Though the iPhone version is about a month old, Digital Chocolate has recently released the iPad version of their physics-oriented, puzzle’esque racing game, Underground 3D Rollercoaster Rush HD. If the name sounds familiar, that’s likely due to its base stemming from an older Digital Chocolate title, New York 3D Rollercoaster Rush HD. However, where direct multiplayer held in the older app may be lost, the newer game takes a different social approach by joining the OpenFeint network.

Like its predecessor, Underground challenges players to race on, quite possibly, the worst designed roller coasters ever. Wrought with steep drops, collapsing tracks, and half finished loops, players use physics to try and complete each level in the fastest time, whilst trying to earn the highest score possible. These bizarre tracks, combined with the fast-paced nature of a racing game makes for a very curious marriage of features that could be best described as a “racing-puzzle game.” Though, it can be frustrating at times, it still makes for a fun creation, and with direct social integration, gives the game an extra level of depth the previous Rush title did not quite have.

Though the premise of the game is a bit different from most games, the overall play is actually quite simple. Players a presented with a very unsafe underground roller coaster, with the sole objective of reaching the end – preferably in one piece. In the more unique mode to Underground — “Underground Mode” — users control a single coaster car that the engineers never locked into the track. Basically means that every incline, dip, or flip can and will send you careening off course.

Controls on the iPad are simple enough, as players touch a pair of sizable arrows to move left of right and a pair of others to rotate forward or backward (though you can turn on the accelerometer to control through tilting the device). The idea is that every time one of these obstacles sends the car off in some, whacked-out, direction, the player must use the controls to reorient it so that it lands wheels down, and, frankly, it’s almost like a puzzle — trying to figure out what direction to rotate, how fast to go, and so on. Failing to do so will result in the vehicle either landing on its roof or plummeting into the void beneath the track.

There are a ton of twists and turns to deal with, so it takes a good eye and a lot of practice to prevent either of these results from occurring, and one might think it frustrating. Surprisingly, it’s not that bad, because neither causes the player to fail. Each track actually has a number of check points to hit, and should the user get stuck or fall, they merely restart at one of these locations. That isn’t to say there is not penalty for failure, however, as the objective is to get the fastest time possible, and the clock does not stop or reset for redos.

After each level, players earn a final score and star rating based on how they did. With the rating alone, an extra level of longevity is added for players that like to earn achievements. Furthermore, considering the speed in which cars move, getting those top ratings and scores will prove most difficult.

As a matter of fact, the latter can be even trickier as there are a myriad of stunts that can be performed to boost points earned as well. As if reaching the end weren’t hard enough sometimes. Players can do flips, catch air, and any number of other “acrobatics” in order to increase their score, and in turn, add a significantly higher level of challenge.

Further challenge is also layered into Underground with OpenFeint. Expectantly, this means a truck load of achievements to earn and share, but since the game is oriented around high scores and fastest times, the competition that comes from leaderboards will be most attractive to many players. Unfortunately, the Bluetooth, head-to-head multiplayer from the New York title has, apparently, been lost.

Underground 3D also has a Classic Mode that is worth mentioning. Here, players control a full three cart coaster through each level. However, since the coaster is three cars long, the rotation element doesn’t really do much, and it really just comes down to speed. Compared to Underground Mode and the single car, it is significantly easier, and very hard to fail. Likely, it’s just there for users to mess around with a bit.

All in all, Underground 3D Rollercoaster Rush HD is a pretty fun game. It’s hard to say how it’s almost puzzle-like racing will appeal to players, but if the previous New York title is any indication, with its generally high user approval, it ought to do well. That said, the game runs $2.99, but for those on the fence regarding its value, there is a nice free version to sate the appetite (which also incorporates OpenFeint). Overall, the game is an amusing addition for iPad owners, and while it doesn’t feel “great,” it is still better than most.

