GDC Day 3: Battle of the Payment Processors

I spent most of the first day of the Expo walking through and talking to all of the business/marketing related companies... and there were a lot of them. Apparently they've noticed the explosive growth in the mobile and social games markets, and how there are many new companies forming to publish games. So many vendors are looking to sell picks and shovels to these gold miners. Picks and shovels like payment processing, quality assurance, localization, and in-game advertising. And every combination possible of these services... with different countries covered, and varying plans, and different specialties...

It made my head hurt and I already generally understood these areas. It's no wonder that most of these booths were empty of showgoers... the programmers and artists and designers were mostly gawking at the spiffy 3D utilities or over in the Career Pavilion trying to find a new place to get paychecks.

The exhibitors were delighted to talk to someone, so I was able to make a lot of good connections. I'll be swimming in information next week. As far as I can tell (and this was confirmed by all the exhibitors I talked to) no one has actually done an overview of payment processing options that covers all the companies (or even a reasonable number of them). I need to do that and explain all the various types of payment options out there, and how they apply to different types of companies... I've talked myself into a big task, but it should be quite useful for developers who want to become publishers.

After that I plan to make a similar effort for QA, localization, advertising, and similar things that are generally useful (or potentially useful) for small publishers.