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Interest Growing For Pre-Paid Game Cards
Worlds in Motion is running an interview with GMG Entertainment, a company finding success marketing pre-paid "digital currency cards" used online for games and other entertainment services. Customers and retailers alike are enjoying the simplicity and utility of the cards, and GMG suggests that this segment of the industry will only continue to grow:
"I estimate this year that you'll see EA enter this space for some of their games, and a few other big names are absolutely interested. In fact we're in final negotiations with a couple of recognizable names. We tend to estimate the size of the total pre-paid gaming card business when we do our numbers, and this year we're looking to something between $75-100 million dollars in sales across North America. We see that going to $250-300 million in 2009 and being in the region of a half-billion by 2010. We see this market growing dramatically in the next two to five years."
Pre paid? Does that mean someone already paid for them and they are free?
Sounds like what this is. It's yet another way to stop you getting a refund on that crappy game which promised the moon and delivered crap.
Eve has real problems with RMTs (Real Money Traders) but is combating this well. I am not sure what the WoW status is for RMTs as I have neverbothered to play the game. It bewilders me why you would want to play a game of such immature graphical rendering. I love to fly through space in my cruiser http://www.eve-online.com/itemdatabase/EN/ships/cruisers/gallente/627.asp
Nothing pleases me more :)
Whole sections of value cards, all incompatible, are showing up in stores now.
A Hispanic organization has been researching the various "Call Mexico" phone cards, and on average they deliver about 60% of their face value. It turns out that some of them have no value at all.
If anything I think most people will invest their $15 per month in a virtual vacation. MMO's help to distract from real life woes.
Thank God! After WoW destroyed my life and my credit cards were all canceled, I thought my days as an undead thief were over.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
So, let's see, "Pre-Paid Game Cards":
The customer pays upfront, giving you 100% of the card's face value immediately. At worst, they end up giving you a little loan. At best, some or all of the card is never redeemed.
These cards bring the nickel-and-dime micropayment experience to consumers too young for credit cards.
The system can use the same, or similar, electronic payment infrastructure as credit cards already do, making it cheap to administer.
Well, I can certainly see why interest is growing in selling prepaid cards, they are basically just an online rehash of the old gift card scam. What I find harder to understand is why interest would be growing in buying them(underage gamers with no other way of paying excepted). The whole gift card/prepaid "value" card thing is a gigantic scam.
and i never will. how and where they find these people, is beyond me.
i did play MUDs, i know the type of game, and I honestly think the only reason people play these games is to sell items, characters etc, to people with money but not the time, who want a tricked out sword and armor that make them godly in a video game, and they can brag about having so and so a sword.
i played MUDs for about 6-8 months, and i never looked at an everquest box and thought 'this might be fun' i got over the genera as a whole, and it shocks me that people like these games. I know WOW is designed by great game programmers, but to me a video game should have a one time up front cost. paying by the month? forget it.
not even for a console, where i can play many video games online for one 'extra' fee, forget it, i pay for internet, that's the most i'm willing to pay to play online. i know some people are willing to pay extra, but i just don't see the entire gaming world bending over to pay a few extra billion here and there to bolster the economy. the gaming venues have been hit or miss all through the gaming history, i've seen every major player from atari to nintendo have trouble treading water. there are reasons why companies like 3do are a legacy, and why EA owns half the gaming properties on the known face of the earth.
trying to figure out what people want to do with their free time, is not a measured science, it's an art.
i spent 2-3 years struggling with an addiction to online real time strategy, and i know i have an internet addiction, but after 3 years i learned how to deal with my online strategy addiction, and i now have time for television, the internet, and whatever else, all without usually having trouble falling asleep at night. during my addiction i was so problematic that i would play til 2 am and physical exhaustion set in, i would at times shout from getting angry at other gamers without even being aware of having spoken.
it wasn't pretty, and i didn't have to go cold turkey. i can take measures to control how i game.
sadly i don't know if kids can learn how to be grown up until they're 30. i'm 30 and i don't know if i could have said or done anything to prevent me from making the same mistakes i made. ah well.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
these must be very wealthy people to give away money buying imaginary things...
i for one could afford it in terms of monetary but i can't afford it if i look at the bigger picture (property prices, cost of living rising, etc.)
online gaming is the death of gaming. (period)
What gets me is that it's effectively a way for marketers to convince people to trade nice, clean cash that you can exchange for whatever good or service you want, in exchange for the same cash value with what amounts to a sort of restrictive End-User License Agreement attached to it (saying that "this money may only be exchanged for ScamCo® products or services". Sometimes there are even expiration dates or "service fees" associated with some of them...)
"Restricted" money ought to be less valuable than unrestricted money. If there was a genuine discount (e.g. pay $45 and get a "$50 Gift Card" for ScamCo® products) I could understand the appeal - in that example, the company would be paying YOU in exchange for your cost in lost usefulness of the money by accepting the "license". I don't recall ever seeing it done this way, though.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
(Kids+Money)*(PayForPlayGames-NeedForCreditcards)=profit
A key growth limiter to online games has always been the need for credit cards, either because kids don't have them or adults don't want to risk fraud from either a fly-by-night game company or EA getting their billing department hacked.
