The panel, featuring some of the leading exponents of the entertainment and gaming industry – among them: Michael Arrieta, CEO, Big Air Studios; Chris Carvalho, COO, Kabam – will be moderated by Jeremy Miller, Senior Analyst at DFC Intelligence, and will address some of the new frontiers in content monetization.

Specifically, the panel will explore and discuss best practices in the games space and how digital entertainment leaders can leverage these tactics, new broadband distribution channels and new social concepts to make monetization an integral and wholesome part of the user experience.

To read more about the event, please click here.

The new features, compatible with all major platforms (including transactions from smartphones and tablets), are specially well-suited for enterprise customers in need of increased transaction security, increased product marketability and large data set optimization.

Specifically, the new fraud reports include fraud response both on a daily basis and by country, allowing customers to track the number of transactions that are considered risky or are denied due to a high fraud score and modify their rules and/or local product offerings accordingly. Chargebacks are also monitored, allowing quick identification of any suspicious activity related to a specific payment method.

Daily Fraud Monitoring

The new promotion tracking, on the other hand, allows publishers and developers to fine-tune their virtual item offerings on a daily basis, depending on how users respond to new promotions. Offer redemptions in both real and virtual currency are supported, making it easy to accurately track promotional marketing expenses as well.

Sales reporting, both across virtual items and currency sales, has also been enriched by adding daily revenues by currency (normalized to USD, based on current exchange rates) and payment gateway. The latter is a very useful feature to quickly spot potential issues with any payment methods, including power outages or fraud attacks.

Daily Revenue by Payment Gateways

“We’re proud to be offering enhance security and sales monitoring capabilities to our customers” said Russell Shiffer, Vice President of Product at Live Gamer. “The introduction of these new features makes our analytics platform even more complete and represents an added layer of security and performance monitoring to our global clients.”

“Brent and Eric are representative of the strong talent that Live Gamer consistently attracts and I’m very pleased to welcome them to the team,” said Jesse Gould, Vice President of Business Development for  Live Gamer. “As the microtransaction market continues to rapidly become the de facto model for digital content monetization our team is well positioned to meet the demands of our global client base.”

Brent Martyn has 14 years of experience collaborating with top brands to develop successful sales and marketing strategies in digital, print, and emerging media channels. Brent has held executive positions with both Ziff Davis and IDG, and as an example, has helped many brands position themselves within Electronic Arts portfolio of blockbuster titles. Most recently, Brent was Director of Business Development for Dialect Inc, a Content Marketing Agency working with top gaming and technology brands such as Electronic Arts, NVIDIA and GameFly. He received his BA from Gettysburg College.

Eric Williams brings a combination of business development and sales engineering experience spanning work in both the US and Europe. Most recently, he was a Sales Engineer at Deutsche Telekom’s online payments subsidiary ClickandBuy. He received his BS in Information Sciences and Technology from Penn State University and also studied at Philipps-Universität Marburg.

Welcome Brent and Eric to the Live Gamer Team!

Most recently, Clayton was the director of product management at Visa/Playspan where he led their global payments product. Previously, he led product management for payment solutions focused on digital goods monetization as the principal of product management at Amazon Payments. Before joining Amazon he co-founded as and was the VP of product management at Sotto Wireless, a venture-capital backed telecom service provider combining cellular and hosted VoIP for the small and medium enterprise market. He also held product leadership and innovation roles in mobile data services and applications at AT&T Wireless.

However, we also love to have fun with the games themselves, and we are lucky enough to have some in-house top talent when it comes to recommending new games. One of them is Richard Rodriguez, who recently delivered a stunning presentation on the evolution of story telling throughout gaming history at our NYC headquarters.

As a start, Richard highlighted how game story telling can be categorized in four different categories: basic, complex, refined and DIY (do it yourself). This closely tracks the history of video game development in the past 25 years, as most games can be labeled using one of these four categories.

A great example of basic story telling is the classic Super Mario Bros (see Figure 1). The story here is pretty simple: to rescue the princess is the game main’s goal, and the rest follows. Despite being quite a long game and having many levels (players were quite concerned about this at the time), the game itself was the main focus, and the story development was kept to a minimum.

