Player.IO

Many of you have asked us to make it easier to collaborate with other developers on a game, and today we’ve launched a new feature that allows you to do just that!

On the settings page for each game you can now find the Developer Access list where you can add other developers to your game and give them access to whatever parts of your game that you want. Simply enter their Player.IO developer username or email address, and mark the features that you want them to have access to.

When you have shared a game, the Admin Panel URLs become global. If, for example, you are looking at a specific user in the PayVault admin, you can copy the URL, send it to another developer that has access to PayVault users in your game, and he will be able to click the link and see the exact same page as you are, which makes working together a breeze.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, just head over to the forum.

We’ve just released version 2.3 of the development package.

The big new feature is complete support for .Net 4.0, but there are also many other minor fixes and improvements included.

Release notes:

• Support for .NET 4.0.
• Now targets .NET 4.0 by default in all samples.
• Better Mono Support: Console-only interface when running the server in MonoDevelop (for instance, on Mac OS X).
• You can force console mode with the “force-console” commandline argument to the development server.
• You can force gui mode with the “force-gui” commandline argument to the development server.
• Support for C#-style events.
• Support for C# generics with “new()” constraint.
• System.Attribute added to whitelist.

We’ve been pretty busy here at Player.IO and we have now added two more providers for PayVault, mobile payments with Zong, and offer-based payments with TrialPay.

TrialPay works just like the other offer-based providers, you just need to set up an account with them, configure it in PayVault, and you’re ready to display their offers in your game. TrialPay has local offers worldwide, and you can even adjust your virtual currency exchange rate on a per-region basis in order to increase your monetization.

Just like the other offer-based payment providers, we have added support for this in the SiteBox Templates, which means that integrating the TrialPay offerwall in your Facebook App has never been easier.

Zong is a payment provider for direct mobile payments. It works just like any other provider, sign up for an account with them, configure it in PayVault on Player.IO, and you can start getting mobile payments. You can sell both individual PayVault items as well as PayVault coins, as long as you set up an exchange rate in PayVault.

Mobile payments can only be processed by a local carrier in the country the user is in, so as part of the Zong PayVault API we will auto-detect the user’s country and return this value to you, as well as the remaining data needed to intiate a payment.

With the latest update to Player.IO we can now serve all Sitebox and GameFS content securely through https.

The biggest impact of this is that we now support secure Facebook apps. As you might have seen, Facebook recently added support for always browsing the site securely using https, and also made it an option for Facebook apps. You can now find the secure canvas url that you need to specify in the Sitebox setup guide for your app, and if you enter it, the Facebook users that normally browse Facebook securely can also browse your app in the same way.

Intruducing PartnerPay – the easiest way to grow your game through partnerships.

PartnerPay is an affiliate system that tracks the lifetime actions of players from partners, and manages commission payments to those partners based on those actions.

For instance, Everybody Edits uses PartnerPay to offer partners roughly 30% of the lifetime revenue from players partners can deliver to the game.

You can read more about PartnerPay for Developers here: PartnerPay Documentation

If you’re a potential partner, you’re probably more interested in the PartnerPay site

As many of you are probably aware of, Facebook are pushing their own Facebook Credits payment system for all games on Facebook, and might make it mandatory in the near future. Since we think it would be a shame if all of you PayVault customers missed out on that, we have now implemented Facebook Credits as a Payvault provider.

This means that you can let your players buy coins and items in your game on Facebook as easily as using any of the other payment providers, if not easier since many players may already have Credits on their Facebook account.

As an extra bonus we’ve also added a dispute resolution system to the PayVault admin panel. If a player disputes a transaction on Facebook, an email discussion is initiated by Facebook between the player and you, the developer. However, they provide no web interface for resolving the dispute, but if you use PayVault, we provide this interface for you. Simply locate the disputed transaction in the PayVault admin panel, hit the “resolve” button, choose a resolution, write a comment, and you’re done!

A lot of you have asked us for more options when paying for our services, and we are now happy to announce prepaid accounts!

The prepaid option is for those of you that would rather pay upfront, than have monthly recurring costs. You can simply add funds to your prepaid account, and each monthly bill, including any usage, will be settled using these funds. You will be notified when your account is about to run out so that you can add more funds to it.

The biggest difference compared to the recurring plans though is that you can now use PayPal to add funds to your prepaid account. We know that a lot of you have requested the option to pay for Player.IO with PayPal, and now you can finally do that! PayPal also offers a lot more different credit cards and payment options than our regular credit card provider, so no matter what card you have, there is now a way for you to get a Player.IO paid plan.

Needless to say, a prepaid account works great together with PayVault for PayPal, that way you can easily cover your game’s expenses with the game’s revenue!