A new virtual goods payment method avoids the need for credit cards by employing a different, and widely-available, form of plastic: prepaid calling cards.

San Francisco-based Zeus Research, which says it specializes in "innovative prepaid card solutions," has partnered with New York-based STi Prepaid, a nationwide retail and online seller of calling cards. Zeus says STi's existing cards, of which the company sells some 200 million a year across 200,000 retail outlets, can be used to pay for virtual goods in games whose developers have implemented the Zeus API.

The deal is likely aimed at two specific groups of consumers: those who are unwilling to use credit cards online out of security concerns, and those too young to have their own credit cards. Traditionally, the use of credit cards in online payments has served as a de facto enforcement of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which defines a "child" as an individual under the age of 13.

"Having seen the issues and opportunities in virtual currency first hand, we spent the year building a service which would be simple for a player to use, quick for a publisher to integrate, and which would provide a massive and instant increase in retail outlets to complement the current payment options," said Zeus founder Sean Ryan in a statement.

"By partnering with leading prepaid calling card company STi Prepaid, we open up an entirely new set of local retail outlets for virtual currency card purchases, which will drive this exciting sector even higher."

Zeus plans to launch the service in March, with program partners to be announced then.

Casual game developer PlayFirst has hired Mitali Pattnaik, previously a social gaming executive at Electronic Arts, to serve as its general manager.

The San Francisco-based studio, developer of games including Diner Dash and Chocolatier, says Pattnaik will drive PlayFirst's social gaming efforts.

Although PlayFirst has released games to social platforms like Facebook, it has traditionally operated mainly in the standard casual sphere of download- and portal-based games. Pattnaik's hire marks a clearer move into the emerging social gaming space.

"Social platforms are a natural fit for PlayFirst," said PlayFirst CEO Mari Baker in a statement. "We have a history of publishing best-selling games for women, and can mine our catalog of great IP to bring well-known brands to the social platform. We are already seeing a large crossover factor between our traditional PC download customers and those playing on Facebook and we expect this trend to continue."

As head of marketing for Electronic Arts' social games group, Pattnaik headed up the launch of The Sims 3's online virtual goods store. She has also served in marketing and management capacities at Yahoo! and Microsoft.

Baker said Pattnaik's experience in online monetization will be of key importance in her new role.

Information on professional networking site LinkedIn suggests Pattnaik has been working at PlayFirst since November of last year -- the same month Electronic Arts acquired social developer Playfish.

Free Realms, Sony Online Entertainment's youth-targeted free-to-play PC MMO, has reached a milestone of eight million unique user registrations, the publisher announced today.

Developed by SOE's San Diego headquarters, Free Realms launched April 28 of last year, giving it an average monthly registration rate of nearly 900,000. The game is free to download and play, with an optional paid subscription conferring various bonuses, as well as in-game microtransactions.

Registrations seem to have slowed somewhat since their peak growth: the game had accrued two million registrations a month after launch and five million three months after launch, meaning its average monthly registration count since last August is approximately 500,000.

Sony did not indicate the size of the game's current active player base.

"Free Realms is more than just a virtual world for our players; it is a portal for imagination," said SOE president John Smedley in a statement. "Our job as developers is to listen to and predict what they want and give them the tools that inspire and compel them to share their experiences with eight million others."

Free Realms was nominated for this year's Best New Social/Online Game award at the Game Developers Choice Awards, to be held on March 11 during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

World of Warcraft operations in China have apparently hit yet another roadblock as operator NetEase has suspended new user registrations while it applies for a license to operate the Burning Crusade expansion pack.

In the midst of its transition from operator The9 -- a switch made by Activision Blizzard in order to obtain a more favorable royalty rate -- WoW operations in China have become tangled in a power struggle between two different government groups that differ on how to regulate online game content. As a result, the game saw a long closed beta and two months of downtime in the region last year before it was at last allowed to re-launch.

Now, according to Reuters, NetEase has decided to re-apply to the General Administration of Press and Publication for a license to operate The Burning Crusade, and will disallow new registrations for a week from Monday, ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday.

China's Ministry of Culture first approved WoW's relaunch in September 2009, having taken over some of the relevant regulatory responsibilities. However, many of those responsibilities remain the province of GAPP, which demanded the first suspension after claiming the relaunch was greenlit without its input. NetEase has always maintained it never violated any regulations.

Chinese regulators have become increasingly concerned over "undesirable content" in online games. Among the edits made to WoW to allow its launch in China were the replacement of bone piles with sandbags and a color change of enemy blood from red to a vague black mist.

The Chinese government is also cracking down in particular on foreign investments in its burgeoning online game industry, which is expected to grow 30 to 40 percent to $4 billion this year. GAPP has stipulated foreign companies "cannot control or participate in domestic game-operating businesses indirectly through another investment company, signed agreements or by supplying technical support."

In our latest employment-specific round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in big sister site Gamasutra's industry-leading game jobs section this week, including positions from Black Rock Studio, Blizzard and more.

Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.

It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and more.

Some of the notable jobs posted this week include:

Black Rock Studio: Lead Vehicle Artist
"When a company the size of Disney steps into European development, it's pretty big news. Disney employs over 100,000 staff. It’s one of the biggest Entertainment companies in the world and it's getting serious about original games. We're a strong studio of just over a hundred people, based at the heart of beautiful and cosmopolitan Brighton, UK. Just a quick train ride away from London in an office where pretty much everyone gets a sea view. The atmosphere is relaxed and friendly but focussed and our role is to create original racing game franchises."

CCP China: Senior Programmer
"CCP, makers of the largest game universe in existence, is looking for a Senior Engineer to be a part of the creative team that brought the world the groundbreaking MMO title, EVE Online. Successful applicants will join a seasoned team based in Shanghai, China where they will work on original games for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3."

Continue reading "Round-Up: Gamasutra Network Jobs, Week Of Feb 5" »

Portable avatar service and virtual world WeeWorld has launched WeeMee Avatar Creator, a new application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that allows users to create and display customized WeeMee avatars on their handset.

More than 33 million users have registered to create WeeMees since the service launched in 2002. Those members can customize different clothes, accessories, hobbies and more for their avatars, and then bring those characters into social networks, blogging sites, instant messaging platforms, email signatures, mobile phones, and more due to WeeWorld's open platform.

Developed in conjunction with Toronto studio Smallmedium, the iPhone app features a built in WeeMee editor to create, edit, and save avatars. They can use then assign those WeeMees as visual caller ID images for their friends through the embedded address book. They can also save WeeMees to the Photos app and use as wallpapers, send through email, or use on services like Facebook and Twitter.

"Now Apple iPhone and iPod touch users have the opportunity to be creative and have fun making digital identities for themselves and their friends," says WeeWorld COO Lauren Bigelow. "We already have 33 million people around the globe who are passionate about their WeeMees, and we are thrilled to welcome the iPhone and iPod touch users to that community."

You can see screenshots from the WeeMee Avatar Creator iPhone application below:

Continue reading "WeeWorld Brings WeeMee Avatar Creator To iPhone" »

Paris-headquartered microtransaction company Hi-Media Payments announced the opening of a new San Francisco office, as well as plans to bring its Allopass micropayments platform to the North Aemrican market. The new branch, Hi-media USA, will be headed by CEO Pooj and will service U.S. customers and their clients. Its initial U.S. customers include Artix Entertainment, Gambit, gWallet, and Sometrics.

Hi-Media works with a variety of companies that sell virtual goods or digital content such as social networks, dating sites, streaming media firms, and developers of social games, MMOs, and virtual worlds. Its Allopass platform currently processes over eight million transactions per month. It supports nine different payment methods like credit cards, mobile payments, home phone billing, and third-party prepaid cards.