One-shot electronic money transfer are the future, I wish my credit card made them easy to do for everything. Maybe they should go talk to those cell-phone money guys in India.
I played WoW for about 6 months, leveled a character to 70, realized that end game sucked because I was paying a monthly fee to play a game where everything end game is on a timer....Wanna do X dungeon? Only once this week! Wanna make some material? Only once every 3 or 4 days...
Screw that...
Soooo now I'm playing a bit of Combat Arms which is a free shooter, but Nexon has implemented the micro-transaction system in such a way that its completely unappealing to attempt to "purchase" anything with game card cash. It would be one thing if I dropped 3 or 4 bucks on outfit or a weapon I got to keep for as long as I played the game. Nope...you pay real money to RENT outfits, guns and characters. 10 bucks a month to rent a character skin that gives you some hypersonic speed boost. There are some games coming out which promise that the microtransaction items are merely going to be cosmetic and game enhancing, not player ability enhancing....Im looking forward to those coming out soon, hopefully they will get the formula better....
But, if the currret trend is where gaming with microtransactions is headed? Count me out for them ever getting money out of me. On the other hand, if it really was a *micro* transaction (think 2-5 bucks an item), could be done with my debit card, I kept said item for the life of the game and and items weren't introduced that completely threw off the game balance? Then they might very well be looking at getting 20-50 bucks out of me if its a game I like..
How is this flamebait? Seems perfectly logical to me.
Most of these replies regard why someone would use these: :-)
Take Runescape for example (yes I play, let the bashing begin):
Most of its demographic is age 20 and below. Most of that age group does not have credit cards to pay membership, therefore, they release cards that you buy, that provide a month or two of membership once you input the PIN on the card.
Ironically, the game that needed this most JUST released PP Cards a couple weeks ago.
And for those saying "paying monthly for a game is stupid" Even EVE Online, with it's huge $20 fee, is the price of two to four movies per month, with more time spent entertaining you and a greater aspect of social connection.
It's all a matter of perspective.
I'm curious. I know some people don't have good credit, so they can't get 'credit cards', or they are underage. What are the requirements for the 'pre-paid' credit cards I see advertised from time to time? I would assume, being pre-paid, that you don't need to have good credit? Not sure about the age requirements though - can a minor get a pre-paid card?
I'm not sure why more people don't use pre-paid credit cards for online transactions if they cannot get a 'traditional' credit card?
"One-shot electronic money transfer are the future, I wish my credit card made them easy to do for everything. Maybe they should go talk to those cell-phone money guys in India."
I have a card with a bank that has a one-time credit card number system I can use for one-shot transactions, or recurring paymemnts. I go to the website for the bank, and after logging in, I can request a number be created, I can specify how many months until it expires (2 month minimum), and I can specify a spending limit. It generates a number instantly, which I can use for payment. Once the number has been used once (unless I specified that it the recurring payment option), it cannot be used again. With the recurring payment numbers, I believe once a merchant has used it, it becomes 'tied' to that merchant, so that no other merchants can bill it. With the recurring payment, I can specify the per-payment limit, and it can only be billed at most once per month (I think).
It does add some inconvenience to transactions, and it occurs to me that if anyone ever were able to get into my online account, they could generate themselves some numbers and go shopping, but I think that it's more secure than the alternative of using one number for transactions with every merchant. I don't know for sure, but I think that if there were a problem, like that SOE billing system problem that caused a credit card to get locked, if you used one of those generated credit card numbers when you setup payment with the affected merchant, it might not affect transactions on the same account with other numbers and other merchants.
Let me assure you that it is no mere coincidence that pre-paid gamecards are up and MMORPG's are also rising in sales. While trading accounts is specifically against Blizzard's (for example) EULA, I promise it happens every single day. Blizzard has made it known that they will ban any and all account suspected of being involved in any sort of sale or trade between parties, and will inherently ban any additional accounts associated with the billing information provided with the banned account.
That being said, game cards have no paper trail. They allow anybody to add game time to an account, without it being tracked. Simply remember your account information per account, and it becomes unreasonable to ban via IP, because that can very easily be changed.
There is a correlation between gamecard sales, and increasing requirements for anonymity in order to make untaxed and unsanctioned profits.
Something witty.
Will they turn them into re-paid game cards?
Step one: Sell re-paid game card.
Step two: Offer website so that users can use the re-paid game card to access the secret re-paid game card account settings.
Step three: Make them now buy the stuff that they would have already bought if they were pre-paid game card.
Step four: ???????????
Step five: Profit!
I have a prepaid cell phone. I pay about $15 incl taxes a month for my phone. That's a lot cheaper than my previous plans with T Mobile and AT&T.
I could see the prepaid cards for online games as a great incentive for kids. If they don't get their grades good, or don't do their chores then they miss out on the card until they remedy the situation. That could mean a week or more of no online chatting with their MMO friends.
That, balanced with a time limit and responsible monitoring could be a good thing.
Of course, I still don't understand why I have to pay $50 for the game which comes with zero months included. If I pay $50 and have to pay monthly, I should get at least two months of playtime included. My $60 prepaid phone came with two months of service.