十月末PayPal即将推出针对社交游戏精简版支付工具，它们将简化游戏中的虚拟货币交易流程，有利于吸引更多的玩家成为付费玩家。

“如果我正在玩游戏，我不得不退出游戏，登陆另一个网站，付款，再回到游戏。”PayPal的产品开发副总裁Osama Bedier说，“而现在我们公司正在开发一种内联商店，玩家们在游戏中就可以完成付费交易。”

virtual goods

这一工具的发售体现了微支付的新特征，即游戏玩家只需小额支付就能继续游戏，如50美分或1美元，目前大部分玩家需要充值10到20美元才能继续游戏。

这对于将旁观者转变成购买者有着重大的意义。

“我们希望的是在‘我想进行虚拟交易’时，我只需鼠标一点，钱就汇进了我的账户。就像长途电话付费，月末我们会收到月结账单。无需多余的烦恼，玩家可以尽情享受游戏。”

目前，PayPal正联手多家游戏公司对新产品进行测试，10月末这一支付工具将在旧金山创意会议上正式发布。

PayPal公司和Facebook一向保持着良好的关系，对此Bedie也表示期待与Facebook的未来合作，但同时他并不担心社交网络有一天会瓜分走这个市场。

“我们无法预计潜在的竞争，但现在我们面临的一个最大问题是许多人将网上支付当作是一种信用卡取现的方法。”

PayPal will launch a new suite of developer tools at the end of October that will make it easier for social gamers to pay as they go, potentially on-boarding millions of new casual gamers who are deterred by the hassle of topping up on virtual currencies.

“Right now, if I’m playing a game, I have to leave the flow, go to a different web site, authenticate myself, authorize a payment and then come back to the game,” said Osama Bedier, the vice president of product development at PayPal. “We’re going to have an inline shopping experience where you can authorize a transaction on the screen right there in the game.”

The launch will be paired with a new micropayments feature, which will give players the option to continue the game while paying in increments of just 50 cents or a dollar. Right now, players usually have to top up in bigger increments of $10 or 20 to continue playing games.

“It makes sense to alter the point at which browsers become buyers,” he said, adding that PayPal has 87 million customers. The effect will be to have more a “metered” approach to gameplay, almost like the way you’d put an additional quarter or two in to play an arcade game.

“What I expect is to have the experience of ‘I want that virtual tractor!’ then I click on it and it automatically pulls from my account,” he said. “It will be like how long-distance phone calls are billed. It gets tallied up and you get billed at some normal interval. It takes all the friction out, allowing you to just enjoy the game.”

PayPal is currently testing the new workflow with a handful of gaming companies and will launch the tools at the end of October at its San Francisco-based Innovate conference.

As for PayPal’s relationship with Facebook, Bedier only expects it to deepen over the next few years and said he’s not concerned that the social network will at some point encroach on its turf.

“It’s hard for us to be concerned about potential competition,” he said. “The mistake most guys make trying going into payments is assuming that it’s just collecting a whole bunch of credit cards and figuring it out later.(source:inside facebook)