Fatfoogoo Expanding into Social Games

When Martin Herdina and Daniel Petri founded Vienna-based fatfoogoo in late 2006, they intended to create a consumer marketplace for virtual goods and in-game services. However, when they realized that most game operators wanted to operate their monetization platforms in-house without endorsing a third-party brand, the company quickly switched to a white-label model. Now, over the last several months the company has expanded its efforts deeper into the social games market, providing payments, billing, customer service, anti-fraud, and store and secondary market management services to developers. Herdina, fatfoogoo's CEO, recently told us about the company's decision to focus more on social games. "We've been working with social app and game developers since the end of 2008, as the requirements are very similar to classical online game business models," Herdina says. "The first social networking project we did was to provide store, white-label payments and virtual currencies for the avatar engine mEgo, now we are just working with Gogogic on powering Vikings of Thule - and some really exciting social apps/games projects are currently under the hood." Although the majority of its 22 employees are based in its Vienna headquarters, the company also recently opened offices in the US and UK to work with publishers and partners more closely. "Our technology is purely international, so it's capable of supporting multi-languages, multi currencies, multi-byte character-sets and different VAT-rates," Herdina says. "However, in terms of business development we are mostly focusing on talking to potential partners in North America and Europe." While fatfoogoo has developed its own payment gateway in-house, it is partnering with a wide range of payment providers specifically focused on social games. Fatfoogoo's payment options unclude credit cards, direct debit, mobile payments (like Boku and Mopay), prepaid cards (like Paysafecard and Rixty) on a global basis, according to Herdina. In addition, the company has partnered with several managed offer platforms to enable alternative forms of advertiser-financed purchases. "We treat offers as an alternative payment option, and therefore work with quite a few offer providers in different regions to ensure ideal coverage, like PayBuyPartner, AdParlor, GratisPay, and SponsorPay," Herdina says. We'll continue tracking the company as it expands further into social gaming over the next year. "We are expecting our ongoing and future projects in the social app/game space to contribute a significant part to our success in 2010," Herdina says.

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Fatfoogoo Expanding into Social Games

Justin Smith

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Justin Smith