APRIL 19, 2011 • Playfish, the social gaming subsidiary of Electronic Arts, is dropping its own cross-game virtual currency in favor of using Facebook Credits. The shift will become mandatory as of July 1.  During the transition, users can exchange their Playfish Cash for individual game currencies. Playfish says it has 5.7 million daily users on Facebook, and 36 monthly users.  In terms of active users, Playfish has 4.4 million daily, and 27 million monthly on Facebook.

Impact: The movement to Facebook Credits as a universal currency has the potential to substantially increase sales of content on social networks.  However, at the same time it will make it very hard for content creators to keep users within their own “ecosystem.”  With Facebook Credits consumers can easily migrate to all kinds of other products.  This is likely to make consumers more willing to adopt Facebook Credits than more limited currencies, but it also opens up the market to many more content creators.  Like other distributors, a service like Facebook is more interested in aggregate sales than any individual piece of content.