Facebook Credits gift cards are now on sale at grocery store chain Tesco and videogame retailer Game in the UK. The cards can be purchased with any payment option the physical stores accept, making them accessible to teens without credit cards. The cards can be redeemed by scratching off the back and entering the code on the Facebook Credits webpage.

Making the gift cards available in the UK is another step towards Facebook’s goal to provide hundreds of payment options for Credits. The cards were first sold at US big box outlet Target, and are now also available at Best Buy and Wal-Mart, supermarket Safeway, and electronics and game retailers Radioshack and GameStop.

Facebook has recently added a number of other payment methods including mobile phone payment provider Boku, loose change counting kiosks CoinStar through Rixty, and third-party gift card exchange Plastic Jungle. Putting Facebook Credits in retail stores not only makes them more accessible, but seeing the cards on the shelf reminds people of the virtual economy they could join.

Between Game’s 683 and Tesco’s 2,482 locations, users can purchase gift cards in £5, £10, £20, and £25 denominations. Facebook also continues to say that it’s possible user may eventually be able to spend Credits on Facebook-integrated third party websites, in addition to the Facebook canvas where they can currently be used.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

On the heels of announcing a payments partnership with Facebook, PlaySpan is making another announcement regarding the startup’s UltimatePay payments product. PlaySpan is launching UltimatePay Mobile, a virtual currency and micropayments monetization widget for smartphone platforms. The initial private beta launch will support Android phones and Nokia phones with WebRuntime installed.

UltimatePay is a ‘Monetization as a Service’ platform for apps, games, videos and digital goods. Based on the user’s location, the payments platform draws from over 85 different payment options. Because of its vast variety of payment options (which include PayPal, pre-paid cards, and a number of credit cards), UltimatePay is designed for a global audience.

UltimatePay Mobile gives smartphone developers a way to deliver a one-click payment experience to mobile gamers, and provide a comprehensive payments offering. The platform allows players to view their balance and transaction history, while allowing them to purchase items in-app without ever having to leave the game.

Of course, PlaySpan isn’t the first startup or company to bring in-app payments to Android phones; PayPal, Boku and Zong all offer in-app payments libraries to developers.

PlaySpan, which recently raised $18 million in new funding, already has a number of partnerships with a number of gaming and media companies, including Ubisoft, Sanrio and others. Perhaps the company can leverage some of these relationships to offer UltimatePay in publisher’s mobile games.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Mobile payment provider Zong was the first alternative payment company to get its offering integrated into Facebook’s main Credits purchase interface. That was last August, and Facebook has since added a variety of other ways to by the virtual currency, including advertising offers provided by TrialPay, a more diverse set of credit card and banking options, its own pre-paid retail cards, and a big expansion in other ways that users can gain Credits through third parties.

Now, more than a year later, Facebook is going to add Zong rival Boku to the Credits purchase options, according to a report from All Things D. It seems obvious that Facebook would add Boku, and many other payment options, at some point. So why now?

The timing isn’t that odd, considering the overall expansion of Credits in recent months. Facebook is making the currency the only way that users can buy virtual goods on the platform. Boku and Zong have up until now been active on the platform, as payment options for developers selling their own virtual currencies in games. It’s likely that Facebook is able to strike favorable deal terms with the payment providers it is aggregating, given Facebook’s leverage through the Credits rollout.

Boku, formed out of some earlier mobile payments companies, has established itself as the main competitor to Zong. Both companies let users pay for Credits and other virtual currencies using their mobile phone accounts, and both have worked hard to establish relationships with carriers around the world, even as more mainstream payment options continue to be the most popular with users, according to a recent survey we did for our Inside Facebook Gold analysis service.

Those relationships are time-consuming to build, but they can be just as important as the mobile payments technology underpinning the startups’ systems. Carriers who are comfortable with one of these mobile payment companies will sometimes agree to reduce their otherwise-high transaction fees, for example.

More intriguingly, a recent article from TechCrunch said that Apple and Google have both been talking to Boku about an acquisition or significant partnership. Perhaps the interest of those two rivals spurred Facebook to get Boku on the platform?  Boku’s goal as an independent company is to become as widely accessible to users as possible, and up until this point it has watched Zong get promoted over it by Facebook, even as Facebook has made Credits the only way for users to buy virtual currency on the platform. Now that it appears to be on board, perhaps it will be more inspired to stay independent?

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Following CrowdStar, Zynga, Playdom, RockYou and most other social game developers on Facebook, EA’s Playfish has announced that it is entering into a five-year agreement to use Credits as the exclusive virtual currency payment option on Facebook. It was only a matter of time.

While many developers had directly integrated with third-party payment options like PayPal, mobile payment options, offers, and more during the early years of the platform, that began to change last year. The developer community began to whisper that Facebook was going to make then use Credits exclusively, and over the course of the first part of this year, Facebook began to talk publicly about doing so. Playfish has been testing Credits for months, and given the string of other “five year strategic partnerships” that Facebook and social gaming companies have announced, most in the industry assumed it would be doing the same.

EA is getting the same deal as everyone else, in that Facebook will take a 30% cut of Credits revenue and share the other 70%, according to Facebook.

Some developers, especially larger ones that had already built their own payment infrastructures, were not happy about the switch. But Facebook’s intention is not just to make money from the booming virtual goods economy that has emerged on its platform, but to improve the payments user experience and increase the volume of payments for everyone. One view is that it needed to make everyone use Credits in order to have the virtual currency get traction.

Facebook itself has also invested heavily in making this happen, building out its payments team, greatly increasing the number of payment options, and iterating on payments interface flows.

So, now that so many developers have signed on, Credits should be starting to generate higher revenues — and, if everything goes according to plan, the entire ecosystem could see revenue increases as more users spend more money.

To dig deeper on the social gaming landscape, including Credits and monetization dynamics on the Facebook Platform, check out our new report – Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2011.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook