Online gaming can take various forms as the industry continues to evolve. Gamers play on PCs, video game consoles, and mobile devices, and the range of game variations they play is immense.
While obviously, entertainment is the best part of it, and therefore gaming makes little sense without high-quality games, there is one innate part that can never be ignored and this is payment processing. No one wants to pay for a low-quality game but when a high-quality game has payment issues, the platform or developer risks losing their customers’ loyalty.
In this post, we look into payment nuances in gaming, warn of potential issues, and explain how Apple Pay may be one of the solutions for many players in different countries.
How Players Pay for Games
Online gaming revenue models come in different forms. They can represent a pure revenue model or a mixed one, but the general picture looks the following way:
- Buy-to-play games must be bought to get access to content. The player pays once but the publisher continues to support the game.
- Freemium games are free to download and play but they have certain limits in the player’s opportunity to progress in the game. If players want to progress they should use microtransactions in the game to get access to new levels or options.
- Subscription-based games may be free for new players but eventually, they require a monthly fee for stable access.
- Ad-supported games usually do not require any payment from the player but the publishers demonstrate advertisements during the game and the player has to watch them to continue playing.
There is another type of comparatively recent games. They are called play-to-earn and these usually have blockchain elements and while some initial investment may be required from the players, the game has mechanisms to pay them back for contributions.
Interestingly, online casino games are often one of the interests that gamers generally share. While casino games as separate products don’t have specific payment models for the end users, online casinos that offer them for real-money gambling can also apply different revenue models to attract new players.
Casino sites can offer no-deposit (“freemium”) access to games with a casino bonus, offer different advantageous bonuses, or grant access to gambling for very affordable money, starting from as little as $1.
It must be said right away that Apple Pay is one of the very few payment methods that mostly fits into all the revenue models listed above when the player wants to pay for their games.
Be it a freemium mobile game with loot boxes, a subscription-based game, or some of the best Apple Pay casinos at CasinosHunter.com with or without bonuses, Apple Pay will facilitate most of the payment types easily.
Pains Related To Gaming Payments
Now there are many issues connected to payments, their speed, convenience, safety, compatibility, and so on. Funny enough (really it isn’t), those issues don’t hit the publishers or developers or platforms very hard. Most of the time, it is users who face the consequences of low-quality service or technical issues.
Simple, seamless, safe digital transactions are key for a positive user experience. However, many players reportedly can go all the way through the registration process and open an account for access to the game but eventually abandon the checkout page.
These are the problems they usually face:
- limited payment options, their local convenient payment options, or widely accepted international payments not allowed;
- payment declined repeatedly;
- unexpected additional fees or recurring prices;
- slow, glitchy, unresponsive checkout page;
- price in foreign currency;
- foreign taxes or extra taxes;
- concerns about payment safety and personal data safety.
At the same time, reasonable and adequate payment conditions could help platforms and publishers manage many important aspects to keep their customers loyal and satisfied:
- manage loyalty via loyalty programs (by the way, Apple Pay is excellent at that). Offering extra games to loyal users is one of the ways to reward them.
- attracting more subscriptions via loyalty and convenient offers, or unique offers, combined with adequate pricing.
- as gaming grows and new revenue models arrive, new laws, taxes, and fees arrive as well. Publishers want to diversify not only their revenue streams but also make payments more flexible for their customers, maybe offering payment options with lower fees, or offering services in a wide range from low-deposit to high-roller.
- facilitate transactions for the in-game content trading (trading, selling, and buying in-game items between players).
- improve checkout user experience with security and adequate interface.
Very few payment methods allow doing all those things at the same time, and Apple Pay is one of them. Initially an online mobile payment, it is not pioneering in the facilitation of all kinds of subscriptions and transactions and it works equally well for merchants and end users.
What To Improve: Opportunities for Payment Operators
There are several areas that payment processing operators can explore and improve their services if they pay attention to payment quality. These are:
- Authorization, authentication, payment confirmation, fraud management, account theft, identity theft, security breaches: improving privacy policies, user terms and conditions, data safety measures, and connecting all these to how the payments are processed can take a company’s service to a whole new level.
- Cryptocurrency video gaming: due to various reasons, cryptocurrencies are stably popular among players. Expanding the players’ opportunities for gaming in these terms would push the boundaries for both players and companies.
Adequate and well-supported methods like Apple Pay and others used together with a range of improvements and change, can bring game companies success that is visible – through the volumes of transactions, average transaction value, and so on. But this will not be seen until user experience is taken care of.
