The term “virtual goods” has been popping up more and more often, probably because people are starting to realize what most online gaming companies already know: virtual goods are big business. Ironically (or maybe not), the sale of virtual goods is highest in free games. Even though the games themselves are free for anyone to play, it turns out the majority of players end up paying small amounts to upgrade their characters’ abilities or add virtual goods to their accounts in order to enhance their experience or increase their status.

In order to shed more light on the trends in virtual goods purchasing, market researcher VGMarket, along with Playspan, conducted a survey in July of this year, asking players what kinds of virtual goods they were buying and in what kind of games. The findings of the survey, summarized in a recent article posted on VentureBeat, show that over half of all virtual goods transactions occur in free-to-play games. (more…)

At iovation, we help combat a wide variety of fraud concerns for companies across multiple industries, including many in the online gaming industry. The fact that we work with gaming publishers and providers of massively multiplayer online (MMO) games, however, is surprising to most people. Their first reaction is “Really? What kind of fraud problems do they have?” The answer: “Way more than you might think…”

The gaming industry has been fighting fraud and abuse ever since games went online and it goes way beyond simple payment fraud. Here are a few of the problems we help our customers address: (more…)