Sating the curiosity of developers, the market research firm tailored specifically to video games, VGMarket, and online monetization company PlaySpan conducted a survey to garner a better estimation on just how many players are spending real money on virtual goods. Conducted between July 15th and 31st of this year, the survey of 2,425 pulled from a variety of customers ranging from those that made online purchases through the PlaySpan Marketplace, made use of the retail-based Ultimate Game Card, or utilized the more recent virtual currencies acquisition, Spare Change.

Covering this wide expanse of purchasing options, the PlaySpan/VGMarket survey discovered that 58% of surveyed gamers bought virtual goods with one of the aforementioned methods, in the last year, for a free-to-play game. Coming in second, over the same course of time, was massively multiplayer online games at 34%, followed by a mere (by comparison) 23% were social network games.

In addition to having the highest number of purchasers, free-to-play games also saw the highest expenditure. The median average spent among users was approximately $75 with MMOs and social network games coming in at around $60 and $50 respectively. Of those reported, 80% of those surveyed admitted to buying virtual goods for themselves with the remaining 20% buying them for others as gifts. On average, they also proclaimed that they were currently playing three online games.

What form of virtual goods is being purchased most. Well, according to the survey, in-game currency is on top with 71% of players having purchased it in some form or another. Seeing as how virtual currency can be used to make purchases across multiple games on a network, it seems logical that it would be first. However, the difference between #1 and #2 is staggering.

According to the report, weapons were the second most purchased item at 37%, followed by subscription codes at 30%, wearable items at 26%, power-ups at 25%, virtual gifts at 19%, and maps and levels at a scant 16%. In fact, not only did a higher percentage of users buy virtual currency, but the median number of transactions for them were higher as well (7) when compared to all other types of virtual goods (5).

Currently, this is all the information that has been released from PlaySpan and VGMarket, but according to what they have told ISG, additional components of the study that include individual virtual goods seller data may be released in the future.

Tapjoy has introduced a new version of its free advertising optimization platform, tailored specifically for the highly saturated iPhone.

Having been around for a while now, Tapjoy’s past versions have made use of seven different ad networks, to provide revenue options. However, this newest version of platform is what peaked our interest as it now comes with a full set of app analytical tools, from Pinch Media, all in one simple dashboard. Granted, many developers may have an analytics system they currently use, but Tapjoy provides a viable alternative for an ever growing mobile field.

As it stands, the additional analytics tracks a number of the most important pieces of user information including feature usage, demographic reporting, and advertising performance. Furthermore, The Tapjoy SDK also allows for greater revenue potential through ad optimization, virtual goods monetization (through Offerpal), rewarded installs, customizable gaming features, and even wagered tournaments (something that we have seen only twice before with PayoutHub and more recently Come2Play) and user challenges.

As a game developer themselves, Tapjoy does have an understanding of the needs of the game creator. With popular iPhone games such as TapDefense, TapSudoku, and TapWord backing their name, the mobile developer has indeed learned a lot from creating these top apps, and states that they have done their best to include all those key lessons into the features of its latest SDK.

Certainly Tapjoy SDK offers a great option for optimizing any iPhone game, and really does provide a means to move more resources to the creation of a great title rather than worry too much about monetizing it. Interested parties can check out more at Tapjoy.com.

It was over a year ago that we first looked at the white label social gaming platform, Come2Play. Since then, he company has been pretty quiet. Nonetheless, it looks like they are busy again with their latest, and quite significant, addition to the platform: Virtual currency monetization.

For those unfamiliar with Come2Play, it first launched with a service that lets web site owners easily integrate a customizable social gaming channel into web pages. Each channel contains game galleries composed of titles submitted to the Come2Play network, and include multiple play rooms, chat, and virtual goods rewards. Last October, multiplayer API was added, and while, at the time, it only was capable of supporting two-player games, when combined with the existing virtual goods, it paved the way to this latest release.

All of Come2Play’s supported games allow for players to challenge one another, according to the company. Now, the concept of challenges, in and of themselves, is not terribly out of the ordinary. They have been a standard social element in the space for a long time now. However, these Come2Play challenges add a little something to this traditional feature.This is something we have only recently seen with the company PayoutHub, which allows monetization through competitive tournaments.

Here’s how Come2Play’s challenges work: In any challenge, players are able to wager X amount of virtual tokens. The winner of that challenge then takes the total amount of the challenged tokens, which can then be used to make virtual goods purchases. Tokens are also attainable via purchase through the “Token Store” as well as through the completion of advertisement offers.

Right away, one can begin to see the revenue potential from this latest addition. Already, profits for in-network banner advertising revenues – now carried over into these new virtual currency purchases as well – are split, with all publishers receiving 40% of all proceeds. The remainder is then divided evenly between Come2Play and the developer, but with the growth of virtual goods and currencies in the United States, 30% is hardly something to scoff at. In fact, overall growth was worth around $265 million last year, and is projected, according to Piper Jaffray, to reach over $600 million by the end of 2009. We think that number may be a bit low.