The city-building genre is still one of Facebook’s most popular. SuperFun Town!, the new game by Iwi, has tapped into the demand for city games to rise to the top of this week’s list of fastest-growing Facebook games, defined as those still under a million monthly active users.

Most of the new players for SuperFun, the main attraction of which we found to be decorating your brightly-colored town, appeared over the past week. Here’s the AppData chart:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	SuperFun Town!	623,256	+533,908	+597.56
2.	Casino City	519,466	+277,723	+114.88
3.	Pet Resort	263,121	+245,438	+1,387.99
4.	時尚人 生	280,944	+155,375	+123.74
5.	The Hardest Game of the World	595,641	+151,179	+34.01
6.	Birdland	609,820	+145,010	+31.20
7.	Maya Pyramid	373,141	+121,815	+48.47
8.	Jumping Dog	960,364	+110,657	+13.02
9.	الصندوق السحرى	148,599	+110,194	+286.93
10.	Sweet World	679,772	+109,917	+19.29
11.	Bite Me	498,518	+109,067	+28.01
12.	快樂島 主	475,496	+101,569	+27.16
13.	My Casino	746,794	+84,437	+12.75
14.	InGenius	174,855	+77,770	+80.11
15.	Epic Goal	286,171	+77,168	+36.92
16.	Chocolatier: Sweet Society	351,772	+73,710	+26.51
17.	Lovely Farm	453,709	+62,620	+16.01
18.	Resort World	977,765	+61,108	+6.67
19.	尋寶物 語	251,901	+60,802	+31.82
20.	Gangsta Zombies	173,790	+60,243	+53.06

Casino City may look newer, but the game actually dates back to April. The game hit a high point of over two hundred thousand MAU in early June, but quickly fell almost 50 percent over the rest of the month. Now the independently developed game, which has players manage a virtual casino, is on the rise again.

Pet Resort, at number three, is one of Playdom’s most recent games. At the end of the day, it’s a pretty typical pet-raising game; what’s interesting is that the game was released in partnership with Purina, the pet food brand. We’ve seen relatively few games with a direct brand sponsorship to date, and even fewer that have become successful, but Pet Resort is growing fast.

Next up is 時 尚人生, a Chinese-language mall and fashion sim. The Hardest Game of the World, at number five, is more reminiscent of a cheap iPhone puzzler than a Facebook game, but that hasn’t stopped it from accumulating over half a million players — the competitive element in beating any part of the hard game probably leads players to post to their walls more often.

Finally, skipping over a few games, الصندوق السحرى catches our eye. Not for its gameplay — the app looks more like a gimmick to get users to post to their walls — but for the simple virtue of being an Arabic-language game on Facebook, one of the very first we’ve seen.

[Editor's Note: The data cited in this article is excerpted from Inside Facebook Gold, our membership service; the article was also previously printed on Inside Facebook.]

Asia is an exploding presence on Facebook. In this month’s Global Monitor report, in which we track Facebook’s growth around the world, five of the top six countries gaining the most new monthly active users were Asian.

But not every country in the region has caught the wave. Japan is a well-known holdout, with its own strong social networks preventing Facebook’s growth. According to conventional wisdom, South Korea is another tech-savvy country that Facebook simply can’t break into, in large part because of the game-oriented social networks that already hold sway there.

South Korea’s recent growth tells a different story. In the most recent month, June, it added 211,280 monthly active users to Facebook, which equates to 23.5 percent growth. During the previous month, May, it added 183,020 new MAU, which was a growth of 25.6 percent.

This acceleration has been taking place throughout the year; in the last three months, South Korea’s Facebook userbase has more than doubled to its present 1,108,840 users. Below is a graph showing the country’s growth.

Drawing in a significant number of South Koreans would be a significant testament to Facebook’s power. At current growth rates, the country could have over 10 million Facebook users by next summer, according to our projections.

