Facebook May Make Its Virtual Currency Mandatory for Third-Party Apps

Virtual currency is moving serious amounts of money these days and some of the most lucrative businesses, social gaming companies, have taken advantage of the huge potential audience social networks provide and the number of possible ways to promote their products to gain huge user numbers. Facebook, the preferred platform for these companies, has been offering its own virtual currency, Credits, for a while now, but most have shunned this option in favor of implementing their own currencies, a much more lucrative alternative. This, though, may be coming to an end if rumors coming from InsideFacebook, that Facebook is considering making Credits mandatory for third-party developers, turn out to be true.

This move makes a lot of sense for Facebook, the social network is currently in track to make north of $500 million this year, while companies making money from the apps on the site easily generate well beyond that in revenue. It's understandable that Facebook wants a piece of that as it currently makes the majority of its revenue from advertising. Its own Gift Shop, which currently uses Credits, is expected to only bring in about $75 million this year.

The real interesting part isn't necessarily the fact that it will impose the use of Credits, but the cut the social networks takes from the transactions which are believed to be at around 30 percent, adding up to a significant amount of money. There's nothing official at this point and things are too early to know how Facebook plans to handle this, but it is certainly interested in generating revenue, now that the site has reached a very respectable 325 million users worldwide and shows no signs of slowing down.

No one knows how the developers will react to such a move from Facebook, but it's clear that most won't be thrilled. In fact, the biggest players have been taking precautions against becoming too dependent on the platform. Zynga, for example, has set up a dedicated site for FarmVille, the most popular game on Facebook at the moment. Still, Facebook carries a lot of weight and most developers can't afford to be left out, so it will be interesting to see how much it can push.