Come2Play certainly looks to be a viable opportunity for both developers and publishers alike. With multiple monetization opportunities through the platform it makes for a very safe looking endeavor for any of the stated parties, and covers most, if not all, the bases for earning potential.

While Zynga has partnered with a variety of offer monetization platforms over the years, we’ve been hearing that the company has been increasingly driving some users to an offer network it may either own or be strongly allied with. Now, we know the name of that service – DoubleDing.

While we haven’t been able to confirm if DoubleDing is either owned by Zynga or is a separate entity controlled by the company, its executives, or investors – Zynga has not responded to our request for comment yet – we do believe that it’s part of Zynga’s strategy to bring a greater part of the monetization value chain closer to being in-house.

Why would Zynga want to do so? Two reasons:

1. Better margins – This part is clear.
2. Market insight – Zynga could gain a clearer understanding of which game developers it wants to acquire or compete with. It will have its own data about which types of offers work best for which games, and if it distributes the service to third-parties, it will learn about them as well.

For now, the only easily accessible info on DoubleDing is available on its support site. But we’re hearing that its offers are being shown globally, especially in Europe.

Outspark is certainly a company that has seen a lot of changes over the past year ranging from mobile payments, to survey monetization, to new game development partners, and it doesn’t look like they are ready to stop just yet. A week ago, the free-to-play, online game publisher hired Owen Mahoney, a former senior executive of nine years from Electronic Arts.

As founding CEO, Susan Choe moves on to become Outspark’s Chairman of the Board, Mahoney will be charged with further expanding Outspark into the regions of North America, Europe, and Asia. Mahoney is qualified for the job, with his former EA experience as Senior Vice President of Corporate and Business Development. It was there that he was charged with EA’s global development which included responsibilities such as acquisitions, equity investments, and strategic partnerships.

According to Choe, the new hire came out of Outspark’s dramatic global growth since its original inception back in 2007. The general hope is that the fresh blood will be able to expand the current global userbase of 5.4 million unique visitors a month.

Mahoney marks the latest on an ever growing list of top brass leaving the mainstream realm and jumping into the casual and social space, and also one of many to come directly from the EA giant itself. So far, this year, we have seen Brandon Barber (former Senior Director of Global Marketing), Colleen McCreary, and Mike Verdu join Zynga as Vice President of Marketing, Chief People Officer, and Vice President of Game Development respectively; Eric Lindstrom (former EA Senior Game Designer) join SGN as Chief Creative Officer; former COO John Pleasants as Playdom’s new CEO; and, of course, Don Traeger, a former EA Sports veteran, who started the iPhone development studio, Portable Zoo.

[image via Virtual Goods News]

When Martin Herdina and Daniel Petri founded Vienna-based fatfoogoo in late 2006, they intended to create a consumer marketplace for virtual goods and in-game services. However, when they realized that most game operators wanted to operate their monetization platforms in-house without endorsing a third-party brand, the company quickly switched to a white-label model. Now, over the last several months the company has expanded its efforts deeper into the social games market, providing payments, billing, customer service, anti-fraud, and store and secondary market management services to developers.

Herdina, fatfoogoo’s CEO, recently told us about the company’s decision to focus more on social games.

“We’ve been working with social app and game developers since the end of 2008, as the requirements are very similar to classical online game business models,” Herdina says. “The first social networking project we did was to provide store, white-label payments and virtual currencies for the avatar engine mEgo, now we are just working with Gogogic on powering Vikings of Thule – and some really exciting social apps/games projects are currently under the hood.”

Although the majority of its 22 employees are based in its Vienna headquarters, the company also recently opened offices in the US and UK to work with publishers and partners more closely.

“Our technology is purely international, so it’s capable of supporting multi-languages, multi currencies, multi-byte character-sets and different VAT-rates,” Herdina says. “However, in terms of business development we are mostly focusing on talking to potential partners in North America and Europe.”

While fatfoogoo has developed its own payment gateway in-house, it is partnering with a wide range of payment providers specifically focused on social games. Fatfoogoo’s payment options unclude credit cards, direct debit, mobile payments (like Boku and Mopay), prepaid cards (like Paysafecard and Rixty) on a global basis, according to Herdina.

In addition, the company has partnered with several managed offer platforms to enable alternative forms of advertiser-financed purchases. “We treat offers as an alternative payment option, and therefore work with quite a few offer providers in different regions to ensure ideal coverage, like PayBuyPartner, AdParlor, GratisPay, and SponsorPay,” Herdina says.

We’ll continue tracking the company as it expands further into social gaming over the next year.

“We are expecting our ongoing and future projects in the social app/game space to contribute a significant part to our success in 2010,” Herdina says.

Top Facebook game developer Zynga was sued for copyright infringement by rival Psycho Monkey last February. It was accused of copying the popular — and lucrative — Mob Wars game in its own creation, Mafia Wars. That case was only recently settled, but in the meantime, Zynga has turned around and filed 22 copyright and trademark lawsuits against other developers.

One suit, against leading rival Playdom, has been gaining some attention. But Zynga has also sued other well-known developers, including Greenpatch Inc, makers of (Lil) Green Patch and the increasingly popular (Lil) Farm Life — that suit was the most recent, filed on August 7th. July was a far busier month, when Zynga filed 14 suits.

