Female gaming icon and Live Gamer’s Senior Director of Business Development, Stevie Case will speak at a special panel hosted by the Technology Council of Southern California on July 15th. The “How Virtual Goods Are Transforming the Game Industry” panel will focus on the trends and challenges of the Free 2 Play business model and the explosion of virtual goods consumption on Facebook, Smart Phones, and other popular gaming platforms.

Speakers:

• Andre Bremer, Studio CTO at Zynga
• Stevie Case, Senior Director, Business Development at Live Gamer, Inc.
• Jason Kay, Chief Operating Monkey at Monkey Gods LLC
• Brad Spahr, Founder & CEO at Fan Space Media
  (former Exec. Dir. of Digital Distribution, Sony Pictures Entertainment)

Moderator:

• Shalom Mann, Founder & Creative Director at OneLoop Games
  (former SVP & Studio Head, Sony Online Entertainment)

To learn more click here

To register now click here

Live Gamer’s Senior Director of Business Development and video game icon, Stevie Case hosts a brand new radio show, Stevie FTW (For The Win). The new show focuses on the high tech lifestyle, exploring the latest in online gaming, web culture, digital media, and the gadgets that transform them

This past week Stevie and Dan are talkin’ iPads, Blizzard woes, and competitive gaming around the world. eSport Media, Inc.’s CEO Jeff Hunter also sat down to talk about the future of eSports Media. The show has already featured Doug Dyer from AFK Interactive, Dave Rohrl from Playdom, Jonathan Carroll from Alamofire, and Cliff Bleszinski from Epic Games.

Stevie FTW is co-hosted and edited by Dan Taylor and produced by Angel Munoz.

The show airs every Wednesday and you can tune in by visiting www.stevieftw.com

Congratulations to Sony Online Entertainment for launching PoxNora today on Facebook. The new Facebook application comes with a complete storefront powered by Live Gamer Elements platform.

Here is a peak at the PoxNora game on Facebook and the storefront.

Play PoxNora on Facebook

PoxNora Screenshots

V-Con 2010: How Games-as-a-Service & Virtual Items Have Changed the Playbook Forever

produced by Live Gamer

03.10.10 // 10:00am – 5:15pm // West Mezz Room 270/272

@ Game Developers Conference // San Francisco, CA

V-Con is a 1-day exploration into how Games-as-a-Service and Virtual Items have changed the playbook forever. Led by the game industry’s most sought-after CEOs, founders, visionaries, and executives, we’ll discuss the industry’s undisputed transition to this new business model, as well as its ramifications on development, product management, operations, and strategy.

We hope to see you there! Stay tuned – exciting speaker announcements, keynotes, and the official agenda coming soon!

The event is FREE with the purchase of your GDC ticket.

Register Now

Learn More

Today we are pleased to announce that we have expanded our relationship with Sony Online Entertainment LLC (SOE) to implement Elements, our core microtransaction platform, to power micro-payments across their social, web, and in-game channels.

SOE and Live Gamer will work closely over the next quarter to seamlessly augment and upgrade SOE’s existing proprietary infrastructure.  This collaboration will enable a unified cross-platform e-wallet and item merchandising experience within SOE’s traditional client-side PC online game business.  Games to take advantage of the Live Gamer platform will include PoxNora®, Free Realms™, EverQuest® and EverQuest®II, as well as future titles.

“The microtransaction industry has become increasingly specialized, and Live Gamer has helped us with advanced functionality that allows us to continually stay ahead of the curve in ecommerce,” said John Smedley, president, Sony Online Entertainment. “We chose Live Gamer to power our payments, merchandising and primary-secondary market solutions based on innovative technology, recognized track record in the market and an advanced, holistic approach.”

Along with this announcement are significant upgrades to the core platform itself such as an upgraded enterprise storefront, retail merchandising capabilities, advanced item offers and new analytics features for payment gateway optimization to improve publishers’ ability to drive conversion rates, ARPU, and retention.

Read the official announcement or contact us to learn more about our new platform upgrades.

Today we are pleased to announce an extensive group of worldwide publishers who have recently selected Live Gamer to manage and optimize their micro-transaction based virtual economies.

Everyplay (Finland),

Friendscook (United States),

Fotochatter (United States),

Hangout (United States),

Hooked Media Group (United States),

Radius IM (United States),

ph03nix (Canada),

GPM Studio (Korea),

Please contact us, to learn how you can generate additional revenue through microtransactions.

Radius IM Virtual Goods Screenshot

Today, Live Gamer is pleased to  to announce it will be providing  the technology and strategy behind the new virtual gifting and virtual economy of one of the world’s fastest growing Latin social networks, Quepasa.

Virtual Gift and Item Inventory

Quepases users can now buy exciting virtual items such as national flags, roses, da bomb, dice, diamond rings, and much more with QDollars and QPoints. Selected from a variety of vendors as the platform of choice to power this exciting new offering, Live Gamer is bringing it’s complete, end-to-end virtual economy solution to Quepasa with  the deepest currency, inventory, and account data available.

Quepasa has created a comprehensive strategy for deploying virtual currency-driven applications and we’re thrilled to help them optimize their revenues while offering users a compelling virtual shopping and gifting experience.

Check out the press release on the integration here!

Greetings!

It has been an eventful summer for Live Gamer and today we are delighted to announce that Palo Alto-based Twofish, the leading provider of virtual economy solutions for casual gaming and social application developers, is now a Live Gamer company. This acquisition in conjunction with our recent acquisition of N-Cash in Asia expands Live Gamer’s total commerce solution, offering the global interactive entertainment industry even more flexibility and groundbreaking features.

Twofish’s best-in-class technology combines a rich analytics platform and an easy integration toolkit, enabling developers to create a virtual economy in just a few hours, instead of days. We are pleased to provide the essential technologies necessary to develop and grow any micro-transaction-based business model – all under one roof. game companies.

Please read our press announcement or reach out to me if you’d like to hear more.

Andrew Schneider
Co-Founder, President

How do you monetize social networks and social games? Similar to the online games space, there is a growing consensus that the answer is by complementing advertising with a virtual goods micro-transaction business model. Social networks and start-ups are positioning themselves accordingly. Hi5 has announced its own virtual currency. Facebook is now implementing “credits” and MySpace seems to be working on their own payments platform. Jambool provides virtual currency, while Gambit, Zuora and Spare Change offer a variety of direct payment methods. Users can pay for virtual goods by completing offers or surveys thanks to SuperRewards, OfferPal and Sometrics while Zong and MobillCash let them pay with their cellphones. Live Gamer provides a publisher-supported secondary market for virtual good trading. It is only a matter of time until services emerge that optimize electronic storefronts – layout, inventory, pricing and promotions – and virtual goods marketing campaigns.

The pitch for the micro-transaction business model is simple. There is a higher user monetization relative to advertising revenues because of the type of engagement that occurs in social communities and games. Central to this argument is the metric for user monetization: Average Revenue per User (ARPU). The figure below shows several public estimates of annual ARPUs[1]. The apparent wide discrepancy is misleading because of the different ways of defining ARPU. If analyses based on ARPU segmentation, such as average ARPU levels by game/app type and characteristics, or by social platform and region, will inform key decisions about design and user acquisition marketing budgets, these inconsistencies may result in wrong and costly decisions.

Originally posted by Virtual Economy Research Network

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About the author

Nima Pourshasb is director of corporate development at Live Gamer. His background includes Business Development at MTV Networks, where he led M&A deals with social media properties, and a Senior Project Manager role in strategy consulting at Oliver Wyman, specializing in Emerging Markets. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, during which he worked part-time at venture capital firm General Catalyst, helping launch an online advertising company.

To learn more about Nima and his work at Live Gamer please visit www.livegamer.com