Jambool hires marketing veteran from Electronic Arts for social app payments platform

Game veterans are following the gold, leaving traditional game companies for the many upstarts that have sprung up around the social networking economy.
Today, Jambool (which also goes by Social Gold) is announcing it has hired Mike Quigley as its chief marketing officer, VentureBeat has learned. Quigley was former vice president of global marketing for Electronic Arts’ EA Games label and spent 10 years at the company, overseeing marketing of games such as The Sims, Need for Speed, Battlefield, Warhammer Online, and Dragon Age Origins. Quigley left EA in January.
“I had an inkling for a long time about joining a startup with a small team,” Quigley said in an interview. “My goal is to get more game developers to use our payment platform and build the Social Gold brand.”
The Social Gold platform is a virtual goods monetization platform for thousands of online games and virtual worlds. It fits well with free-to-play games on Facebook and other social networks, where gamers can play a game for free but pay with real money to buy virtual goods such as weapons or decorations. With Social Gold, gamers get access to virtual currency inside a game. They can use real money via credit cards or other payment systems to purchase more virtual currency, which they can then spend on items in the game. It’s a seamless experience that lets game makers improve the conversion of free players to paid players. A wide variety of game companies use Social Gold, from Miniclip.com to Ohai.
San Francisco-based Jambool was founded by Amazon.com veterans Vikas Gupta and Reza Hussein. The competition is fragmented, ranging from PayPal to Facebook itself with its credits platform. Jambool is trying to spread beyond Facebook as other platforms become big virtual goods vendors.
As Social Gold expands globally across social, casual and MMO gaming markets, with marquee partners such as Miniclip.com, Gamersafe and Ohai, the company continues to focus on payment platform innovation and driving growth of the overall virtual goods market.
Companies: Jambool
People: Mike Quigley