Throughout our lifespan, fatfoogoo has created a number of monetization and payment platforms and options for a wide range of gaming companies. In 2006, when Martin Herdina and Daniel Petri set out to make a virtual marketplace for the trading and purchasing of virtual goods and services, the initial idea was to provide a marketplace for consumers to meet and trade/sell in-game virtual items and services. While this platform proved to be successful with gamers, game operators made it clear that they would rather keep a tighter hold on what was and what was not being traded within their titles. Et Viola, the modern version of today’s fatfoogoo was born with a white label services and technology model. And while there are a number of ‘traditional’ games and titles that we provide our services to, the undeniable growth and popularity of social games, as well as a number of other browser based games, has been certainly something we’ve been looking at for quite a while now.

Speaking to Justin Smith of insidesocialgames.com last week, Martin states, “We’ve been working with social app and game developers since the end of 2008, as the requirements are very similar to classical online game business models. The first social networking project we did was to provide store, white-label payments and virtual currencies for the avatar engine mEgo, now we are just working with Gogogic on powering Vikings of Thule – and some really exciting social apps/games projects are currently under the hood.”

As Smith states, we are based in Vienna, Austria, miles away from some of traditional games development hotbeds, we’ve also established offices in the UK and the US, with our very own Stevie Case running point on working closely with North American operators/developers.

“Our technology is purely international, so it’s capable of supporting multi-languages, multi currencies, multi-byte character-sets and different VAT-rates,” Herdina says. “However, in terms of business development we are mostly focusing on talking to potential partners in North America and Europe.”

Realizing that while social gaming might share a number of traditional facets, it also takes on it’s own brand of monetization. Specifically, in-game advertising can often be relied on as a primary means of revenues. To this end, we’ve partnered with a number of managed offer platforms in order to facilitate this monetization mechanism. “We treat offers as an alternative payment option, and therefore work with quite a few offer providers in different regions to ensure ideal coverage, like PayBuyPartner, AdParlor, GratisPay, and SponsorPay,” Herdina says.

With this particular attention turned out social games, naturally, facilitating the ease, and variety of payment options is key. We’ve partnered with a number of payment providers specifically focused on social games in order to ensure the highest levels of both client and customer satisfaction. Payment options include credit cards, direct debits, mobile payments, and prepaid cards, to name a few.

“We are expecting our ongoing and future projects in the social app/game space to contribute a significant part to our success in 2010,” Herdina says.

If you’re headed to the Browser Games Forum in Frankfurt this November, Martin will be speaking and available for questions both days.  To have a better look into who we are and what we offer, please visit our solutions section.