Facebook formally announced 2 new Credits programs

Today Facebook formally announced the roll-out of two new Credits programs that were first detailed a couple weeks back at the Inside Social Apps conference: buy with friends and frictionless payments.

Facebook described the two Credits programs on the developer blog:
Buy with friends gives people the option to share a discount with their friends after they make purchases in games.
After making a purchase, the user has the option to share a discount for the same item with their friends through the newsfeed. Their friends can respond by either going to the


game to buy the item, or simply making a purchase inline without losing the context of what they were doing on Facebook.

This function is by many people called a Groupon competition, however I think it has nothing to do with Groupon, it is just another way to bind users and game developer to FB Credits that FB makes more revenue. The approach is smart because it has benefits for the user and therefore the users will have higher acceptance.

The second product, frictionless payments, is essentially Facebook’s one-click buying solution, making it easy for users to stay completely within the game without breaking the experience. There’s no doubt that this should help increase transaction volume for Facebook. These services are limited to Facebook Credits which means they can only be used for virtual goods. Again another step to get more revenue. Till now developers did not need to use FB credits as payment method. But with the instant buy they need to move to Credits.

Developers have a deadline on 1st July to transition over to Credits.

Facebook takes more and more control over their 3rd party apps. These made FB big, but FB had no revenue coming through, which changes with FB credits. 30% of credit revenue goes directly to FB the rest to the developer.


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