Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Open Network Entertainment recently launched the ONE Power-Up Game Card, a universal prepaid gift platform, and cooperative marketing system that supports online game developers, publishers, virtual worlds, and social networks. ONE's Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Pete Grubb, sat down with Ten Ton Hammer to discuss this new venture and how it will affect the future of online gaming.

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Ten Ton Hammer: Where did you get the idea for the ONE card?

Pete Grubb, ONE Vice President of Sales and Marketing:
We've been looking at this space for close to two years. We actually had planned on launching a universal platform before some of the competitors but we really thought it was important to wait and find the right partner that could give us backend systems that would allow us to deeply connect with our game publisher partners and do some very interesting things as it relates to transfer funds.

As you can see from some people in the universal card space, there are many people that can accept a pre-paid card and move funds from Point A to Point B. We thought it was very important to provide a better user experience and more flexibility for the end user so that a ONE Power-Up Game Card user can use that balance from our game site (OneGameCard.com) or from the game publisher's site equally as well and seamlessly.

Ten Ton Hammer:Can you explain how the card works?

Pete: Sure. The ONE Power-Up Game Card is truly a universal prepaid instrument for supporting virtual goods and subscription sales for online game communities, for virtual worlds, and evolving social network space. So fundamentally, we establish a balance for the card when a user activates that card on our system.

A user can take that card, go to our game portal site (onegamecard.com), enter their PIN if they wish to, and proceed with that transaction, or we really do encourage them to create an account and registration with our service. That will allow them to use partial balances across multiple game properties.

We also establish a special security code for that user. We have what's called the ONE Power Play Service and the power code is a unique and secure code that the end user establishes in their profile that then allows them to use that code on supporting partner sites to redeem funds and transfer them to the partner's commerce system.

Ten Ton Hammer: Who are some of the partners you have now then?

Pete: Our list is still growing, but our launch partners include Aeria Games, OnNet, Games Campus, NDoors Atlantica, JCE, GameHI, and Fantage.

Ten Ton Hammer: So they can use the card to pay for subscriptions as well as micro transactions?

Pete: Correct. So one of the things that really makes this service different is the ability to create an auto-recharge service. I think it's a very powerful feature for online game communities and particularly for publishers. What we allow you to do for our services is actually create an automatic recharge card service that can be recharged through a prepaid card.

I don't know if you have children, but I certainly do and a lot of how we designed our system is guided by my children's use of online game properties. Many times you have to give a child an incentive to do things and in this case, having an automatic recharge type feature that can be recharged through prepaid cards gives the parents a lot of power. It's not just a credit card that automatically recharges. There has to be some conscious decision about the need to recharge. So that's an example of some of the types of implementations we can support very easily through our platform.