EA Signs Five-Year Facebook Credits Deal

Electronic Arts has signed a five-year Facebook Credits exclusivity deal with Facebook. EA’s social games operate under the Playfish brand, which EA acquired last year.  Now all current and future Playfish games will feature Facebook Credits as their exclusive form of payment for in-game virtual goods. EA’s deal comes after exclusivity deals signed by competitors Zynga, RockYou, Playdom, and Crowdstar, making it one of the last major Facebook developers to go Credits-exclusive.  EA serves over 44 million monthly active users across all games, making it the fourth-largest app developer on Facebook.

Playfish is the developer of Restaurant City and Pet Society, both top ten Facebook games (by DAU). Playfish has also created Facebook versions of EA’s EA Sports franchises FIFA Soccer and Madden NFL. Playfish is currently developing its next title, a social game based on Hasbro’s Monopoly board game license. EA and Playfish are also working on a version of EA’s successful casual games portal Pogo for Facebook.  The Facebook version of Pogo will host 20 different games at launch, including Poppit, Word Whomp, and casual versions of Hasbro’s family games Scrabble and Boggle.

More than 75 developers and over 200 games on Facebook exclusively support Facebook Credits for payments. Facebook designed Credits so social games on the platform, played by over 200 million of its over 500 million users, could use a portable virtual currency that users could spend in many different games. Prior to Credits, most users had to purchase virtual currency for specific games or, at best, a specific developer’s family of games.  All developers using Credits share revenue with Facebook, with the developer taking 70% of the value of each transaction.

Join us for App Conference – October 18-19, 2012 in Santa Clara