PlaySpan Partners With Spil, Shares Casual Game Monetization Strategy

Online game monetization platform PlaySpan revealed a partnership with Spil Games to provide users of the casual gaming portal network the ability to purchase premium content through PlaySpan's Digital Goods Monetization 2.0 Platform and UltimatePay service. Headquartered in the Netherlands, Spil provides online casual games through 45 game sites localized in 17 languages worldwide, reaching over 115 million visitors each months. Under its new agreement with PlaySpan, the developer can allow players to buy virtual goods and in-game cash for free-to-play casual titles in their local currency using one of 85 global payment methods. PlaySpan recognizes that while the free-to-play model has enjoyed much popularity in the social gaming space, online casual games haven't enjoyed the same success. The firm's chief executive Karl Mehta argued, "So far casual games have not adopted the virtual economy model correctly for mass audience casual games. Spil Games and PlaySpan will be the first to bring this new capability to the mass market." "Casual games have been monetized primarily through advertising and/or paid download leveraging the 'try before you buy' model," PlaySpan's CEO explained to Gamasutra. "For the first time, PlaySpan’s platform provides the free-to-play/pay-for-stuff model with a 'cross-game' microtransaction capability." The company, which offers an Ultimate Game Card product with support for more than a thousand online games, recently commented on the "brisk adoption and usage of prepaid cards". PlaySpan believes that rapid growth will extend to consumers looking for an alternate payment method to buy digital goods in casual games, too. "Pre-paid cards have great appeal for casual game players as well," said Mehta. "There is a huge youth demographic and large segment of female players who prefer to play and pay with pre-paid cards." The CEO also commented on his company's own recent growth: "PlaySpan is growing rapidly worldwide and is driven by the adoption of our platform by the top publishers and platform providers in every category. Recent partnership announcements with Adobe and Changyou are just a few examples of over 1000+ games and platforms sites PlaySpan powers." "Our publisher and platform partners also benefit from PlaySpan’s 'network effect' as a common monetization platform to help publishers and developers monetize at a higher ARPU (average revenue per user) with more paid users with lower fraud rates," Mehta added.