Inside Social Games

Facebook first broached the idea of creating its own virtual currency for third-party developers back in December of 2007. The company has slowly rolled the “Credits” product out. First it introduced the currency for buying gifts in its own gift shop last November, then a tweak here and there, and most recently the launch of Credits for third-party applications this past May.

But now we’re hearing new rumors about what Facebook is planning for developers.

Most significantly, we’ve recently heard from multiple industry sources that Facebook has been meeting with a number of large application developers — especially the big social gaming companies that already have their own lucrative virtual currency systems — and talking about making Credits mandatory. Facebook, we assume, would continue to allow other virtual currencies to co-exist alongside Credits, assuming it does generally move in this direction.

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