The Next Step for Facebook Credits
Facebook Credits is a virtual currency that enables fast and easy transactions across games on Facebook. With Facebook Credits, people enter their payment information once and can buy, earn and spend safely across lots of different games.
Context & Ripple Effects
This post lands one day after Facebook confirmed it will make Facebook Credits mandatory for all game developers, converting what was an opt-in currency into a platform-wide requirement. It follows EA's five-year Credits deal signed in November 2010 after Zynga set the precedent, so the two biggest social-game publishers are already inside the system the blog post now pitches to everyone else.
The timing matters against Facebook's financial backdrop: shares cleared a $70 billion valuation in a private SecondMarket auction just three days before, and Credits is the clearest revenue line the company can point to beyond advertising — hence GigaOM framing the story as 'virtual goods are just the beginning.'
First-order effects
- Every game developer on the platform must now route transactions through Credits rather than their own payment systems or rival currencies, giving Facebook a uniform take on all virtual-goods revenue.
- Users get a single stored payment credential usable across every Facebook game, which lowers the per-purchase friction that previously favored whichever game captured the payment first.
Second-order effects
- Publishers that negotiated direct-billing terms — the route Zynga and EA took before signing — lose leverage, since the mandatory policy removes the alternative they bargained with.
- Third-party payment providers and offer networks serving social games see their access to Facebook traffic narrow to whatever Credits-adjacent roles Facebook permits, concentrating games monetization inside Facebook's own stack.
Third-order effects
- If the currency extends past games into broader commerce, Facebook moves from ad platform toward payments intermediary — a structural position that puts it on a collision course with device makers and card networks that own adjacent transaction layers.
- Mandatory platform currencies set a precedent other large app platforms may follow, making the developer-revenue-share fight a recurring regulatory and competitive battleground.
The trend: Large platforms are consolidating app monetization behind proprietary virtual currencies, trading developer flexibility for a unified payment layer they control.