Figure 1 – Super Mario Bros

Final Fantasy IV (originally released in 1991 for Super Nintendo with no voice acting, only text) is instead a great example of complex story telling. In fact, it is very hard for anyone who plays the game for the first time to get interested in the story of the game, as it does not look particularly entertaining nor makes a lot of sense. In Richard’s own words: “This is a classic example of why older generations tend to look down on gaming: the first time you look at it, you ask yourself, what is this? Only my kids could ever play anything like this”. That is why, in Richard’s opinion, video games started off badly in terms of story telling: good, renowned writers and game developers were not working together yet, with the former always busy writing books and movie plots.

Fast forward 16 years, and we have Bioshock, released in 2007 for PlayStation, and a great example of refined story telling. The game itself has a quite linear plot: the main goal is to stop the underwater city of Rapture’s founder and dictator Andrew Ryan, and the choices that a player can make to do so are somehow limited. However, this is not a casual choice but a sophisticated one from the game’s creator, Ken Levine, and his development team: aware of the linearity of most games, they decided to use Ayn Rand’s objectivism (or rational self-interest) principles as an explanation of why the game is linear. Indeed, in Bioshock the player is forced to follow a linear path since his mind is being controlled in the controlled, artificial reality of Rapture (with the phrase “Would you kindly” representing the dystopian view of objectivism – here is a short clip). This is quite remarkable, and it is something that movie and books cannot render as well, if not at all. This also implies that it takes much more than simply taking a great Hollywood director and making him write a game to ensure that the game is successful, i.e. games and movies are two very different animals, with games being much more dynamic than a static, forced sequence of images stacked together.

As refined story telling elements have become more sophisticated, along with game graphics (with lots of money poured into development), characters have started to resemble more and more real world animations, although there is a caveat: the Uncanny Valley Hypothesis (see Figure 2).

Figure 2 – The Uncanny Valley Hypothesis

In a nutshell, the closer we get to make something look human-like, the less we believe it is actually human, as small differences make a big impact on the final result and our reaction to it. As an example, Mass Effect 2 (released in 2010 for Windows and Xbox 360) is a game with a very advanced and detailed graphical engine and fantastic animations, but unfortunately, showing a very small range in facial expressions: the characters emotions are not portrayed well, causing a negative reaction in the players. So sometimes, advanced graphics does not enhance the game story’s experience, creating the opposite effect instead.

This brings us to Do-It-Yourself story telling, a great example of which is represented by Passage, created by Jason Rohrer in 2007. A uber-minimalistic PC game (5 minutes total, around 1MB in size, minimal input controls, i.e. the arrow keys), the game theme is the passage of time and the character’s own mortality, including the costs and benefits of marriage. Without the need of a lot of graphics, “Passage” offers a lot of story telling per unit of time, and gives users a lot of freedom to decide by themselves what is the meaning of the story and what to make of it.

Lastly, as an example of a modern game offering a very rich story despite its appearance, here is Flower, released in 2009 for PlayStation 3. The game received awards for outstanding visual and audio design, and without trying to attempt realism, it succeeds to entertain players with its rich visuals and interactive music (each flower that blooms makes a distinctive sound).

One final recommendation from Richard: do not expect, at least in the short term, story-rich mobile games, as the playing dynamics is still different from desktop and consoles, i.e. users tend to play in 5-10 minutes intervals, and generally do not expect a very complex story plot. However, things could change in the future, and we’re all looking forward to original mobile games with engrossing stories.

Nano Studio (and its business unit Nano Games, focused on developing digital entertainment on web/desktop and mobile platforms) is at the forefront of the mobile gaming industry in Brazil, which represents one of the largest and fastest-growing markets worldwide. Brazil’s position as the South American country with the largest mobile broadband penetration is fueling this market opportunity. Nano Studio’s first release, Favela Wars, is scheduled for release in March 2013 on web/desktop, shortly followed by the iOS and Android versions.

Nano Studio has integrated the Live Gamer Elements™ platform into Favela Wars to drive the game’s virtual economy for its launch in Brazil, all of South America and the United States. As a complete monetization engine, Live Gamer Elements offers a full content and user management solution, a robust earned and bought virtual currency system, customizable item storefronts and advanced merchandising, as well as deep analytics and integration with international payment gateways.

“We are very excited to be working with Nano Studio,” said Andrew Schneider, President and Co-Founder of Live Gamer. “The team effort and motivation behind the development of Favela Wars have been tremendous and we’re also looking forward to continuing to expand our capabilities for the mobile gaming industry in Brazil and South America.”

“Live Gamer’s Elements technology is allowing us to concentrate our efforts on our core skills instead of building a complex virtual economy management system from scratch,” said Dan Eisenberg, Co-owner of Nano Studio. “This in turn has shortened our time to market and given us the possibility of expanding our offerings to more platforms and clients.”

