MARCH 10, 2010 • According to a study conducted by comScore, 29.7% of social gamers do not have the ability or the means to pay for virtual currency with cash options. Of those who do have the ability and the means, 34.9% say they are “very unlikely” to part with their money in order to purchase points while 22.8% of the respondents reported that they would be willing and are able to buy the points using cash payment methods such as credit cards, PayPal, bank transfers or mobile billing.

Impact: The dirty secret about games played on Facebook is that they have a low conversion rate to paid users when compared with other free-to-play products.  Much of this is because they have focused more on building raw user numbers as opposed to trying to monetize existing users.  This is starting to change as Facebook games start to focus more on monetizing users and less on trying to spam users with marketing offers.  Nevertheless, getting users to pay for virtual goods is not an easy task and payment processing is just one of many issues these products face.