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A deadline of September 12 has been set by Facebook to transition all games to accept local currencies.
The social network had previously used its own Facebook Credits currency but has now provided a local payments API to handle transactions across the global digital economy.
This gives developers ninety days to make the transition.
The payer promotions for Facebook Credits are also being deprecated and will be replaced by a new payer promotion program for local currency “within the coming months.”
Facebook is also canceling its sponsored support for TrialPay offers, but these will still be supported by TrialPay itself through a direct integration solution for Facebook developers.
The company says the new local currency payments will give game makers more control over pricing and payments.
New features allow developers to set the prices for in-game items by local market, cache static prices with Facebook to remove the need for a server request for item information, and the API is also expected to reduce latency by reducing the number of server requests.
This new system comes with its own challenges for developers, who will have to consider international pricing, in-game currencies, and are encouraged to create a mobile specific store.
Facebook has also included A/B testing as part of the API in the hopes of making the migration easier by rolling out changes incrementally to random groups of users.
For more information on what the transition means and what it requires of developers, visit the Facebook Blog post announcing the news.