Live Gamer announced today that it has released an important upgrade to its flagship Elements™ e-commerce platform: digital item expiration and renewal.

The new feature, available across all platforms — web/desktop, mobile, social — is a key upgrade for direct-to-consumer content monetization, allowing publishers and developers to price their content on a per-time or per-view unit basis using real or virtual currency (bought with real money or earned in other ways, i.e. promotions) and be able to renew/extend rental time.

As a result of this new feature, publishers will be able to offer pay-per-view digital items, media or other forms of digital content to their customers, therefore allowing advanced rental-based business models — and their corresponding sophisticated pricing structure — to be easily implemented for both virtual items and digital content. Examples of possible applications are many: micropayments for audio/video content, re-marketing of virtual goods in gaming, or subscription management for the digital print industry.

“We’re delighted to be able to support advanced business models that combine both micro-transactions and rentals,” said Russell Shiffer, Vice President of Product at Live Gamer. “The introduction of this new feature greatly expands our offering in digital e-commerce world, allowing our clients to increase overall retention by reducing customer churn and increasing its lifetime value.”

Live Gamer is excited to announce that President and Co-Founder Andrew Schneider will be speaking at the 2nd annual Games Summit at 2013 International CES. The event is produced by Digital Media Wire, and takes place on January 10^th in Las Vegas, NV. Games Summit brings together some of the most influential executives from the electronics, game, and advertising industries to discuss current trends and the future of games and connected entertainment.

Schneider, a leader in the digital entertainment industry for over 14 years, will be speaking on the panel “What Comes After the Last Generation Game Consoles: New Disruptive Media Distribution Chains” to discuss the evolution of business models and distribution channels as video games continue to migrate into the cloud. Schneider will be joined by: Rob Schonfeld, VP, Global Digital and Mobile Sales, Activision Blizzard; Marshall Jensen, Managing Partner, DMW Hexagon, LLC; Oren Tversky, VP, Business Development, Unity Technologies; Ken Kajikawa, General Manager, Digital Media, Telx; Tasos Kaiafas, Director of Games, AT&T. Michael Cai, VP of Video Games at Interpret, will serve as moderator.

For more information, please click here.

With a global Open Beta Event, Live Gamer integration will deliver 27 unique payment methods in 49 currencies covering mobile, international and local bank-branded credit cards, debit cards, alternative methods, and pre-paid cards to enable immediate global monetization. Meteor Entertainment and Adhesive Games are using Live Gamer Elements for payments, virtual item catalog management, merchandising functionality and analytics in support of increasing conversion rates, boosting ARPU and promoting retention. Live Gamer is also streamlining the look and feel of the purchase flow to support the massive global Open Beta of the title.

“It’s a great thrill to partner with Meteor Entertainment on the massive – and massively anticipated – Open Beta of HAWKEN,” said Andrew Schneider, President and Co-Founder, Live Gamer. “We are delighted to have the opportunity to work closely with the talented Meteor team to integrate Live Gamer’s Elements e-commerce engine to help power their core business model on a global and unprecedented basis.”

Live Gamer’s Deepa Muralikrishnan will be speaking at the International & Cross-Border Payments conference, on Tuesday, November 27 at the Carlton Hotel.  The panel, The Emerging Global Payments Landscape: How International Payment Developments are Affecting Cross-Border Remittances, Payment Processing, and Adoption and Growth Rates in Key Markets, will discuss topics such as exploring the different types of global and cross-border payment platforms and services, new and emerging technologies and business models, and adoption and growth rates in key regions.

Deepa Muralikrishnan is the General Manager of Global Payments at Live Gamer, Inc.  She is a technology product strategist with over 12 years of experience launching digital products and ecommerce stores in global markets.

Other panelists include:

Kazushi Ishijima

Head of Payment Market Infrastructure

Transaction Services Division

The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Ltd. (Tokyo)

James Wills

Standards — Banking Initiatives

SWIFT Pan Americas

Manfred Schuck

Head of Marketing

International Payments Framework Association (IPFA) (Frankfurt, Germany)

Jonathan Lear

Head of Business

Earthport North America

Richard J. O’Brien

President & CEO

Payment Pathways, Inc.

Elena Whisler, AAP

Product Management

Clear2Pay Americas

Gene Neyer

SVP, Product Management

Fundtech Corporation

More information can be found at the following link.