21st Century Wire
January 31, 2011
The 21st century has certainly witnessed a progression towards a ‘cashless society’, but social networking giant Facebook are taking things a step further, throwing their hat into the ring with the introduction of a new compulsory monetary policy that will initially govern its share of the multi-billion dollar online games industry.
Imagine a virtual world where all goods and services are to be offered, bought and paid for by a new virtual-local form of electron currency. Facebook will be piloting such a scheme for their multimillion dollar online games market. As of July 2011, every social game developer on Facebook will have to offer the social network’s “virtual currency credits”.
According to a recent news release from Marketing Week, “Over the next five months developers will have to implement credits as a payment method within their games”. The games industry already accounts for 70% of the virtual goods transactions on the site.
According to Facebook, the social networking corporation are not insisting that their new online currency will be the only payment method available to users, and in exchange for their cooperation game developers will offered incentives if they use Facebook dollars exclusively. Compensation for compliance will apparently include early access to product features and premium promotion on their site, including promotion on the games dashboard and of course, premium ‘smart’ ad targeting.
What appears on the surface to be a simple online marketing tool to help consolidate a niche market share on the world’s largest social network, has in fact much more far and reaching consequences for hundreds of millions of users. What Facebook have effectively achieved here is nothing short of a huge “game changer” in terms of envisioning a world without cash.
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