(openPR) - Fatfoogoo provides a full service game commerce platform for the monetization of online games and virtual worlds

London, 4th August 2008 – While video and computer games are a relentlessly growing market, competition in the game industry is soaring and games publishers are searching for new ways to make their business more profitable. Selling “virtual goods” opens up one of the most promising revenue streams and fatfoogoo’s complete solution helps game publishers and developers to explore this new business model immediately and effortlessly.

Offering subscriptions and in-game content are becoming increasingly common. Gamers are now used to buying and selling “virtual goods” in the games, such as swords, buildings, accessories, add-ons, and other goods and services. This is a brand new game concept – and serving this new virtual market requires very specialized knowledge. The global turnover in the gaming market for trading with virtual goods was half a billion British Pounds in 2006 and is expected to grow further up to 3.5 billion Pounds by 2009, according to a study, conducted by the New York Times. All publishers are aware of the opportunities and are at least work-ing on strategies to explore this market. Fatfoogoo is a pioneer in the booming business for trading virtual game items and offers a professional all-in-one solution for microtransactions to publishers and game developers in the UK that is easy to integrate into any game and on any platform. Publishers save time for their development team and gamers benefit from a secure and reliable environment to buy the goods or services they want.

Martin Herdina, founder and CEO of fatfoogoo says: “There is a rapidly growing demand in the gaming industry for services which deal with the trading of virtual items in a secure and in a safe way. By delivering a professional full service for handling microtransaction based business models and in-game trading of items, we take one worry off the publisher’s shoul-ders and help them to concentrate on their core competencies. Our specialized team allows game operators to outsource the complexity of the in-game commercial ecosystem to the experts. We enable game developers and publishers to implement highly successful plug-n-play support for publisher-to-player and player-to-player transactions as well as the tradi-tional subscription models.”
The team behind fatfoogoo has profound knowledge not only in the gaming industry, but also in areas covering high-scale microtransaction management, and has previously built up and run virtual marketplaces for companies like AT&T, Yahoo, Skype and T-mobile.
“We and the gaming industry have a common objective: To continuously improve the gamers’ experience and make every online game as user-friendly and delightful for the player as possible”, says Martin Herdina. Thanks to fatfoogoo’s platforms, gamers don’t need to interrupt the game anymore to buy or sell something that they urgently need. They can simply make their transactions during the ongoing game and don’t lose any of their valuable time.

Press Contact:
Sarah Cardaun
Braun Europe Ltd.
Tel: +44 20 7297 3311
e-mail: sarah@braun-pr.com

About fatfoogoo:
Founded in 2006 by Daniel Petri and Martin Herdina, fatfoogoo provides the leading game commerce ecosystem for the monetization of online games and virtual worlds. Fatfoogoo’s software offers game publishers a complete full service solution for in-game item transactions between the players and from publisher to player. Thanks to the fatfoogoo expertise publishers are now able to outsource the whole development and maintenance of a game’s trading system for virtual goods, as well as the professional handling of the microtransactions. Depending on the game operator’s preference, fatfoogoo delivers either a white-labeled turn-key solution or a set of modules, individually configured for the specific needs of the game. SUN Microsystems has selected fatfoogoo as transaction management provider for their game server project “Darkstar”; Game-Studios like Gamalocus, Vanilla Live Games, Papermint and others have already built their monetization strategy utilizing fatfoogoos com-prehensive capabilities. The head office of fatfoogoo is in Vienna. Other offices are in UK and the US. For more information please visit www.fatfoogoo.com