PlayFirst Grapevine
The all new, just-for-you PlayPass
At PlayFirst, we keep an ear closely tuned to the feedback from all of you, our loyal fans. There was one message we heard repeatedly, loud and clear: “We love PlayFirst.com, and we love PlayFirst games, but when you sell games for twice what I can pay elsewhere you make it pretty tough for me to be a loyal PlayFirst customer!!!” With everything going on in the economy lately, it’s all the more important for companies to be sensitive to the needs of their loyal users. We decided that it was time to act.
I’m excited to tell you of our newest innovation, PlayPass. In exchange for signing up to receive PlayGold in your account each month you will get up to a 50% discount on games and also receive discounts on add-ons like the Diner Dash restaurant episodes. We are pricing this program at $13.95/month, which puts PG 1,395 into your account. This means that each month you’ll have enough credit to select a full game plus a Diner Dash: Hometown Hero restaurant. If you’re not into the restaurants (why not?!?!?!?), just save that extra PlayGold – yes, it “rolls over” – and pick up another full game the next month or so. But definitely try the restaurants – you can play the first level before deciding to buy, so there’s no reason not to at least take a look. Additionally, PlayPass gives you early access to newly released PlayFirst games. Why? Because we know its fun to be first, and we wanted to give a little extra fun to our most loyal customers.
PlayFirst employees and third-party developers are currently working on about twenty game projects. This lets us launch at least one new PlayFirst game each month. Non-affiliated teams supply our site with hundreds of additional titles each year, giving you a great number and variety of games to choose from. Keeping the regular price of games at $19.95 allows us to best support these talented and passionate teams who are working hard day after day to make your life more fun. I hope that other web sites keep supporting this pricing model as well, so that we can all keep the casual games industry out of a downward spiral where poor economics start to mean poor quality. But you dedicated fans that buy many games are already supporting the industry, and you deserve something back for your loyalty. You are what PlayPass is all about.
I’d like to thank my team here at PlayFirst for really cranking over the past few months to ship PlayPass… right on the heels of shipping the redesigned site with great new features like Tips and Points. It’s your excitement that keeps the web site team motivated, so please give a shout if you like what you see.
Of course, this loyalty pricing is just the beginning. With PlayPass, we now have a fantastic foundation on which to offer more unique products and programs. Without giving too much away, I can say that the DD:HH restaurants are just a hint of what you should expect in terms of game ‘episodes’ from PlayFirst. Oops… have I said too much? ;-)
