Player.IO

Many of you have asked for more tools to manage your QuickConnect users, and we have now released some changes to the QuickConnect Admin Panel that we think a lot of you will be pleased with:

It is now possible to search among your QuickConnect users, either by user id, or by email for Simple Users. You can now also manage individual users and delete them one by one, and you can also change the email address or password for Simple Users:

As your games grow larger, and the amount of configuration and data accessible in the Admin Panel increases, it gets harder to remember what you did and when. To help you with this, we’ve now launched the Changelog feature on Player.IO. When you access this, you will see a timeline of changes you have made to your game through the Admin Panel: Every time you’ve added a BigDB table, credited a user through PayVault, uploaded a file to GameFS, added QuickConnect settings, uploaded a new version of your Multiplayer code, or changed a BigDB object, and much more, there will be a corresponding entry in the Changelog so that you can see what you did and when.

For those of you that have shared access to your games with other developers, the Changelog also keeps track of who did each change, and from what IP address, so that you can see what your team is doing.

You can also add custom notes to the log, for example if you are releasing a new version of your game, you can add a comment explaining the group of changes needed, or you can use them as milestones to mark important changes in your game.

So check out this new feature, and if you have any questions or comments, just head on over to the forum.

Epic Flash Game Contest

Player.IO and Epic Game Ads are happy to announce the Epic Flash Game Contest, a $150.000USD+ game competition using Player.IO!

To participate, simply build a great multiplayer game with micro-transactions using Player.IO tools and submit it before the Febuary 18th 2013 deadline.

Read more here

To make everything fair, winners will be selected from an expert panel with judges from Player.IO, Epic Game Ads, Newgrounds, Kongregate and a few companies yet to be announced.

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