Visa has announced its agreement to pay $190 million plus performance incentives to acquire Playspan, a California-based solution provider of specialty payment mechanisms for games developers. Playspan’s UltimatePay product allows game developers to accept in-game payment for digital goods, but its key strength is its international scope. Developers need write only one interface to the Playspan API in order to accept more than 85 global payment methods supporting 180 countries. In that part of the online games market that is not enclosed in the Facebook ecosystem, especially among game players outside the US, Playspan’s “Monetization As A Service” solution is a powerful enabler. It supports transactions via many variants of specialty cards as well as non-card payment methods, including mobile phone-based billing.
According to Visa: “The acquisition of PlaySpan complements Visa’s 2010 CyberSource acquisition and extends the company’s capabilities into one of the fastest-growing segments of eCommerce – digital and mobile commerce.”
Market observers should stay tuned – it will be fascinating to see what they do with this!
Read the story here: http://corporate.visa.com/media-center/press-releases/press1099.jsp
For more information, see Mercator’s report on social networking and consumer payments.