How many times have you walked into a GameStop hoping to catch a deal on a used game, only to find out that the savings amounted to a mere five dollars off the retail price?
The used game market is a $2.4 billion cash cow that benefits one group – the retailers. And, the folks over at Switchgames.com are simply not having that. They’re putting the power of the used game market back into the hands of gamers, one trade at a time.
We recently spoke with Kai Bond, COO of Switch Games, for the story behind this innovative business.
See the exclusive interview now with reporter Michele Alfonso.
Switchgames.com is all about the community. “We’re adding a couple thousand users a week. And we’re adding several thousand games a week,” Kai stated. “When we relaunched in December we had about 12,000 games available and today we’re above 36,000. There’s no Gamestop in the world we’re you’ll be able to walk into and get 36,000 games.”
“There’s a misconception about used games, that they’re all old or crappy games,” Kai added. “Not True. What you’ll see on the homepage is totally new games that have come out very recently.”
FPS fans may notice that the Switchgames.com layout feels vaguely reminiscent to Bungie’s Halo web interface. Each user has a gamer profile page that features a badge system to ranks users. Help out the community by making recommendations or leaving feedback and you can quickly earn yourself a philanthropy badge. “If you’re doing good for the community we reward that,” Kai remarked.
Unlike sites like Ebay, where users have to sift through several layers of categories and payment models to sell a game, Switchgame.com users can make a trade without ever leaving the homepage. “We found this to be a winning factor in ease of use for newcomers to the web-trade game,” Kai said. “When we built the marketplace we wanted to provide all the tools to allow gamers the complete control over how the used game industry is working.”
There is no fee to use Switchgames. However, if you want to verify your address with Switchgames, to earn the trust of more traders, you do have to pay a negligible fee. There’s a badge for that as well. So, you’ll add another stripe to your profile.
Switchgames.com is going beyond helping just the end gamer. They’ve recently implemented a new business model that allows gamers to give a few dollars back to publishers. This serves as an incentive for gamers to support their favorite publishers. Kai remarks, “What we’re really just trying to do is take that power out of retailers and give it back into the hands of the gamer. We said look we’ll make this optional. If users want to, they can participate. If not, they can ignore it.”
As for the future of Switchgames, the company has several new features they’re looking to implement over the course of the year. Kai says, “Over time, we actually want to roll out some features where you can track your game, so you can see how many people have traded for the game. And, (you can) see where your game has ended up over time.”
- No Comments
