The move, announced on Facebook's Developer Blog, will let makers of apps -- particularly gaming apps -- cultivate another source of recurring income of which Facebook will get a 30% cut. Such subscriptions will be priced in local currency (example: the U.S. dollar or the British pound) rather than in Credits. As Facebook admits in the blog entry, Credits haven't become the standard method of payment since most games on the platform have implemented their own virtual currencies.
Although the program officially starts in July, Facebook has already begun testing subscriptions with Kixeye and Zynga.
As the company disclosed in its SEC filing in February, Facebook derived about 83% of its $3.7 billion in revenues in 2011 from advertising. The rest came from payments, primarily good purchased from Zynga, via Facebook.