Making in-app purchases for social games just got a bit easier.
When it comes to Facebook’s social commerce platform, the site has managed to create an amazing system of monetization.
People are buying premium items in games, paying for bonus features, and spending money to increase the amount of time they can spend in the game. In other words, Facebook Credits is bringing in huge amounts of money for the social networking site, but it wants to go further.
As such, Facebook is rapidly expanding a new to pay to play. Through its newly launched mobile payments infrastructure, users will seamlessly be able to pay for digital Facebook currency by billing the purchase to their mobile carrier’s wireless bill.
So if you want to buy some more in-game currency, you can just tack it onto your Verizon – or AT&T, T-Mobile, 01, Orange, Three, Vodafone, etc) monthly bill.
This platform is designed specifically to work with apps that use the Facebook e-commerce system.
The point is that driving in-app purchases can be cumbersome – there are most likely very strong statistics to show that lots of people begin a purchase but then don’t want to complete the drawn-out forms on a mobile device.
Facebook has been an enormous part of accelerating the trend of free-to-play games, where users can download and play a game at no charge, but when they start getting addicted and need to advance further they end up being played for more money than they probably would have agreed to up front.
By making those transactions as easy as a couple button presses on a mobile device, that point will be even more salient.