However, the question remains as to whether Facebook can overcome the resistance of native social networks, led by Cyworld, which itself failed to cross over to the United States. Depending on what South Korea’s users are coming for, it may be possible for Facebook to coexist with Cyworld and others; the country is notoriously game-addicted, and the fact that roughly 80 percent of South Korea’s users are under 35 suggests that games may be their motivation for visiting Facebook.

Full data on Facebook’s audience growth throughout Europe and in countries around the world is presented in the July 2010 edition of the Facebook Global Monitor report, available through Inside Facebook Gold. An Inside Facebook Gold membership also includes data on language growth, audience demographics by country, and user behavior stats for the Facebook business ecosystem. To learn more about membership, please visit Inside Facebook Gold.

Another day, another acquisition for Playdom. The company has made its seventh buy in less than a year with Metaplace, a San Diego-based company that makes Facebook games.

Metaplace brings with it something that most of Playdom’s acquisitions haven’t, though: a famed developer. Koster is known for being lead designer or creative on a number of games, including the original Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies.

On Facebook, Metaplace was a moderately successful company, with over 1.5 million monthly active users at its high point in two games, My Vineyard and Island Life. At this moment it has about 1.2 million MAU:

But the story of Metaplace itself is a bit longer than just Facebook. The company was started back in 2007 to create a virtual world platform that players could easily build on. In 2008, when virtual worlds like Second Life still looked like the future, it raised $6.7 million in funding from top-shelf investors.

By the end of 2009, Metaplace’s platform had been launched and then closed, and the company switched to building social games. The move wasn’t too surprising; since social games first took off, Koster has been a rare traditional-gaming advocate of the form. Here’s what he said in a long blog post from earlier this year:

Social games are going to push boundaries in design areas that are currently neglected. A renaissance in simulation and strategy games is likely, and I don’t think it is an accident that so many prominent AAA strategy game developers are in social games now.

If what you have craved is greater user agency and impact on a persistent world, a greater sense of community and economic interdependence — those are features that are intrinsic to this new market. As an example, I would point out that there was a core MMO game that many of the readers of this blog loved that had a farming game where you had to check in every few days to collect your stuff and decide what to try to harvest next. And it’s wasn’t Farmville. It was Star Wars Galaxies. In many ways, the features that were seen as oddest or least “gamer-like” in the worldy MMOs are going to be among core features in the social games: housebuilding, shopkeeping, farming, dancing, dress-up, even hairdressing. Right now, these are one-to-a-game. But one possible direction of development is that they not be.

As for Metaplace’s original technology, it hasn’t entirely disappeared. The platform will “form a key part of our unified back-end technology platform for Playdom’s games going forward,” according to Playdom CTO David Sobeski in the company’s acquisition release.

Playdom’s earlier acquisitions this year include Hive7, Acclaim and Three Melons; it also brought in a $33 million funding in mid-June, bringing its total war chest to $76 million.

The hiring by social game developers has picked up this week, according to the data presented on LinkedIn. Most of the major companies are on the list this time as well as a few others we were otherwise informed about. The big news social gaming hire news, which we’ve already covered, was CrowdStar’s official announcement of its new executive team hires. To recap, Pete Hawley joined as Vice President of Product Development, Mark Hull as Vice President of Product Marketing and Community, Mike Ouye as Vice President of Monetization and Merchandising, and Robert Einspruch as Director of Business Development.

Here’s the list:

6 Waves

• Juan Vargas – International developer 6 Waves had some action this week as Juan Vargas joins as Director of Latin America. Formerly he was Global Consumer Group Management Associate of the Central Marketing Office at Citigroup.

CrowdStar

• Ashley Boyd – Ashyley joins CrowdStar as their latest Flash Artist. Prior experience stems from Redbana. U.S. where she was a 2D Production Artist.
• Robert Einspruch – As was noted prior, the former Consultant for MumboJumbo, LLCis now the Director of Business Development at CrowdStar.
• Mark Hull – Mark Hull, on the other hand, joins as Vice President of Product Marketing and Community. Though he hasn’t yet been updated in the company’s LinkedIn data, his prior work came from Vivaty, iWin, and Yahoo.

