Sometrics is today launching GameCoins.com – a community and virtual currency marketplace website targeted at social game players. GameCoins.com focuses on highlighting sometrics’ partner games, such as War Rock and Sorority Life, and then providing a marketplace and community site around those games. Gamers can chat with other players about the games, but using the marketplace they can also earn their favorite games currency using Sometrics’ offers and standard payments.
GameCoins has already signed up 20k users who have used the community elements of the site to post several strategy guides to each of their favorite games. The site is laid out beautifully, and each game has a profile page along with a news feed about players’ latest activities on the site. This truly does seem like a great way to connect with other users of my favorite social games, and the site leverages Facebook Connect to reduce any barrier to signing up.
While the site is great for players, it has benefits for game publishers as well. The game profile pages and the ability for players to buy virtual currencies from outside the game surely increase the appeal of the games, and also gives the games a very professional feel. I haven’t seen anything like this for social games, and looking at the page for War Rock, the production values make this seem more like a summer console game blockbuster than a small social game.
Sometrics started out as providing metrics for application developers on Facebook, but quickly shifted focus to helping publishers manage their virtual currency monetization from offer providers. Their product is the Sometrics’ Offer Solution and Payment Manager, which allows developers and publishers of online games and virtual worlds to see all their offers across networks, see which audience demographics are responding to which offers, and direct traffic accordingly to optimize conversions and increase revenue.
