CrowdStar launches Happy Island, uses Facebook Credits

CrowdStar, despite stiff and significant competition from giants such as Playfish and Zynga, are still churning out the social game titles. Their latest is a tourism business simulation titled Happy Island, and it's fairly unique. Not because of its premise or execution, as these things are fairly standard. Rather, Happy Island uses Facebook Credits exclusively for its microtransaction currency, as opposed to the unique currency of other titles.

Facebook has been pushing for developers of third-party applications to use their microtransaction currency, and Happy Island is the first step along this road. The one issue that giants such as Playfish or Zynga might have is that they will not get quite as much of the profits as they want, which could lead to them not adopting the system. Zynga already has back-ups in case this sort of thing happens (FarmVille.com, after all), but it will be interesting to see the effect this has on the social games landscape in Facebook.

[via Inside Social Games]