Don’t ask the folks who built the game Candy Crush Sage into a multi-billion-dollar company whether Apple is a payments company. They know the answer is already yes.

Today, King Digital Entertainment PLC, the company behind Candy Crush Saga and Pet Rescue Saga, among other games, filed for an initial public offering, and central to the IPO and the company’s future is payments. That is, payments at Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook.

There is no debate at King about the role of payments and the Big 4 consumer tech companies. King knows where its cash comes from:

We rely on third-party platforms such as the Apple App Store, the Google Play Store, the Amazon Appstore and Facebook to distribute our games and collect revenue. If we are unable to maintain a good relationship with such platform providers, if their terms and conditions or pricing changed to our detriment, if we violate, or if a platform provider believes that we have violated, the terms and conditions of its platform, or if any of these platforms were unavailable for a prolonged period of time, our business will suffer.

In 2012 and 2013, we derived a majority of our revenue from distribution of our games on the Apple App Store, the Google Play Store, the Amazon Appstore and Facebook, and most of the virtual items we sell are purchased using the payments processing systems of these platform providers.

That “majority of revenue” — of more than $1.8 billion of total revenue — led to King paying out more than $560 million to those companies in payment processing fees in 2013. King had 324 million unique users worldwide in December 2013.

King, which generates much of its revenue by selling “durable” virtual goods in its games, marks a new trend in gaming: “app stores as key distribution and payment gateways.”

Mobile platforms and social networks have opened their platforms to developers, transforming the distribution and consumption of digital content. Developers can now distribute applications (apps) to a global audience and refresh these with regular content and feature updates. Key distribution platforms such as the Apple App Store, the Google Play Store, the Amazon Appstore and Facebook provide integrated payment systems. These allow users to make frequent small purchases in a convenient way using trusted infrastructure. According to Gartner, mobile app stores total downloads worldwide are expected to reach 268 billion and $77 billion in total revenue worldwide by 2017.

In other words, companies like King are emblematic of the rapid growth in mobile gaming – I can’t recall the last time I was on a New York subway and I did not see someone playing Candy Crush Saga – but that growth is being channeled through the major social mobile platforms. And away from traditional financial services companies. King has tapped into something that some FIs continue to disbelieve: the emergence of the mobile digital life. That Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook are central to this should offer a clarion call to anyone wondering which ventures will control payments in the not-too-distant future.

Learn more about what’s next in banking at Bank Innovation 2014 on March 3-4 in Seattle. Request an invitation here.