Platogo.com integrates Buxter payment to social gaming, makes flash developers happy

Platogo is an Austrian company that specializes in providing useful APIs to game developers. Recently they launched an in game payment API based on Buxter. Jakob Sommerhuber, Platogo's CEO was nice enough to spare some of his time for us to talk about his experience.

Q: Let me ask you the most basic question first, What does Platogo exactly do?

A: Basically we provide tools for game developers. These tools help them to integrate their games into Facebook. What this means is that we provide APIs that enable high scores leader boards for social gaming, or you could use Platogo to make it possible to challenge friends on Facebook to a game directly.

On the other hand we provide an in-game shop solution  - and that's, obviously, where Buxter comes into play. We use it as a means of purchasing a virtual currency in the games. With these virtual currencies items in a game can be bought.

Q: How important is payment in games?

A: It is definitively a growing market, especially on Facebook, because there are quite a number of social games that successfully monetized their users. Currently we concentrate on casual games and we observed that this is a rising and very active market.

Q: How do you estimate the growth of freemium and in game payment games over the next years?

A: I think that it is very likely to come down to about 10% of all games on Facebook having some kind of payment element.

Q: How did Buxter help you?

A: Buxter clearly has the benefit that ClickandBuy offers a lot of different payment options in quite a lot of countries. So our choice to use an aggregator like ClickandBuy was pretty obvious to us. We didn't want to implement all the payment integrations necessary to accept bank transfer payments and all the various options out there. Of course Buxter is a great new solution for social networks and we are very happy with it.

Q: How much time did you spend implementing your payment API

A: Implementing our in game API and attaching Buxter to it took us a mere two weeks.

Q: How important do you think it is to keep the user within the borders of Facebook during payment?

A: We had a lot of experience that indicates the strong will of Users to stay within Facebook once they are logged in to it. For example banners that link to external websites don't really work in Facebook - the same thing goes for games that lead the user away from Facebook. So it was a logical step to have payment work inside Facebook as well. We think this is a major factor in the commercial success of a Facebook game.

Q: What kind of advice do you have to share for developers starting out to write games for Facebook?

A: Why of course, they should use Platogo (laughs). No, really the important thing to consider is the magnitude of work we can save the developer by giving him all these tools from highscores to payment that would otherwise require his time and attention developing it himself.

The game developer only defines the virtual items he wants to sell, and we give him all the keys to his shop to start out with his monetized game. We think that virtual goods and for-pay extensions of games are the future of gaming online.

To have a look at a demo game from the Platogo portfolio go to http://apps.facebook.com/veggiesnake/ .