Inside Social Games

Mobile payment company Zong announced yesterday that it has partnered with Outspark to bring its payment service to Outspark games. Outspark, an online multiplayer game publisher whose titles include Fiesta, Wind Slayer, and Project Powder , will now be able to provide its nearly 5 million users with a new means of purchasing the company’s virtual currency, SparkCash, with their mobile phones through Zong’s mobile billing service.

The partnership makes sense, as Outspark’s global audience is more challenging to monetize through traditional payment methods. Zong can process payments across 100+ carriers in 17 countries (the last of which was the US in 2008), largely through direct mobile carrier relationships. We expect to see increasing partnerships between publishers like Outspark and mobile payment companies in the year ahead.

“The partnership allows us to introduce the mobile billing concept to a large, growing and global audience of Outspark members,” says David Marcus, Founder and CEO of Zong.