Virtual Goods News

Today the comprehensive virtual economy services provider Live Gamer announced that it had secured seven new global partners. Everyplay, friendscook, Fotochatter, Hangout, Hooked and RadiusIM, ph03nix, and GPM are all now using Live Gamer to manage all of their transaction and virtual economy needs. 

Currently Live Gamer serves of 72 clients operating over 100 different projects. Distributed among these 100+ projects are 56 million registered users located in 23 different countries who generate about 3 million online transactions per month.  

Live Gamer president and co-founder Andrew Schneider believes that Live Gamer's growth is a sign that the virtual goods industry is moving into a new phase of growth and development. During "phase one," which occurred 2-4 years ago, he believes most businesses getting involved in the space were simply concerned with how to accept payments. Now, in "phase two," Schneider believes virtual goods business models are growing more sophisticated, with companies putting more emphasis on using analytical data and marketing techniques to increase conversion among users. 

"These are companies that are looking for a robust solution that is easy to implement and will scale as their needs scale," said Schneider. "It's about questions like "What can I do?" and "How do I optimize?" Our clients are very focused on serving the needs of their own end-users."  

Schneider predicts continued growth for segments of the virtual goods industry that concern themselves with providing analytic data to developers. He also believes developers who choose to deal with third parties for handling basic monetization duties like payments and transaction processing will want flexible featuresets that ca