Playdom

• Chris Znerold – Formerly an Interactive Art Director at Zenzi, Chris joins Playdom as its newest Interactive Designer.
• JD Conley – Evidently part of the Hive7 acquisition, where he was CTO and Chief Software Architect, JD Conley joins Playdom as a Dev Lead.
• James Kelly – Leaving his role as Senior Software Engineer for TicketWeb, James takes on the same title over at Playdom.
• Zhen Cao – Zhen gets a promotion, it seems, moving up to Senior Producer. His prior roll at the company was Software Engineer.
• Taylor Adams – Taylor Adams gets similar treatment, moving up from Revenue Analyst to Senior Revenue Analyst.
• Steve Makofsky – He joins Playdom as its new Vice President of Mobile Platforms. Thanks to our commenters for the tip.

Playfish

• Kevin Hew – He joins Playfish as its latest Game Developer. Before this, Kevin worked the same role for Glu Mobile.
• Joysuke Wong – Formerly a Freelance Digital Artist for mod7, Joysuke is now an official Game Artist for Playfish.

PushButton Labs

• Keith Johnston – Though not part of our LinkedIn research, we were informed of Keith Johnston’s hiring at PushButton Labs by the developer themselves. He joins as their newest Flash Developer, with prior experience with GarageGames with the game TubeTwist. His last role was at VMware.
• Jon Tunnell – A graduate from the University of Oregon, Jon gets his chance at PushButton Labs as the company’s newest Game Designer.

RockYou!

• Linda Hong – Linda is the newest Web Designer and Production Artist for RockYou!, coming over from her role as a Field Marketing Specialist for Adobe Systems.
• Benjamin Sasson – He is now a Product Manager for RockYou! Prior, he worked as a Senior Web Content Designer for Sony Computer Entertainment America.

Zynga

• Jay Monahan – The former Vice President and General Counsel for Vuze, Jay Monahan, comes over to Zynga as its new Deputy General Counsel.
• John W. Osvald – Another for the job changing area as John changes his role at Zynga from Director of Product to Deputy GM.

Playfish‘s newest Facebook game, Pirates Ahoy!, is a unique combination of any number of game genres and features that you’ve probably seen before: it’s a high seas sailing adventure that puts a fresh spin on everything from virtual spaces to treasure hunting.

Though it is easiest to claim Pirates Ahoy! as a treasure hunting game like Treasure Isle or Treasure Madness, the truth of the matter is that this is only one small part of the game. Honestly, it’s difficult to classify the game as any one genre so we’ll just call it a role-playing game. Why? Well, because everything you do is in the role of a pirate. Players sail the high seas, fight monsters, plunder treasure, and even create their own pirate cove and ship.

The game starts out with the player sailing their pirate ship around a rather large stretch of ocean and rescuing an overboard Facebook friend. After they join your crew (more on that later), it’s time to sail for the horizon. Players can control their ship, telling it to go wherever they desire. It’s fairly reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda: Windwaker, though simplified. As players sail, they will see any number of islands, sea creatures, and even other drowning pirates to save.

Now, the islands cannot be initially visited, but the sea creatures – or sea monsters, rather – can be. Costing a small bit of energy, players can attack these giants of the ocean for a reward (you can also lose, so be careful). Sometimes it is coin, sometimes experience, but occasionally it is a treasure map.

This is where the treasure hunting comes into play. You use the map to discover islands that have treasure, then you dig around the island, using purchasable tools to do the digging, Treasure Madness style. Coins, gems, food, and treasure can all be dug up. This, however, is slightly different than the other treasure hunting games. Granted, food still restores energy, but once treasure is discovered, it must be restored using gems that can either be bought with Playfish Cash, or dug up.

As expected, these come in sets the user can collect, but rather than selling the set, should a user finish it, they receive a nice decorative reward (like a trophy) to place in their personal pirate cove.

This is actually the next major part of Pirates Ahoy! Players get more than a personal abode, as they go pirate city-building and construct their own personal Tortuga. From here, players can physically construct the land the way they see fit (not including elevation) with sand, rock, grass, and so on. However, this virtual space is for more than just looks. Players can, in fact, construct buildings to produce products, such as peg legs, to sell. They can even hire a worker mule to collect from their factories, automatically, for a few days at the cost of Playfish Cash.

If players are looking for pure aesthetics, on the other hand, it is also worth mentioning that the pirate ship itself is customizable. Though it isn’t as in-depth as the island. Players can change the sail, bow, siding, and cabin. There is even a badge (which is probably representative of the Jolly Roger) that can be changed. Unfortunately, new ones must be unlocked as achievements and it isn’t visible as an actual flag.

Beyond treasure hunting and virtual spaces, players can also take part in quests and missions. The quests are found around the ocean and appear to be found in floating bottles. Of course, they have a level requirement most of the time, but doing them will earn special rewards (e.g. gold). Missions, on the other hand can be garnered one of two ways. The first, apparently, is by accident. We actually stumbled across a giant seahorse and was able to photograph it, which unlocked a mission to find three of them somewhere in the ocean for a chunk of experience and gold.

The adventure was also automatically catalogued in a Facebook photo album, but this is only part of the social elements. The most common appears to be here, in that players can visit each other’s islands. However, there is no prompt to “help them out” upon visiting. They can join your crew as swashbucklers themselves.

Since virtually every major action in Pirates Ahoy! requires energy, a larger crew is prudent. You see, pirate captains don’t use just their energy but the whole crew that works for them. So, the more crew you have, the more energy is available. Friends can be hired one of two ways. The first, is to post to your Facebook feed (similar to Hotel City) that you are hiring pirates. The second, is to find them out in the ocean and save them. Of course, this is based on chance, and costs a small sum of money, but it does not require them to actually play.

Knowing Playfish, and the expansiveness of this pirate world (not to mention what new areas will open up in time), we’ve only hit the tip of this particular iceberg. With a beautiful, cel-shaded animation style, and pretty epic music, Pirates Ahoy! is a game with zero complaints. Well, almost zero, at worst, and this is being very nit-picky, the ship doesn’t look nearly as good as the rest of the game, and the decoratable island is designed in grid-like, blocky shape that may not be all that appealing to many. Overall, however, this is a fantastic creation from Playfish, and is certainly one of the most creative and interesting titles we have seen from them in a long time.

Mobile social gaming network Aurora Feint has two significant pieces of news this morning. The first is that it’s planning a game store that it hopes will become Android’s answer to Apple’s App Store. Second, it has received a strategic investment from The9, a large Chinese game developer.

The move onto Android reflects that platform’s failure to match the App Store’s efficiency in distributing apps.

Where the App Store manages to pack a lot of categories into an interface that’s still easily navigable by users, Android’s discovery mechanisms are unpolished, and the platform has far fewer categories to search through.

Aurora Feint can draw on past experience for the project. Although the company is best known for its OpenFeint social features for iPhone games, that product includes game discovery; and the company owns an iPhone app called Game Spotlight, which offers users another avenue to find games.

At its launch later this summer, Aurora Feint’s new store will already feature some publishers: Astraware, Digital Chocolate, Glu Mobile and Hudson Soft, as well as a number of smaller studios. Interested developers can sign up for more information here.

As for The9′s investment, there’s not much more information about it except that it’s a “strategic minority equity investment”. However, it’s not the first Asian partnership that Aurora Feint has sealed. Last year, it sold a 20 percent stake to Japanese game developer DeNA, which is a subsidiary of a large Japanese mobile company.

DeNA recently reached out to Western developers, signaling that the Japanese game market may finally have a place for outside companies. China, also, is much-desired target for Western game makers of all types, so we wouldn’t be surprised to see Aurora announcing some significant moves in the region going forward.