However, many of the defendants are clearly not in the right.

> Continue reading at Inside Facebook

Today at the TechCrunch50 conference, a new project is launching, after having been incubated by game company SGN over the last year. Called ToyBots Woozees, it is a platform for connecting “physical toys with full 3G, GPS and accelerometer capabilities tied to online and mobile games,” according to the company.

For example, a dad on a business trip could buy an audio book through Woozees’ iPhone app, then set his child’s toy — say, a stuffed teddy bear — to read the book at 8pm that night. SGN and Woozees chief executive Shervin Pishevar said the idea was inspired by something his daughter said: “Dad, I really want a pillow that will tell me stories.”

Woozees includes both hardware and software, so third-parties can integrate it into their own toys. A wide range of features let you go as far as using the toy as a controller in a video game.

From the company:

OpenSDK enables IP holdlers and independent developers to create products that leverage the network. Comes bundled with hardware and firmware. Developers can bundle hardware and software to build their own toys.

SGN will announce major deals with a telecom provider and a toy distributor in the coming week. On stage at the conference, Best Buy executive Kal Patel said the product was meeting an “unmet need.”

You can contact the company for more details.

When we last checked in with the with Ironstar Helsinki, we talked about the Finnish company’s mobile virtual world, MoiPal. Well, it looks to be growing as the social developer is expanding its web and mobile title into Facebook. With, currently, 200,000 registered users total, this latest expansion marks one of the first steps toward Ironstar’s goals of greater international growth.

Targeting the younger demographic, MoiPal has made most of its revenue through the sale of virtual goods (primarily through mobile payments – SMS text payments in Europe and Zong in the United States). While the company has been doing all right, it isn’t quite where it needs to be to reach its stated goal of 1 million users in 2009. As was seen with our recent look at the mobile MMO, TibiaME, international growth is the greatest avenue towards the goal Ironstar has. To help it, the company will be hiring a brand new CEO, Tiina Zilliacus.

Moving on to the overseeing of the MoiPal service and its technical elements, the current CEO, Joakim Achren, says that they are looking to reach the level of international users it desires through Zilliacus’ experience in consumer services and digital commerce. Furthermore, Archren believes that it will be Facebook that will be the medium in which they get there.

As Achren states in a post from ArcticStartups, Ironstar has long followed Facebook as a social gaming and distribution platform with particular notice paid to the popularity of social developers such as Zynga and Playfish. With the millions of users attracted by said developers’ games, such notice is hard to pass by, and Archen hopes for Ironstar to reach a similar level.

Wrought with many of the exploratory features, avatar customization, and the overall care of your digital self that had made the mobile rendition popular, this new Facebook version could very well help in the goals that Ironstar Helsinki is after. However, such numbers will not be easy to come by right away considering the distribution challenges that come with such a large space, saturated with thousands of applications. That isn’t to say that the move won’t pay off for Ironstar, but Facebook or no Facebook, 1 million users in less than four months is going to be a tall order.

Now international politics is not necessarily a specialty at ISG, but every once and a while you stumble onto something curious as it pertains to one’s niche. The latest in this regard is a Twitter game and contest by the name of Play4Iran, and while the “game play” is rather simplistic it is actually created for a greater cause: The Green Movement, the Iranian opposition political group.

Seeing games created for a cause is nothing new to the social space. In the past, we have seen a number of titles supporting the environment from Green Patch, medicine from Hive7’s Zen Garden, and humanitarianism from Booyah Societies.

Here is the back story: Leading up to the tenth presidential elections in Iran, back in June, a number of rallies and activities began taking place in support for a reformist candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi. The general hope was to oust the current regime, but a disappointing loss (due to alleged election fraud) led to a countrywide movement symbolized by the color green. Asking for civil freedoms, the movement, as it was seen by the rest of the world, marked a dramatic and “great cultured civil movement,” according to Iranian sociologist and writer, Kazem Kardavani.

Play4Iran is a Twitter contest game intended to directly support this movement in a digital, and international fashion. The game, as it were, is nothing terribly complex (as most Twitter games aren’t). Players who sign up are placed into a leaderboard system and earn points by completing various actions. Basically, the earning of points is the whole game, and is simply tailored to add a small bit of game play value to the act of garnering support for the civil movement.

Points are earned in simple ways as well. Registration, green profile pictures (green tone, or adding a green ribbon, candle, or stripe), referrals, “Verified Twitter Account” referrals, and even a few bonus points earned through the submission of pictures to the “Green Wall.”

Created by Twitter users @greenthumbnails and @lissnup, Play4Iran marks, according to them, “one of the most popular ways of showing support for the Green Movement in Iran.” Furthermore, they state that, thus far, “tens of thousands of Twitter members have chosen a green profile picture,” and though it’s impossible to tell just how many people actually do have a green avatar, in general, this little application may be helping out.

The Play4Iran game/contest is scheduled to end on September 23, 2009. Interested parties can sign up at the Play4Iran website.