Are you running such a contest? Also do you personally accept BTC from people for payment for your goods/services? I accept it myself. I also give customers discount for buying my services in bitcoin. I would sell bitcoins for cash to locals here in Victoria BC as well. I sometimes randomly ask merchants at checkout "Oh can I pay with bitcoin?". Most of them respond "What is a bitcoin?" although one of them said "Not yet, still waiting to see if it really becomes soemthing".

That is the #1 thing keeping the popularity from rising and the #1 thing from keeping the price from rising due to the accompanying demand.  Going through some sketchy site like dwolla or liberty reserve or paying $35+ in fees to transfer money from a bank account to MTGox is insanely stupid.  There are local exchange programs but not enough of them.  There are a couple tiny companies that exchange directly through paypal and stuff but they're setting themselves up for massive scams with chargebacks, etc. So really there is no good solution.  I'd prefer a giant BTC ebay where someone can sell some random stuff and get BTC for it.  That'd have some serious problems with fraud too but it'd be neat

You can deposit USD into a bank account and get Bitcoins from several exchanges.

Social farm games: some users buy to get a head, others save by selling and for some there is no limit as to what they would do to get a head ... your basic virtual economy. You just need to balance the amounts that go in/out. On top of that your targeting a crowd that is used to digital money.

Small con, by handing btc back to players your probably gone have a hard time to keep something for your self and/or to find funding for development.
Biggest con, games are so annoying and expensive to make.

If well executed this would be a huge boost 

I started by giving several BTC to friends' kids as birthday gift, hope that will grow with them to payback their school in the future

Checkout all the countries on this list!

Qatar
Cambodia
Kyrgyzstan
Mexico
Ghana
Puerto Rico
etc etc

https://localbitcoins.com/statistics

I get the impression the folks here are just not into gaming. Sure every once in a while someone starts a thread yet again saying bitcoin should be used in games, but even those same people do not seem to actually make any effort to get in and play any/all games that people do set up. So basically they seem to tend to be "someone else should do something I myself am too lazy to do" type people...

For a long time Ixcoin was the only coin that had a player actually running around in-game trying to engage other players in trade using that player/trader's favourite coin, so it actually looked like Ixcoin would be the front-runner among the cryptocoins that were not created speficically by players, for players, inside the actual game itself.

Basically if you want players in games to use a particular currency, get in-game and offer them the currency you want them to get into. If they find that bitcoiners are good customers for in-game stuff they will come to like bitcoins, and having obtained them they will look for ways to spend them, quite possibly not only inside the game they "earned" them in.

So far bitcoiners look like notorious cheapskates compared to many other currencies, heck the Ixcoin advocate probably spent more value/worth of Ixcoin in game than all the bitcoins spent by all the bitcoiners. (Such very very few bitcoiners as even tried/offered, that is...)

-MarkM-

I actually set millibits as in-game currency for a while, but even free millibits didn't attract bitcoiners into the game, and the other players basically just complained that it was not fair to set the default currency to one that a bunch of non-players preferred instead of to one that at least one player preferred. The Ixcoin advocate got a lot of support in fact from other players saying if anyone's favourite cryptocoin should be used it should be his, since at least he actually played the game whereas bitcoiners are notorious for not actually playing despite running around telling people who DO play to use bitcoins.

Why the heck should players cater to a bunch of non-players? It makes them feel used. They prefer to use a fellow-player's currency rather than yet another currency some outsider who does not even play the game wants to impose upon them.

-MarkM-

Take a good look at the tables linked to from http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

I never thought any of the alternatives would surpass bitcoin in value but it seems the vast expenditures of bitcoins on ASIC pre-orders has supressed bitcoin prices so much and so long now that bitcoin is no longer top dog.

I don't think there is really much threat anymore of bitcoiners over-running all the other players.

-MarkM-

I'm on it bro. Captain Brocoin to the rescue.