Get ready for the virtual Real World. Viacom subsidiary MTV Networks has acquired Social Express, a little-known developer, to make its move into social gaming, according to VentureBeat.

Social Express was founded by Tony Espinoza and Neil Souza, and has 10 employees. Although VentureBeat calls both former Zynga employees, it appears that Espinoza actually spent the two years prior to Social Express at with SuperSecret.com, a web-based game for kids.

That recent experience may have helped Viacom decide to acquire Social Express; both company founders will take on executive social media positions at Viacom, but Espinoza will specifically become a VP and general manager at the Nickelodeon Kids & Family Group, which is part of MTV.

As for why Social Express never released anything, Viacom said that the company has been at work on a game development platform, which will presumably be used for MTV’s future releases. There aren’t any details on the acquisition price, but VentureBeat has more from its interview with Viacom execs.

If 2009 was the year of farms and fish tanks on Facebook, then 2010 is the year that developers are remembering that the world of gaming has much more to offer. The strategy genre, in particular, is enjoying a renaissance on Facebook.

Strategy games seem like a bad fit for the average Facebook gamer, at least according to several commonly-held notions about who, exactly, a Facebook gamer is: someone who doesn’t enjoy conflict or competition, who only wants to play for a few minutes at a time, who has no desire to play games designed along traditional lines.

But that’s not stopping a string of successful strategy games, started earlier this year by Watercooler’s Kingdoms of Camelot. Although it was launched last November, Camelot took until January to start growing in earnest, reaching its peak in early June with over 3.7 million monthly active users.

Camelot’s success seems doubly unusual, in that it’s an incredibly complex game — at least by the gold standard of dead-simple design favored on Facebook.

That game’s growth may have helped convince other developers to pay attention to strategy on Facebook. A short list of strategy releases this year would include Evony, PoxNora, Nanostar Castles, Age of Ocean, and most recently, Verdonia, The Settlers and Backyard Monsters.

Verdonia, in particular, has taken off. Following a mid-June release, it’s just short of three million MAU today :

As some commenters noted in our review of Verdonia, the game shares a number of mechanics with Evony. The latter game, owned by Regan Mercantile, licenses content from a Hong Kong company, so it’s possible that Verdonia uses the same source. Verdonia’s developer, Playdom, declined to comment on whether that was the case (as did Regan).

Whatever the case, either game serves as an example of how complex strategy can succeed on Facebook, so we spoke with both companies.

Playdom is best known as the publisher of games like Social City and Sorority Life, so Verdonia seems to stand out. But the company is looking to branch out and build a larger portfolio, according to chief financial officer Christa Quarles.

“I think what’s interesting there is that you have a lot of people trying it out,” Quarles said. “It’s at least demonstrative that there’s really a harder core audience out there. The initial art for the game, even, is not puppy dogs with big eyes. It’s medieval knights with swords. It validates our opinion, which is that there are harder core gamers on Facebook.”

Having a strategy game become successful is partially a function of Facebook’s size, which will give companies a lot of latitude to experiment in the future. “You’re going to see increasing production value, more niches being explored,” said Quarles. “At the end of the day when you’re talking about 450 million players on Facebook, 200 millionish users playing games, four games per month per user — there are a lot of game events on Facebook, and it’s not just going to be the softer, more casual end making hay.”

One problem for Verdonia may be a lack of continuing engagement from its new players. Although new monthly actives are streaming in, daily active users have been tough for the game to hold on to. Here’s a view of the game’s DAU as a percentage of MAU:

Verdonia could have various problems. It may be attracting some users who aren’t interested in strategy, or bugs could be driving some players away. Evony, on the other hand, has a solid DAU / MAU of 18 percent, along with its own web version that some players use without visiting Facebook.

Surprisingly, Evony also manages to attract a significant number of women, according to game producer Darold Higa — whereas an outside observer might assume it only caters to men, based on the geeky setting and art. “Thirty percent of our playerbase is female,” said Higa. “I think sometimes that’s missed, but there are actually whole alliances that are female.”

Evony is also a good example of how a game with fewer users than a more typical farming or sim game can be successful. Its users tend to have more discretionary income than other Facebook players, according to Higa, and they play a lot: three hours a day on average, to be specific.

That high level of engagement sounds more like a massively multi player game like World of Warcraft, but Higa thinks there’s potential for the two game categories to mix. “If you look at the Facebook audience, not everyone will want that complex gameplay,” he said. “But I think you will find a fairly large percentage will want more gameplay. I’ve played tons of strategy, usually on a dedicated client. The big hurdle is playing it in the first place.”

Mixing Facebook gaming with MMO-style play is certainly an attractive concept to other companies. What’s missing is the merger between typical MMO activities — like playing for a long time — and the quick-play style of Facebook that developers use to encourage players to pay for virtual goods. Evony, though, should offer some encouragement to others who want to make a more complex game.

“This may come from my gaming background, but I think that like movies, television and literature, if you create with the idea that you’ll only appeal to the lowest common denominator, you may be successful in the short run. But the entertainment that really appeals to people has a lot of depth,” said Higa. “People tend to dumb down content with the idea that it will reach that magical mass market. I think, if you have a really good game and you put it in front of the mass market, you may be surprised at how many people engage it.”

[Editor's note: Super Rewards founder Jason Bailey shares his views on various ways of monetizing social games through virtual currency payments -- aside from Facebook's currency, Credits, which comes with its own costs and benefits. He breaks down each type of payment option by cost and implementation time, based on his market perspective. Fees and percentages included in this article are derived from his company's experiences working with customers.]

A primary concern of most game publishers is monetizing their content. The current dominant paradigm is to collect payments for premium virtual items. An important question often asked by social game publishers is: “Should I run my own separate payment methods such as credit cards or PayPal, or should I use payment aggregators?”

Many publishers who opt to manage their own payment processes encounter a maze of payment roadblocks, including international contracts, complicated carrier fee structures, foreign currency issues, and chargebacks or reversals. With some fee structure set-ups, an earned payment of $1,000 can quickly diminish to less than $100 by the time it reaches the publisher and can take more than 90 from when the payment was made to actually reach the pocket of the publisher.

To help publishers decide what’s best for them, in order of priority and effectiveness, let’s examine the current core payment options and the costs and challenges associated with each:

1. Credit Card Payments – Credit Cards are, not surprisingly, the most dominant form of making payments online. One challenge: credit card processors mandate that chargebacks and reversal rates hover at a maximum of three percent, but to get preferred merchant rates, these rates need to be under one percent. It is not unusual to lose your account if the chargeback and reversal rates do not meet specific requirements. Expect to have someone on your team focused on dealing with these issues or risk losing your merchant account.

Fees: 3% to 8%

Implementation time: Weeks, if not months, to get a merchant account with your bank or merchant solution provider. Two weeks for a good developer to implement and test the transaction processing. You will often need to repeat this process for each county you accept payments in as most merchant accounts will only accept US, UK or CA based credit cards.

2. PayPal – While PayPal can be very simple to integrate, using this medium is not without glitches. After you have done a significant number of transactions, PayPal will sometimes either begin holding money back or place the account on “lockdown.” In addition, sometimes a person can reverse a payment transaction, in which case PayPal usually errs on the side of the customer, resulting in a lost payment. Reversal rates on virtual currencies can be very high. Just as it is easy to click-click and buy some pixels, it is also very easy to go click-click and reverse the charges. Buyer’s remorse on colorful pixels and virtual tractors can be high.

Fees: 4% to 10%. Expect a 10% to 15% revenue lift by adding PayPal to your existing credit card implementation, if credit cards are the only option you offer.

Implementation time: Short (a few hours for a good developer). But the follow-up with refunds, reversals, and payment disputes can be significant.

