Creative New

Via virtualworldsnews

Today Zeevex announced its intent to launch the first-ever “open virtual currency platform,” essentially a virtual currency that’s convertible into other virtual currencies from Zeevex’s partner games. The virtual currency would be loaded into an online “Digital Locker” created when a user purchased a Zeevex prepaid card and went to the Zeevex website to redeem it. The prepaid cards will be handled by InComm,  a partner in the new venture. 

“The open aspect of the Zeevex Virtual Currency will allow even non-game operator partners to offer content for which gamers can use their Zeev Tokens. This creates multiple revenue streams for online game operators from their existing gamers that will always flow through our brick-and-mortar retail partners. Zeevex is a really exciting development in the prepaid card space,” Dave Etling, VP of Product Development at InComm, said in a statement.

The Zeevex currency, called Zeev Tokens, can be spent in increments as low as $.5 and can be spent on subscription fees and one-time purchases in addition to in-game microtransactions.  The Zeev Token’s value is fixed to the value of the US dollar (1 Zeev Token to $.01) to prevent inflation, which combines with Zeevex’s retail-only model to also try to prevent fraud and gold selling. 

Zeevex notes that trusted partners would be able to access the lockers as well, in order to deposit virtual items and currency as part of giveaways and loyalty reward programs. In addition, gamers can trade Zeev Tokens to each other through the Zeevex Gamer-2-Gamer service.

When the service launches in July, Zeevex is promising that its prepaid cards will be available in over 20,000 brick-and-mortar retail locations. This is, no doubt, a result of prepaid card industry leader InComm’s role in creating and distributing the cards. What appears to set Zeevex’s offering apart from other multi-game prepaid cards like the Ultimate Game Card is interoperability. While you have to spend an entire Ultimate Game Card on a single game, Zeevex’s Digital Locker technology lets you break a card’s face value up among several different games.

Zeev Tokens can be cashed out but only by Zeevex’s official operators and client games. Zeevex is promising no up front cost to clients that want to sign on with the Zeevex network as well as easy integration. No clients have been named yet, but CEO Dean Gebert told us that clients have been signed and will be revealed in a series of announcements happening over the next three weeks. 

There are a few points in the Zeevex ecosystem where the company itself turns a profit. It gets a small portion of the face value of every Zeevex prepaid card when it is activated. When players exchange Zeev Tokens, the receiver pays Zeevex a 2% transaction fee (down to a minimum of one Token). Gebert also states that Zeevex plans on offering users of Zeevex certain additional services and content through its client games. 

Both Zeevex and its heavyweight partner InComm are based in Atlanta, where Zeevex has taken a private round of venture capital funding of an undisclosed amount. Gebert says Zeevex has sponsored several video game trade show events along with InComm, including some events at the upcoming E3 show. It will be interesting to see how this story develops over the summer, as Zeevex is sounding like it has the potential to become a serious contender in an area with pre-existing giants like PlaySpan and its Ultimate Game Guard, Live Gamer, and GMG Entertainment.