The company offers localized payment methods, which it says reduces or avoids friction in the checkout process, leading to higher completion rates and generating more paying customers than credit cards alone. Hi-Media also claims that Allopass is the only micropayment platform that offers merchant settlement in less than ten days, which it says is "a significant advantage" for companies that can't afford to wait up to 60 days to get paid.

"We know micropayments," says Preena, "and after almost a decade working with thousands of online merchants around the world, we have a firm understanding of what it takes to make payments friction-free while offering merchants more options along with fast and efficient payback."

Along with announcing new alternative payment partners, indie game portal Kongregate revealed that Playmage's Dream World, the first social game to use its Konduit Application Platform for community/monetization features, attracted over one million gameplays.

The Konduit Application Platform enables developer to tap into Kongregate features like leaderboards, virtual goods, profiles, and chat from their own backend using Javascript, Actionscript, or REST APIs. It's a similar setup to what social game developers have used on other platforms like Facebook; Kongregate believes that offering the same architecture helps establish itself as an alternative to casual titles on social networks, or as a social site for core gamers.

Just two weeks after Playmage ported Dream World from Facebook to Kongregate -- the developer integrated Konduit into the title in less than one week -- the social RPG received more than one million gameplays with a CPM (cost per thousand) of $20 and an ARPPU (average revenue per paying user) of $26. Kongregate attributed the game's success to its integration of the platform's achievements system to pull in hundreds of thousands of players looking to earn badges.

They company also revealed several new payment method partners from the social gaming market: mobile payments provider Zong, offer-based ad network Offerpal, and PlaySpan's prepaid card Ultimate Game Card. Kongregate also plans to to add European partners later this month like prepaid card PaySafe and other payment options through PayByCash.

Based in San Francisco and founded in 2006, Kongregate receives more than one million game plays a day and adds around one thousand new titles to its portal each month. The site enjoys an audience of more than eight million unique users worldwide, 85 percent of which are young males. While its games are free to play, many premium titles allow players to purchase virtual goods with real world money through its microtransaction platform Kongregate Kreds.

"Free-to-play web MMOs and strategy games are a rapidly growing $500 million market, and yet the largest, most popular social networks are unable to address the needs of this large and important demographic of hardcore players – 13 to 34," says Kongregate CEO and co-founder Jim Greer.

"These games tend to be more complex and require a higher level of skill to play them, and existing social platforms are simply unsuitable for the more sophisticated, hardcore gaming experiences," he continues. "Konduit brings together our community of millions of players with the architecture necessary to deliver the robust social features that benefit both the developer and player – Dream World exemplifies this."

Just a couple months after migrating launching a standalone site for mega-hit FarmVille, social game developer Zynga has further expanded the popular farming sim beyond Facebook to Microsoft's MSN Games portal.

As with the FarmVille.com version of the casual title, the MSN Games edition uses Facebook Connect so that players can still interact with the 76+ million FarmVille players on the social network. The version on the portal will still pull from users' information from Facebook even though it's no longer hosted on a separate site.

Though Zynga plans to bring more of its Facebook titles to MSN Games and Windows Live Messenger later this year, the San Francisco-headquartered developer did not specify which games it has in mind. The studio's popular social games include Cafe World (30.2 million users on Facebook), FishVille (25.3 million), Texas HoldEm Poker (25.3 million), and Mafia Wars (24.7 million).

"Social gaming has gone mainstream," says Zynga's Games SVP Mike Verdu. "People love to connect with their friends through our games, which are broadly accessible and have universal themes. Bringing FarmVille to a major site like MSN Games is a great way to expand the reach of social games and is a logical next step in how we deliver them to consumers."

“As hundreds of millions of customers continue to enjoy social gaming, we’re excited to partner with Zynga to add FarmVille to our broad portfolio of games on MSN Games," adds Microsoft's Windows Gaming general manager Mike Ybarra, according to a report from Social Times.