Forum PayVault Dual currency support?

Discussion and help relating to the PlayerIO payment solution, PayVault.

Dual currency support?

Postby wildbunny » July 14th, 2011, 2:51 pm

Hi guys,

In my game I want to be able to sell two types of virtual currency like all the zynga games do - the free one which is earned by users over time, and the regular bought one.

Currently I can't see a way to do that in payvault, since you can only buy coins?

Cheers, Paul.
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Re: Dual currency support?

Postby wildbunny » July 14th, 2011, 2:53 pm

Ahh, hang on a sec - maybe I can use GetBuyDirectInfo()? :)
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Re: Dual currency support?

Postby cjcenizal » July 14th, 2011, 5:08 pm

Ahh, that's an interesting idea. Currently, my free currency system is just a table called "Resources", with an object per user. I use it to track who has how much of what. But I suppose something implemented through PayVault would be more secure. However, it looks like PlayerIO intends PayVault to be used just for paid currency.
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Re: Dual currency support?

Postby wildbunny » July 14th, 2011, 5:15 pm

cjcenizal wrote:Ahh, that's an interesting idea. Currently, my free currency system is just a table called "Resources", with an object per user. I use it to track who has how much of what. But I suppose something implemented through PayVault would be more secure. However, it looks like PlayerIO intends PayVault to be used just for paid currency.


It looks like you can use GetBuyDirectInfo() to implement the free currency:

I've made a bunch of entries in PayVaultItems for each price point and then I just call GetBuyDirectInfo() with the key of the price point required :)

Cheers, Paul.
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Re: Dual currency support?

Postby Henrik » July 14th, 2011, 6:00 pm

cjcenizal wrote:But I suppose something implemented through PayVault would be more secure. However, it looks like PlayerIO intends PayVault to be used just for paid currency.

Yes, that's the idea.

We decided pretty early on to only support a single paid currency, having multiple is really hard to explain/document/setup, both for developers and players.

My recommendation would be to have only one paid currency. If they want to purchase the second virtual currency, make them buy the paid currency first, and then exchange that into the second currency. Don't give them the option to purchase the second currency directly, it's confusing, and various consumer protection laws might give you a headache. There's a reason all Zynga games make you do it in two steps.
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Re: Dual currency support?

Postby wildbunny » July 14th, 2011, 6:48 pm

That's just it though; they don't require two steps at all :) Actually requiring two steps would be very confusing and would lead to lower conversion rate... I can do what I require with buyDirect so lets see how it goes :)

Cheers, Paul.
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Re: Dual currency support?

Postby Oliver » July 22nd, 2011, 8:36 pm

PayVault is exclusively paid currency. We had a lot of debates about building in support for dual currency, but we realized that "dual currency" means many different things to different people, and the fact that the free currency is earnable in very different ways in each game, made us go for the following support for dual currency:

Dual Currency w/ Player.IO
=======================
The Paid Currency: Use PayVault.
Loyalty Currency: Use BigDB+serverside code

That way you can get your loyalty currency to work in a way completely integrated with your game design.

- Oliver
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