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…)

We are pleased to announce the release of our recent case study with BattleClinic on Gamasutra.com. The case study details how we helped them achieve a 95% reduction in credit card chargebacks in 8 months. As the leader in fraud prevention for MMOs, iovation pioneered the use of device fingerprinting to establish device reputations and fight online fraud.

The reality in the online games environment is that even many of the best anti-fraud tools simply don’t provide effective results. Time and again we at iovation have seen significant uplift over existing tools to reduce fraud for our customers in the MMO industry: in the case of BattleClinic, as dramatic as a 95% reduction. What seems to be particularly compelling about theresults we’ve seen in this industry is our ability to quickly establish the relationships between player accounts that were previously hidden. Not only does this result in dramatic reduction in fraud, it also significantly reduces the amount of time spent on trying to manually search for associations and patterns in personal data.

iovation is committed to the gaming industry and frequently attends and presents at gaming conferences. We will be at both the Casual Connect Seattle conference, July 21-23, and the Austin GDC conference, Sept 15-18, if you would like to meet with us in person.