Virtual Goods Wrap-Up For The Week Of June 19, 2010

By Chris Sherman On June 19, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Welcome to the Virtual Goods News Wrap-Up for the week of June 19, 2010. The Wrap-Up is where VGN spotlights stories that we didn't get to cover individually, but still make for interesting reading about the virtual goods industry.

A Place For Every Tweet And Every Tweet In Its Place: Twitter has partnered with Gowalla and Foursquare to add its new Places feature, rather than developing its own location-based service. The location data is provided by TomTom and Localeze.

CrowdStar Runs Its Own Virtual Goods Campaign To Help Out With Oil Spill: Similar to the many social campaigns for Haiti, social game developers are starting to roll out charity virtual goods campaigns to raise money for victims of the Gulf oil spill disaster. CrowdStar's item is a turtle virtual pet in its Zoo Paradise game, but other developer (particularly Zynga) are pitching in with items of their own.

EA: Playfish Userbase Growing Despite Shrinkage With Top Social Games: EA claims that Playfish has gained users while other top social developers have lost, on average, about 22% of their userbase. EA estimates Playfish has grown its userbase by about 5% during the social gaming downturn.

Facebook Expands Free Credits Promotion In CrowdStar's Hello City: Facebook is currently giving five free Facebook Credits to users who install CrowdStar's Hello City game.

Facebook's 2009 Revenues May Have Been $100 Million More Than Estimated, Reuters Says: Facebook may have earned as much as $800 million in revenue last year, driven largely by display ads (which are purchased largely by social game developers). It is expected that this figure will increase this year, driven by the rollout of Facebook Credits. Some estimates for 2010 go as high as $2 billion.

Microsoft's Xbox Live Is Making Boatloads Of Money On Virtual Goods: Forbes estimates that Microsoft made $625 million last year through sales of avatar virtual goods on Xbox Live. This equals or exceeds the amount of money Microsoft is making off of Xbox LIve subscriptions.

Scoreloop Spreads Its Social Features Across The Remaining Large Mobile Platforms: Scoreloop has partnered with Ideaworks to port its service across niche mobile platforms including Symbian, Windows Mobile, Brew, Bada, and webOS.