Today Aria Systems announced it would partner with Work [at] Play to create the Velocity customer management platform with integrated payment support. In simpler terms, Velocity is an extension of Aria's core systems product designed specifically to meet the payment and management needs of online games and virtual worlds.
It features robust support for handling both subscription payments and microtransaction payments in amounts as low as a "thousandth of a cent" according to Aria Systems CEO Ed Sullivan. It also allows for easy management of user registrations, fraud, virtual item inventories, and data analysis.
Velocity takes over customer support duties for a client game, too, routing complaints into its own call centers. Sullivan considers this comprehensive approach something that, right now, only Velocity brings into the virtual world and gaming space.
"A classic mistake people make when they design these things is that they look at billing as an extension of accounting. But accounting and ecommerce systems can't really understand the full nature of the relationship," said Sullivan.
Right now the only announced client for Velocity is the Music Mogul Web-based virtual world, but Sullivan notes that other clients are signed on and will be announced throughout the quarter. In time Sullivan hopes Velocity's ewallet support will actually allow users to move virtual currency or items from one client game to another, though he states that no signed client is yet willing to do this.
For now Sullivan is content to talk up Velocity's Level 1 PCI compliance as one of its major selling points, which allows client games to have very deep access to data about what users are doing in games and what's going into and out of user inventories. Velocity will also handle user-to-user item transactions. Right now it provides for both trading and gifting of virtual items, as well as purchase of music-related merchandise in the Music Mogul world.
It sounds like Velocity combines the services of an analytics company like TwoFish with both payment services and a host of other customer management tools that growing virtual worlds and online games will require. Right now the big trend for backend technology services looking to do business with developers is to try and provide as much service as possible. Sullivan clearly states that to Aria, Velocity is a "doubling down" of their commitment to the gaming space. It will be interesting to see who decides to sign on with it.
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