• RockYou To Exclusively Use Facebook Credits For The Next Five Years

    Robin Wauters

    Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

    Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

    RockYou, one of the largest developers of social games and applications, this morning announced that it has inked a long-term deal with Facebook.

    Under the terms of the agreement, RockYou will be making Facebook Credits the exclusive virtual currency in its games and apps for the next five years.

    As is standard for developers on Facebook, RockYou will receive 70 percent of the revenue from Facebook Credits, while Facebook will keep the remaining 30 percent.

    This marks another coup for Facebook, which has been aggressively trying to push third-party developers and publishers to use its virtual currency in their platform applications as of late.

    As Inside Network’s Eric Eldon pointed out recently, Facebook had so far convinced only CrowdStar and LOLapps to use Facebook Credits exclusively as the direct payment method, with rivals like Zynga participating but continuing to use alternatives.

    Zynga and Facebook most recently sparred over Facebook’s Credits initiative, which was introduced last April. Zynga was of course trying to negotiate to lower Facebook’s cut and in these earlier negotiations, things got pretty heated.

    Going back to today’s announcement, RockYou and Facebook separately announced that they teamed up earlier this year for the former’s advertiser-sponsored “Deal of the Day” program, which rewards people with Facebook Credits when they interact with in-game advertising. More than 1 million people completed the Deal of the Day with Facebook Credits in the first four days after it launched in April, the companies said in a joint statement.

    To date, RockYou claims it has issued over 5 million Facebook Credits in its “Zoo World” game alone, using both direct pay and advertiser-sponsored solutions.

    Company: RockYou
    Website: rockyou.com
    Launch Date: November 2005
    Funding: $129M

    RockYou® is committed to defining the future of social gaming, creating products intended to serve players, advertisers, and developers alike. The company has dedicated itself to the development of high-quality games, including the award-nominated Gourmet Ranchâ„¢ and the celebrated Zoo Worldâ„¢ franchise. With advertising products that offer brands more meaningful interactions with players, RockYou creates an unmatched value-per-engagement for both brands and users. RockYou’s partnerships with world-class talent are part of their steadfast commitment to working with the next...

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    Company: Facebook
    Website: facebook.com
    Launch Date: February 1, 2004
    IPO: NASDAQ:FB

    Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1.1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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