Facebook Credits

» see facebook.com/credits as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Facebook Credits was Facebook's in-platform currency from May 2009 through September 2013. Ten credits cost a dollar. Facebook kept thirty percent of every transaction, the game developer kept seventy. From July 1, 2011 onward, every game on the Facebook platform was required to use Credits for in-game payments, which meant that for two years if you wanted to buy fuel for your tractor in FarmVille or a brick for your skyscraper in CityVille, you went through Credits first and the dollar second.

By the peak of 2011, over 150 developers and 650 games had integrated Credits, accounting for more than seventy percent of all virtual goods sold on Facebook. Zynga had already made Credits the only currency for its games in September 2010, projected to clear half a billion dollars a year off virtual cows and skyscrapers alone. Facebook talked about Credits as a future micropayments system that would work across any application, not just games. The Credits brand, the math, and the thirty-percent rake all assumed Facebook gaming would keep growing.

In June 2012 Facebook announced it was unwinding the whole thing and moving to local currency. By September 2013 the transition was complete and the brand was retired. Zynga's collapse had already made the mandatory-Credits policy meaningless, and the migration of casual gaming to phones had moved spending into the App Store and Google Play, where Apple and Google were taking their own thirty percent.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

by the time i would have signed up to FarmVille, i was twenty-eight years old and out of university, working in computer vision. that was not a FarmVille demographic. Credits sat behind a layer of games i never opened, on a platform i was on for friend updates and not for harvesting digital corn.

i remember the moment Credits got pushed in the turkish facebook UI. the in-game purchase popup switched currencies, and for a while you saw little blue chip icons inside game ads on the right rail. then they were gone. nobody i knew bought any, but plenty of people i knew had a relative who farmed.

~ what it actually was ~

Credits was a coupon system. you bought ten credits for one US dollar, then spent them inside an app that priced its goods in credits. the math was clean and the friction was the entire point. facebook wanted to be the layer of trust between the player and the game developer, the way visa is the layer between a shopper and a store, except visa takes one or two percent and facebook took thirty.

the thirty-percent rake matched what apple and google were charging on their own app stores, which is what made Credits look reasonable when zynga was on Facebook and not on iPhone. once zynga was on iPhone, paying thirty percent to apple and thirty percent to facebook started to feel like a stack of brokers nobody had asked for.

~ the day it died ~

june 19 2012 was the public announcement: facebook would move from credits to local currency over the next year. the official line was about "removing friction for our developers", which was a polite way of saying that holding a separate currency on facebook had become a tax nobody wanted to pay anymore. by mid-2013 the math had reversed. a dollar bought you nothing in facebook gaming because facebook gaming had moved to the phone and forgotten the desktop.

the credits brand was retired on september 12 2013, with users given until then to spend their balance or convert it. zynga had laid off eighteen percent of its staff three months earlier. the entire pipeline that had made Credits make sense had unwound around it.

~ the legacy ~

Credits is the canonical lesson on platform-internal currency. you can force a coupon between the buyer and the seller as long as the buyer has nowhere else to go. the moment the seller has another venue, the coupon becomes friction the buyer notices. beenz and flooz had taught the same lesson on the open web in 2001. Credits relearned it on a closed platform a decade later, ran it for four years, then retired it the same way.

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