Inside Social Games

While neither the full release of the Facebook Credits system nor the release of the full API to developers has yet to be announced, there have been a handful of games that have been testing the Facebook Credits integration.

As we reported back in mid-December, Happy Island, developed by CrowdStar, was the first game that exclusively used Facebook Credits for all in-game purchases. Recently, we’ve noticed that a “Payments Issues” link has been added to the footer of Happy Island, which provides a sneak peek at what options users will have to dispute payments for Credits going forward.

Selecting the Payments Issues link opens up a new dialogue box, where a user can choose to either get help in making a purchase using Facebook Credits or to dispute a past transaction:

If a user selects the first option, they see a very straight-forward dialogue box that opens with, at this point, just one pre-populated comment field (not a drop down) that the user can change, plus an additional text box where comments can be added:

If you wish to dispute a Facebook Credits purchase, then you are instead presented a screen with a pull-down box that allows you to select the purchase you want to dispute:

And then must describe why you are disputing the transaction:

This is a pretty simple billing resolution process, but since details about the credits program and a developer API has not been released yet, it provides a small insight into why they are building a payment operations team — in part, to deal with all these inquiries.

It also brings up the question of how this process will be balanced (if at all) with payment systems other than Facebook Credits. For example, (Lil) Green Patch by Playdom has purchases available by Facebook Credits and PayPal, yet the Payment Issues link (which is also integrated there) only deals with Facebook Credits – there is no direct link to deal with any disputes of payments done with PayPal. If Facebook continues to allow developers to use their own payment methods (including credit card, PayPal and offer systems), it would be doubtful that they’d want to lead customers who have issues with those payment methods to get mixed up with Facebook Credit-specific disputes.