SWITCHGAMES The Future of Video Game Trading
Up until this point, there are only a couple of ways people knew of to trade there video games in to get a new one. You either take them to GameStop and get store credit-- which is what I usually do--but they give you so little money for the games you trade in, then they sell it for double or triple the amount they paid for it. Or you can sell your games on e-bay and get a little more money than what you would get at GameStop-- but the process of taking the time to put it on sale isn't worth it to me. Switchgames is the new kid in town and it allows for gamers to actually trade their games physical with other gamers.
It may not be as fast or as convenient as GameStop, but I think the founder and CCO of the company Jason Crawford is on to something.
The difference with SwitchGames is the distribution of product. You're not sending in games in exchange for points(e.g. SwitchGames' competitor Goozex does), nor sending games away to a SwitchGames warehouse to be swapped for something else. SwitchGames looks like a web 2.0 version of eBay focused squarely on gamers. Either by selected browsing or through a dating service-esque member matching system called SwitchBot, participants volunteer games up for trade or propose trades and the whole concept is built upon sending a game to someone and receiving another one back. A game for a game.
Crawford says,
This is actual trading, there's no membership fees, there's no trade-in fees, there's no subscription fees, there's no queues. There's a lot of no's. [laughs] Basically, you list the games you want, you list the games that you own and then SwitchBot will connect you with other users. And we have things, mechanisms in place that can make trading with other gamers safer, faster and easier. That's how we make our money.
The service is 100% free all the way around, and that my friends is a huge selling point. We have nothing to lose if we want to try it out and give it a test spin. The SwitchGames database is huge! And they have implemented a strategy to protect your investment. SwitchGames also comes with a $5.95 "Safe Trade" option. Safe Trade is $5.95 for each participant in the trade but is the only way to 100% guarantee you cannot be screwed out of a transaction. If the buyer or seller never sends the game, sends the wrong game or something else goes wrong, SwitchGames will protect you, either by covering the cost of the missing game or providing a copy of the missing game.
What's here is really an opportunity to do something big. Gamers could take over and I love that whole idea, just flipping the entire model upside down. GameStop doesn't care about SwitchGames, they couldn't care less about this. 'Game peer-to-peer trading? Okay, whatever.' Until, you know, 350,000 gamers are using it and then they're like 'whoa, oh no, we can't control this' and you can't control that, the gamers control it. That's the way we built the whole model. You can see that we don't force anything on anybody and that's the way it will always be. You spend the money if you want to spend the money.
Crawford's theory suggests that if GameStop starts losing trade-in volume from a site that's offering gamers a better deal, then GameStop will have to raise the value of its trade-ins. Whether you use SwitchGames or not, gamers win the game.
Check SwitchGames out for yourself by Clicking Here! I just signed up.
Source: G4TV