Inside Social Games

Following our story about a possible partnership between Zynga and pre-paid game card company InComm today, Playdom has told us that it is officially going to roll out pre-paid cards, and also with InComm.

The idea here is to let anyone with loose change buy pre-paid cards, then enter a code from those cards to buy virtual currencies and goods within games. They are designed for teenagers without access to credit cards or mobile phone accounts that other payment services required.

InComm cards are available at around 150,000 retail locations. “Playdom Game Cards,” at the cost of $10 and $15 apiece, will be available at some Target and Walgreen stores in the middle of next month and then at 7-11 stores later this year. Players can use them to buy things like weapons arsenals in Mobsters 2: Vendetta and or designer apparel in Sorority Life. In terms of the target buyers, Playdom isn’t disclosing what portion of its 28 million monthly active users on social networks like Facebook and MySpace are teens — just “a growing number” according to Mike Ouye, the company’s director of monetization.

A market leader in pre-paid cards, InComm has already been seeing traction with virtual world and massive multiplayer online gaming companies. It claims to have grown its virtual currency card business “200%” in 2008, although it’s not disclosing how much revenue that actually was for the company. The company, accordingly, is making sure to show up at gaming industry events like the Game Developers Conference in Austin earlier this month.