[This post originally appeared on Adrian Crook’s Freetoplay.biz site.]
Speaker:
Deborah Liu, Manager of Product Marketing, Facebook
DEBORAH
Benefits of FB Credits for users
- Familiar payment experience
- Unified virtual currency – more demand for that currency, more money put into system
- Secure place to store payment info – overhead of mental energy incurred entering multiple payment info is a drag on economy – takes friction out of process
- New ways to pay and earn – if we add a gift card, it’s available across all games
Mahjong Dimensions Example
- Buy 2x boost – you have sufficient credits – make purchase… no pulling out credit card, etc. Just use your stored balance.
Millionaire City Example
- Buy millionaire gold… need to buy FB credits… Visa card is stored, I make payment instantly and get my gold
Benefits for developers
- Reduced payment friction – in the discretionary goods space you want to remove as much friction as possible
- Seamless integration with Facebook platform – we don’t want the 6th person a 5 person team hires to be a payment processing person.
- Users with stored payment methods – no hump that user needs to get over to give you their payment info in a new game… if someone has spent before, FB has their info. 5-10x greater monetization among users that already have a stored payment method (whether that is FB Credits or your own cross-game method).
- More payers
Where are FB Credits now?
- 200+ games and applications
- 75+ developers
- 22 of the top 25 games
- More than half of all game experiences
Arkadium and Digital Chocolate introduced:
Jessica from Arkadium
- Have 5 games on FB, use FB Credits as their exclusive hard currency
- Wanted seamless integration experience for our users, payment process to be easy
- As a developer, Credits API easy to work with
- Our players are very casual gamers – we didn’t want to confuse them with multiple types of hard currencies
A couple ways they’ve integrated FB Credits
- Changed Mahjong Dimensions to a 1 minute play experience… needed to add ways to enhance game experience
- Social aspect of game is leaderboard
- We introduced Game Boosts… highly consumeable… score multipliers, etc.
- Found users are very very willing to pay to have these boosts in their gameplay
- With a game called Ultimate Fan, we wanted to experiment with purchasing a virtual item like a plane or blimp or snowman that will give you an entry into a sweepstakes (you can also do it for free with a soft currency)
- We launched it last week and it was very successful
- Also implemented Credits via the purchase of downloadable casual games – with Solitaire Heaven, we offer users the ability to download any of our solitaire games and play them offline. In traditional casual downloadable space we’d lose 50-60% of the sale to distributor. In FB, we only lose 30%.
- Final example is Writer’s Blox – we offered the ability for users to subscribe for additional puzzles
Lessons learned working with credits:
- Price premium items in Credits only – when offered a chance to buy something with soft currency, players do anything to avoid paying
- Set price anchors so buyers have a reference point – set initial prices and leave for a month or so, then offer a pack of those items for slightly less so they can understand it’s a deal for them
- Keep content fresh – retire items, introduce new items weekly or daily, place things on sale
- Make items valuable and consumeable – address a pain point, nothing evergreen (buying it once and having it forever means they are less likely to buy again), advance gameplay
Thomas from Digital Chocolate
- Started in 2003 as mobile games developer
- Put out over 1M SKUs per year… #1 publisher on iPhone with 80 titles last year
- Moved into social gaming 18 months ago
- Grown to 15M MAU, 2.5 DAU across their FB titles
- #6 social company by DAU
Why Credits?
- Trusted partner
- Universal payment interface
- Single point of contact for payments
- Resources shifted from payments to games
Lessons Learned
- UI Flow
- Pre-educate Credits
Results
- Superior revenue (graph shows revenue before and after FB Credits implementation – goes up after implementaiton) 🙂
- Increased ARPPU
The future
- VIP Games Network – has over 8M DAU – all partners use FB Credits. Much higher ARPU and significant conversion.
- A localized purchasing experience – really important given FB’s international reach.
- Deeper integration – working on FB stored value cards for holiday season.
- SaaS interoperability – Mobile, etc – FB Credits everywhere.
Back to Deborah
- Opening up FB Credits to more developers.
- Starting today, we can on-ramp 3-4x as many developers every week as we’ve been bringing on in the last 6 months.
- Hope to work through backlog in developer applications over the next few weeks.
- Go to developer.facebook.com/credits to apply
- Announcement #2: Increasing payment options and increasing liquidity in the system
- More than 20 new ways for people to pay for Facebook Credits through partnership with PlaySpan
- International markets very important – new payment methods will capture some of those
- Should open up more audiences for developers who work with FB Credits
