iGame Radio

ETA: Buy Anyware is two words, and I updated the site to reflect that. My apologies to Plimus for the incorrection.

Ever find yourself in an intense game and discover that some dude has a must-have item but when you click on the purchase link to buy it you get bumped out of game to a website storefront and find yourself screaming ARGHHHHHHHH! Yeah, me too.

Today Plimus has introduced a solution to your problems in the form of the Buy Anyware API. This so-called E-Commerce 3.0 solution is intended to provide a “frictionless” e-commerce experience within the application itself. No more chucking you out of game for that vital Cloak of Awesome Good Looks.

I spoke with Simon Jones, Vice President of Strategic Solutions at Plimus, to get more information about this new API. Developers can use Buy Anyware to control the customer experience at any level, and to almost any degree. The experience could be as surface as a pop-up window when you click on purchasing an item that allows you to complete the transaction with a click. Or it could be as deep as a part of gameplay itself, where the purchase doesn’t even register to you as a transaction in the traditional sense, and you haven’t even popped out of the game experience at all, such as when you visit the town in an RPG game and purchase items with virtual (or real) coins.

Plimus has already attracted the attention of some big players in the game industry, including Playdom, Namco, and Blizzard. And because Plimus uses multiple financial enterprise solutions, such as PayPal, Gigya, and Yummy Interactive, there’s a guarantee that if one conduit goes down, another is available. Plimus uses a prioritizing algorithm to determine which solution is the best in your location, based on monetary exchange rates, fees charged, etc. Only time will tell whether this algorithm will actually do the job, but Jones states that they are constantly tweaking the algorithm.

Plimus insists that this will be the “Death of the Storefront”, at least in the traditional sense. I wondered if that would cause problems for many traditional virtual storefront owners, who use that space to hawk connected software, games, etc, or items that are not doing so well, so that they can get more eyes on them. But Jones insists that Buy Anyware can help with that too.

“Actually, I think it would allow them to do a better job at it,” Jones said, referring to storefront owners using Buy Anyware to refer additional items to buyers. Jones said that sellers can use statistical information that Plimus provides them from previous purchases to determine which ones are better to refer as pre- or post-purchases to other purchases.

What happens if you end up loosing access to the Internet? Many single-player games have in-game purchases that would require Internet access to do so. Jones said not to worry. Buy Anyware is a flexible toolkit that would allow users to create queues of purchases that can later clear after Internet access has been achieved. It really depends on the developer who uses Buy Anyware and how they use this API.

And that is probably the biggest question of all. With a toolkit this flexible, how well will developers use it? There will obviously be some great examples of integrated “storefronts” if you will, something that really doesn’t look like a store at all, but really is in-game and allows you to pay for things with in-game cash, real cash, or purchase in-game currency with real. Or, of course, in the case of adventure and RPG games, probably is a store. Heh.

But other developers may not use this API very well, and we could end up seeing some pretty awful stuff. They may end up attempting to crowd the equivalent of a virtual storefront onto a screen, or in the case of an iPhone a tiny screen, not really understanding how to rethink e-commerce.

Buy Anyware is cross-platform. When I asked just how cross-platform, Jones replied that the API is basically available on any platform and any OS as long as it is “…Internet-aware, and can pass XML over an SSL-enabled pipe…” Which means Mac, iPhone/iPod Touch, and iPad may start seeing Buy Anyware enabled apps sometime soon.

This looks like a powerful e-commerce API that can help developers rethink their way of doing purchases in-game. The only real question is how many developers can and will be willing to develop to the potential that this API represents.