In-Game payments. A Better Way Without the Pain

Payments need to be instantaneous, secure and unintrusive to the game as possible.

In-app payments and online payments in general can be a mixed bag.

A very large mixed bag to solve given that in-app payments drive 95% of mobile app store monetization.

On the player side it’s a bad experience in many forms while for developers it can be a third-party integration nightmare where issues are out of their hands to resolve.

Game developers are usually not payment processing and electronic funds transfer experts, they make games!

Enjin Coin provides a payment layer that was designed for game use, not as a one-size-fits-none by banking developers who expect it to be deployed in banking, website/e-comm or traditional point-of-sale conditions.

Payments need to be instantaneous, secure and unintrusive to the game as possible.

Problems and Solutions for Players

No Credit Card

As the majority of gamers have grown into adulthood, credit cards are something many just take for granted.

Younger players can trade or earn ENJ to pay for things without ever having to bother parents for card details. While “top-up” cards are often an alternative, not everyone has easy access to a physical game store or other location that sells them for the games that you want.

ENJ is an option (or even locking a game to ENJ payment only) means parents do not need to worry about the kids running up thousands on a saved credit card.

Credit and debit cards are still not as ubiquitous in other parts of the world make up a large market.

Advertising Creates a Horrible Experience

Having your game interrupted by interstitials or a portion of the playable area of the screen eaten up by a banner.

How about advertising’s cousin i.e crappy/scammy offers and surveys — what if developers didn’t have to resort to any of this if an alternative like ENJ being spent into the game works?

Card Processing Problems

If you do have a credit card, they aren’t exactly trouble free either.

If you go overseas on a trip, the game may have hard-locked your country and you find yourself unable to pay even if you want to.

There can be long processing times or paypal e-check clearing times before you even get your stuff. I guess it depends on how much the developer is willing to trust and how much goodwill they want to extend…

Honestly, credit card problems are an article into themselves so we’ll digress. Being able to pay in ENJ/crypto sidesteps all of these as crypto doesn’t care about mailing addresses or countries and the transactions are completely electronic and immutable end-to-end.

Pooling/Sharing/Gifting

These often get asked about by players who are hamstrung by the developers’ policies within the games.

In an ENJ driven economy, players would have full control and being electronic and crypto based, pooling purchases becomes a lot easier than designating someone to collect cash/paypal. That would be largely based on trust and the good nature of the trusted.

As Enjin Coin is smart contract based, these arrangements can be codified (literally) and transparent for all to read and executed impartially and instantly once conditions are met.

Problems and Solutions for Developers

Un-skinnable Elements

A good example is the “Verified by Visa” popup being an external black box library that also happens to be joined at the hip with a UI that is set in stone.

Lack of True Control

Submitting a game or an item for sale is not an impartial listing.

You are subject to the policies of the game or platform i.e. no second hand sales, limits such as whether you can give anything away for free and constraints on something that should be technically yours to sell.

These terms would be entirely set by smart contract by a developer with zero platform rules to contend with.

Long Learning Curve

For example with Android you have to become very familiar with their developer ecosystem, data structures and other things that distracts from your core competencies.

Click the hyperlink to dive deeper into the code details.

All Types of Currencies Treated Equally

Or rather agnostically.

Especially since we allow you to make your own and set no limitations on whether it’s free in-game currency or “paid”.

They are all based on the same underlying system. Google Play in this example only extends their management and tracking services for paid currency.

Not a One-stop-shop or an Extensible Infrastructure

There are one-stop-shop solutions such as these but they are not designed to be extendable or generic for both player use AND developer use.

Something like Google Play is also NOT designed to be a complete virtual currency solution the way Enjin Coin will be for both developers and players alike.

Not as a typical gatekeeper platform but one designed to be the infrastructure that can serve the entire ecosystem upon which other platforms are built.

Payment Gateways

A gateway like Stripe may also have regional restrictions. Paypal handles your money directly and as such, can also hold money or freeze accounts and also become responsible for arbitration.

Nothing is ever sent directly like things are on the blockchain and there is no neutral arbiter that can also quickly and cleanly execute any decisions made like a smart contract. Most payment gateway problems are a casualty of still being largely tied to physical locations and fiat currency.

As we are blockchain and crypto based we are completely agnostic and the system is decentralized where parties all deal directly with each other.

Transaction Fees

Transaction companies like Visa and Mastercard take 2–3% while average crypto transaction fees are even smaller, measured in fractions of a percentage.

Paperwork in a Cashless World

No unholy amounts of paperwork and having to deal with faxes or the rest of the “old world” to open a payments account. Instant receipt of payment.

It makes no difference whether Enjin Coin is implemented in-game or out-of-game and Enjin Coin is apt to solve many out-of-game payment problems too. We talked to Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games who has been both an indie developer and publisher of adventure games over problems he’s had with various gateways over the years. One was unresponsive, gave limited amounts of time to download and he often had to reset the links manually.

Of course he couldn’t do it himself and there was an amount of email tag involved. There was a similar story with another provider except this time it was regarding customer forms and receipt templates and were not cleanly separated from a code standpoint from the payments themselves.

At one point, a major platform portal he was using prevented all developers from accepting pre-orders at the time. These are all issues that Enjin Coin would never run into as it’s only role is to be the infrastructure, not to be a platform holder or gatekeeper in any way.

In closing, you can see Enjin Coin is quite ambitious when it comes to solving many pain points that all of us as gamers or developers have likely endured at some point or another.

With Enjin Coin, much of the pain of the present day will become a thing of the past.