Ultimate Game Card
Sterling sales reported over Black Friday.
Santa Clara, California – December 1, 2010 – PlaySpan, the global leader in monetization solutions for online games, virtual worlds, social networks, and videos, reported robust Black Friday and Thanksgiving Holiday Weekend sales today.
Sales of PlaySpan’s Ultimate Game Card, redeemable on more than 1000 online games via the Ultimate Pay platform, were up 48 percent for Black Friday from 2009 to 2010, and 69 percent from Friday the previous week. The Ultimate Game Card is available in more than 50,000 retail outlets in North America, including CVS, 7-Eleven, Rite Aid, Walgreens, GameStop and Walmart stores, as well as a growing list of countries globally. The data is for North America only.
“Since the Ultimate Pay platform is used by so many online games, including MMOs, virtual worlds and Facebook games, it is a good proxy for general game consumer sentiment,” said Karl Mehta, Founder & CEO of PlaySpan. Mehta went on to add that Ultimate Game Cards have proven to be a popular last-minute gift item for hard to please teenagers and sales typically pick up from Thanksgiving through Christmas.
The PlaySpan Marketplace, which features virtual goods, in-game currencies and online game downloads and subscriptions from dozens of online game publishers and runs on the UltimatePay platform, also reported a substantial increase in sales over the weekend. Year over year sales for Black Friday were up 56% and for the entire weekend Thursday through Sunday they were up 19%. The bump in cash sales amounted to 11% weekend over weekend, compared to the previous four-day period, Nov. 18-21, and a 17% jump Friday Nov. 22 to Friday Nov. 29.
“Typically entertainment is somewhat recession proof so online games revenue has remained fairly robust during the last year,” said Mehta. “However, the huge spike in holiday weekend activity certainly indicates a big jump in consumer sentiment over last year.”
About PlaySpan, Inc.
PlaySpan™ is the global leader in monetization platform services for more than 1,000 online games, social networks, and online videos. PlaySpan's patent-pending Monetization-as-a-Service™ (MaaS) platform enables publishers and developers to generate new revenue streams and grow ARPU.
PlaySpan’s Monetization-as-a-Service™ with its global payments product, UltimatePay™ delivers over 85 global payment methods in 180 countries including credit cards, PayPal, mobile payments, and PlaySpan’s ULTIMATE GAME CARD ®, the #1 selling multi-game pre-paid card, available in over 50,000 retail locations across North America and a growing list of countries worldwide.
PlaySpan is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices in Virginia, and Mumbai. Investors include Easton Capital, Menlo Ventures, Vodafone Ventures, Softbank Bodhi Fund, STIC, and Novel TMT Ventures. The company has won over 13 major awards in the past 3 years, was honored by Inc Magazine as one of the fastest growing companies in its Inc 5000 list for 2010 and was named to Business Insider’s prestigious Digital 100 for 2010.
For more information about PlaySpan, visit: http://developer.playspan.com
Media Contact:
Eric Gonzalez
VSC PR (on behalf of PlaySpan)
415.272.0836
eric@vscconsulting.com