Zynga game cards now sold here.

MARCH 25, 2010 • Zynga rolled out $10 and $25 pre-paid game cards to such national retailers such as 7-Eleven, Inc., Best Buy, GameStop – bringing availability of its game cards to 12,800 stores nationwide.

Impact: Zynga’s big success has been with leveraging Facebook to quickly build up tens of millions of users to its games.  The problem is that monetizing those users has mainly relied on driving those users to marketing referrals which pay Zynga for consumer leads.  But it is clear consumers will quickly grow weary of this approach.  Therefore, Zynga is focusing on a more traditional game approach that focuses on quality game design and getting users to actually pay for the game experience.  Obviously this means a more traditional approach to distribution.  Getting consumers to buy pre-paid game cards at retail is a tried and true approach to monetizing digital distributed products including free-to-play games.