3. Offers – Offers are advertisements that provide players an opportunity to earn in-game points, currency, or other rewards in exchange for actions such as signing up for a service, responding to a survey, watching video ads, or shopping at online merchants. This revenue stream can be a good fit for users who want points but don’t want to make a direct payment, and are the most appealing when matched with advertisements that users would otherwise be interested in, anyway. Offers also get some users accustomed to getting virtual currency, prompting them to pay directly later. However, some users take offers with the intention of not following through — earning points in a game, while canceling the offer they completed. Offer providers have also faced severe criticism for running deceitful or low-quality advertisements, although the industry has worked to increase offer quality in recent months

Fees: None, besides a revenue share on the ads. Expect around a 20% lift in revenue by adding offers, although results can be significantly lower or higher, based on type of offer, implementation, and other factors.

Implementation time: 30 minutes to 4 hours, depending on the depth and customization of the integration.

4. Mobile Payments – Mobile phone payments allow consumers to pay for digital goods via a mobile phone. The costs are added to their monthly phone bill. Currently, there are several payment providers out there (Zong, Paymo, and a half-dozen others). Some options may accept payments in Norway and Sweden, but not in Mexico or Columbia. All will cover the big countries like the US and UK, but one may cover Sprint, but not AT&T. The solution is to integrate multiple providers.

Fees: 15% to 90% depending on country, carrier and provider. In countries such as the UK, mobile payments are common and the costs are low. In the US and Canada, the carriers take margins as high as 50%. Also expect payment terms in the net 90 range (some countries are net 365). Expect a 5% or so uptick in revenue by adding mobile payment options.

Implementation time: 5 to 10 days of development and testing per integration, also set aside a good amount of time to read thick contracts.

5. Landline Phone Payments – This type of payment, which allows users to charge payments to their home phone bill, shares the same issues as mobile payments.

Fees: 30% to 50% Expect a 1% to 2% uptick for this option.

Implementation time: Same as mobile payments. Risk: High reversal rates.

6. Stored Value Card –There are about 30 different cards available to consumers, everywhere from WalMart to 7-Eleven. Some cards are only available on the West Coast, while others are just on the East Coast. For true coverage, you should plan to integrate about eight of these cards.

Fees: 15% to 30%. Uptick in revenue depends on your demographics. If you have a young, US-based group of players, uptick can be as much as 10% or more. On average, however, it is much lower.

Implementation time: A couple of days for each. Also, allow about a week of back and forth for the contracts on each.

7. Debit from Bank Account Payments – Potential issues with debit: some types of bank accounts do not allow direct debits; different policies for different banks internationally; and the potential for direct debit fraud.

Fees: 5% to 20% Expect an uptick of 3% to 5%.

Implementation time: The challenge here is getting approved and completing the contract process, which can take months.

8. Mail-in Cash – This type of payment is not too popular with consumers, given the extra steps and waiting period required.

Fees: None. Expected uptick is less than 1%.

9. Wire payments – Many consider this not worth the hassle if you only make $1,000 per day and the expected uptick would only be a few dollars. But if you are generating $100,000 per day, this may be worth the trouble.

Fees: 5% to 15%

Now that we have reviewed the options, one question remains: What is the best course of action? Naturally I am slightly biased here, but the most important things to consider are speed to market and focusing on your core expertise. You can spend significant time building out all of these options. We highly recommend that you do as more is better.

Or you can pull a simple one stop, one implementation, one payment source from us, or one of my competitors for that matter. Our pitch is usually this: “Game developers focus on what they do best, building and growing highly engaging games, and have the monetization solution provider do what they do best, manages dozens of payment options from a hundred plus countries, across millions of users. Whichever avenue you choose, we hope this information will help you decide the best payment options for you.

Jason Bailey is the founder of online virtual currency monetization platform Super Rewards. He sold the company to Adknowledge in July of 2009 and became the advertising network’s general manager of virtual currencies.