Big Fish Games has teamed up with Coinbase to bring bitcoin payments to its extensive line-up of casual games.
This small, private company is a relatively big player in the casual gaming arena and is the publisher of the Mystery Case franchise and Big Fish Casino, along with over 3,000 casual games from more than 500 developers.
Although the company isn’t as big as Zynga, it serves over 1,500,000 downloads a day and it has 700 employees.
Big Fish Games allows users to try the games before they make the purchase and many of its games allow traders to buy and sell virtual items.
Cutting costs
While it may be smaller than Zynga, the bitcoin rollout announced by Big Fish is quite a bit more comprehensive.
Zynga limited bitcoin support to FarmVille 2 and a few other titles, while Big Fish plans to allow bitcoin payments for all 3,000 titles in its portfolio. Furthermore, consumers will be able to make in-game purchases with bitcoin.
This is what sets it apart from Zynga, as the rollout is not a test run, reports Venture Beat. Zynga also opted for BitPay over Coinbase as its payment processor of choice.
Big Fish Games’ founder and Chief Executive Officer Paul Thelen pointed out that about 8% of the company’s gross revenue is eaten up by transaction fees.
The integration of bitcoin payments is aimed to bring this figure down, as Coinbase demands no fee on the first $1m of transactions, and just 1% thereafter.
The fees are clearly a big deal, as the company generates half of its revenue through its e-commerce system. Big Fish netted $266m of revenue last year.
Enthusiastic employee
Oddly enough, it appears that the company’s decision to look into bitcoin came about after a single employee started advocating for it. One of the company’s engineers is apparently a bitcoin enthusiast and it appears that he made a rather good case for the digital currency.
As far as in-game purchases go, the rollout will apparently be limited to Big Fish Casino and a couple of other games for the time being. However, all the company’s games will be available for purchase with bitcoin.
Interestingly, the company considered reinvesting the savings into bitcoin-related projects, but it eventually decided to stick to its core business and keep churning out casual games.
Using bitcoin for purchases is relatively simple, and Big Fish has provided a step-by-step video guide on YouTube too: