On the heels of its recent acquisitions of microtransaction platforms Twofish and N-Cash, Live Gamer, an online marketplace for players to trade and buy video game virtual goods, is seeing success in managing virtual economies for online games, virtual worlds and social networks. In conjunction with game makers, Live Gamer’s platform lets online game players trade virtual goods they earn in games. The company is using Twofish and N-Cash’s micropayments technologies to power commerce in these gaming marketplaces.
Gaming customers including Everyplay (Finland), friendscook, Fotochatter, Hangout, Hooked and Radius IM (United States), ph03nix (Canada) and GPM (Korea) are using Live Gamer’s virtual goods exchange to power an economy platform around their games. Live Gamer’s platform includes virtual currency and virtual item systems, inventory management, publisher-sponsored secondary market trading, analytics, fraud management and support features.
Currently, Live Gamer has over 72 customers and supports over 56 million registered users across all of partner implementations, exceeding 3 million micro-transactions per month.
Live Gamer co-founder and president Andrew Schneider said that the microtransaction and gaming industries are evolving at such a rapid pace, that the requirement for his company extends beyond just creating a safe e-commerce transaction. He says that with competition and innovation, virtual economies include a host of more robust and interactive features, including advanced merchadising of virtual goods.
Schneider said that Live Gamer is also particularly excited about Apple’s recent ruling to allow in-app commerce for free apps. He see this as new and potentially huge dimension for microtransactions and payments to gain even more momentum in the space, and says that Live Gamer will definitely be trying to be a part of this opportunity in the future.
Competitors to Live Gamer include PlaySpan (which also made a recent acquisition of a micropayments startup).