Rixty Founder Discusses New Ways To Monetize Players Without Credit Cards

Ted, founder of Rixty, talks about how you can monetize more of your players

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/cc-rixty.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]dC1D69Kpcd0[/wp_youtube]

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at Casual Connect in Seattle, and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Ted: Hi, I’m Ted Sorom and I’m from Rixty. I’m the CEO and Founder, and Rixty is a cash-based payment method that is used by game companies to help monetize the greater percentage of their users.

Interviewer: Who uses Rixty? How can Rixty be used for game developers who are hoping to add another monetization method?

Ted: Yeah. So, we work with thousands of different games today from the MMO space and particularly in the free play and micro transaction space as well as subscription-based big games. What we do is really help out the game developer and monetize a greater percentage of their users.

So, if you have a product that attracts a certain population, a certain percentage of that aren’t going to have credit cards or PayPal accounts. They may not have a way to pay. Well, what we do is give 20,000 U.S. locations where they can go, and either go to a Coinstar and put in cash and coins and avoid the normal coin sorting keys there. You get a receipt with a code on it, and then they can take that online for payment. They can do that at the Coinstar machine as well as the prepaid card.

So, it’s really a payment option that’s good for any game developer that’s really has any sort of audience.

Interviewer: How are you guys different than the OfferPal? Can you differentiate then in case the listeners don’t know how to understand what the difference is between you guys and, say, OfferPal or SuperSonic?

Ted: Sure. So, we are a direct cash payment option where the offer providers really focus on these offers that give users value. I think one of the biggest differences is that our users can pay over and over and over again. So, it’s much easier in the MMO space in the game play.

We see users who come in and spend multiple times a week. We have a user that spent earlier this week, spent $680 in cash through a Coinstar machine for a game. He also the week before spent $340. And so, how many offers could you do to get to that level of money?

Interviewer: How many cans do they have to put in for that?

Ted: Well, in this case we find out that a lot of our users start with coins and then they switch over to cash. So, 60 percent of the coins in our kiosk take bills as well. So, this particular user goes in to a Coinstar machine, feeds it all bills and gets up to the $680 of cash in the machine.

So, that’s one of the big differences. We monetize much greater dollar amounts than you’ll find at the OfferPal.

Interviewer: So, this would be another payment option in addition to, maybe, the offer providers.

Ted: Yeah. Exactly. So, we would in the suite of different payment options, give the provider the option.

Interviewer: Do you focus on helping developers optimize how they can use Rixty or place Rixty in their systems to actually drive it or raise it?

Ted: Certainly, we work closely with developers when we launch with them. We usually do a promotion to expose this new option to their audience. We also work with them on the messaging and help to get our option off the payments page because you have a lot of users that are right on the cusp of paying but they may never put it through to actually pay.

If they know that they can go and use a jar of coins that are just sitting on the desk doing nothing right now, you can put them over the edge. I think that’s pretty important.

The other thing that we think about is the demographics that we serve, and the fact that a lot of people probably think this is the kids option, but over 70 percent of our users are over the age of 18, and our biggest spenders are over the age of 30. And so, they really spend and everyone’s got coins.

Interviewer: Can you talk about how long it takes to implement this system in someone’s game, and what types of games are perfect for this system?

Ted: Yeah. So, the integration is really straightforward. Everyone says this, but we can actually prevail. We’ve given developers our API and specs at noon and by six o’clock they’re integrated and ready to get going. Especially the smaller developers, this can be very straightforward. It looks a lot like PayPal’s site integration, and most developers have already done that. It’s very straightforward.

As far as what games it works best for, it’s really any game that’s got a payments page and especially micro transaction-based games. The user can go in and put in $122.50 in a Coinstar machine in coins and then spend and buy a chunk of that virtual currency and spend that down over time.

Interviewer: Do you have direct flash integration?

Ted: So, we don’t do flash integration. What we do have is an iFrame that can be embedded into flash. So, there’s a way to do it, but we don’t have native flash code.

Interviewer: And where can developers get started then to implement your system?

Ted: Yeah. They can just go to Rixty.com. Click the “about” tab, and in the “about” tab there’s a section where they can learn about our… There’s some brochures and reach out to us. So, they can email us at bizdev@rixty.com.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.