Finding the Right Payment Methods for Gamers

With the surge in technology and a huge increase in online and mobile gaming in recent years – there has definitely been a need for operators to evaluate the payment methods that are available for their prospective customers.  It is now becoming one of the deciding factors as to whether gamers choose to play on a particular product or not, and with so much choice readily available it’s becoming a must when users can easily go somewhere else.  There was a recent report released by Digital River which revealed that as there is now more focus on free play gaming, which has changed how players like to pay and that business models may need to be re-evaluated.

Statistics from the Super Data Research showed that $15.9 billion of money generated from the gaming industry is from consoles etc, and there is $7.1 billion generated from online and mobile products.  It was also projected that there will be a huge increase in this type of product with the expectation that come 2017, free gaming and virtual purchases will account for over 50% of the online gaming market.
Particular growth is expected in countries such as Europe, China, USA and Japan.  China and Japan are no surprise as they tend to lead the way in terms of technology.  The preferred payment methods used by player’s is also dependant on the actual gaming market.  For example with multi-player video games (MMO’s) the amount spent on each transaction was roughly 3 times larger if e-wallets or credit or debit cards were being used as opposed to PayPal.

There has been a huge growth in mobile payments which has seen the likes of Apple developing products such as Apple Passbook to make things more convenient for users and of course getting themselves ahead of the game.  There are 4 different variations of mobile payments: standard mobile billing, eWallets such as PayPal, SMS payments and credit or debit cards.  The number of mobile payments made in 2010 was 4.6 billion and this is likely to rise to over 15.3 billion by the end of 2013 – this alone gives you an indication of the ever growing popularity of this method.

SuperData got a group of 950 people from USA and Brazil and compared the data to get an idea of where the mobile money was spent.  Social gaming accounted for 27% of the mobile spends in the USA and multiplayer video games 18%.  The stats from Brazil showed that 32% as spent on social gaming and 15% on multiplayer video games.  There was an additional 18% made up by combat titles.
There was further research completed to see why these users preferred alternative payment methods.  There were various responses such as that when using credit and debit cards, you aren’t really keeping track of your money so it’s easy to spend more than you anticipated and that there was difficulty in getting them set up.

In countries such as China and Russia they clearly favour utilising PayPal over any other payment method.  There are many advantages to this.  Very importantly it’s completely safe and secure, giving the user peace of mind when transferring funds.  It’s also very quick, instead of having to continuously enter in credit and debit card details, all you need to do is remember your log in details and you can make an instant payment.
PayPal bingo is a perfect example of this. Player’s now look for sites that offer PayPal as a method of depositing and withdrawing when joining a site in fact there are online portals dedicated to telling prospective player’s the best sites out there that have this feature to make sure that .  If you want to find out more about bingo sites with PayPal deposits click here!