, the range of offers we can make is severely limited,” Phil shares.
The bespoke DTC webshop Phil imagined couldn’t be purchased off the shelf. To earn player trust and capture share of wallet, he and his team needed a partner who could own the end-to-end build and stick around to help him scale it.
The team evaluated multiple DTC payments providers for their scalability, industry reputation, and core DTC infrastructure. Stash stood out across these areas and seemed a natural fit for F1® Clash.
“Building a DTC channel was a major growth opportunity for us, but we had to get it right. To build a scalable storefront that actually felt authentic to the F1 community, we needed to find the right partner.”
Solution
A Bespoke, Game-Native Webshop, Backed by a Full-Service Merchant of Record
The Stash team worked diligently to bring the F1® Clash webshop to life. Throughout onboarding, they collaborated with the F1® Clash team to align on the storefront design and iterate on mocks, while tackling the full engineering lift. Soon, Hutch had launched what Phil calls a big step towards “the fully integrated, all-singing, all-dancing webshop of our dreams.” And it immediately started generating more revenue than a static webshop ever could.
Today, this live ops-driven storefront seamlessly extends the F1 world players already know—from its game-native visuals and offer display to its constantly refreshed seasonal content.
Thanks to a direct API connection to F1® Clash’s game backend, the Hutch team surfaces offers from the same catalog as the game. Players don’t even have to create a new account to access them. They can sign in with their existing credentials and check out with their saved payment methods.
This integration makes it easy for the team to tailor offers to each player’s progression stage, spending behavior, and engagement pattern, in addition to the rhythms of the real F1 season. The webshop’s ability to adjust to real-time events and behaviors keeps it consistently relevant, naturally pulling players toward value-driven bundles and offers over raw currency.
If Phil and his team ever suspect that an approach isn’t resonating, they can tweak directly in the backend, and the changes go live on the webshop in minutes. “Knowing we can undo anything without extra engineering work gives us the confidence to be bold with our offer strategy,” he shares.
But the real peace of mind runs deeper than operational flexibility. As Hutch’s Merchant of Record, Stash absorbs the full compliance burden: tax remittance, fraud protection, odds disclosures, and transaction-level audit trails. This ensures every offer Hutch runs on this DTC channel is automatically compliant with all payment and gaming regulations across every market F1® Clash operates in and currency it accepts.
With the foundational DTC infrastructure already in place, Phil’s team continues to effortlessly expand their offer catalog. And as the webshop creates more targeted engagement opportunities, the share of players choosing to spend their time and money there climbs too.
Behind this compounding growth is Stash’s hands-on team. Whether Phil wants to make a minor UX fix or overhaul offer organization, Stash remains closely involved through every evolution of Hutch’s DTC strategy.
“The level of care that Stash put into our webshop is unparalleled. From the UX to the offers, everything about it feels like a true extension of the F1® Clash game.”
Results
Hutch Boosts Month-to-Month First-Time DTC Buyer Count by 240%
With Stash, Hutch launched a tailor-made DTC channel, with:
- A unified live ops infrastructure across the game and webshop
- Game-native UX
- Personalized offers tied to player behavior and real-world F1 events
- Full compliance and payment abstraction via a Merchant of Record
Even better, Stash makes it easy for Phil’s team to rapidly experiment and iterate, without adding any engineering overhead.
The results quickly validated the investment:
- 5x increase in daily DTC gross revenue
- 200% increase in month-to-month DTC revenue growth
- 240% increase in month-to-month first-time DTC buyer count
- 230% increase in month-to-month unique DTC purchasers count
What’s next? The team are actively working with Stash to launch both a loyalty program and an in-game checkout solution for F1® Clash. The goal is to expand the channel from a monetization play into a deeper engagement and retention driver.
“Stash adds features and ups their service quality at a rate I’ve never seen from incumbents. We love working with them so much that we plan to engage them for multiple titles in our portfolio.”
