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Comment by makerops | Hacker News Reader

I am not a video game player, but this seems like such an obvious site (and awesome), are there a lot of competitors? I see ads for video game stores, and how they screw you on trade-ins, which this seems to fix.

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There are two or three major competitors that I'm aware of (other than the GameStops and Amazons of the world), and a handful of smaller ones. We're currently, by my estimates, the third largest. The folks who I now run the site for own the largest (as far as I'm aware), but we're mostly independent since I still operate it day-to-day.

One of the major points of the site is that you get 100% of the value you sell the game for. If it's going for $40 used, and you sell it for 4000 credits (the site's currency, valued at $1/100), you get 4000 credits to spend on something else.

First, let me say I love the idea and the site. My question: Why bother with the credits? Is it a legal workaround for currency? Why not make credits equivalent to dollars?

There were already a lot of sites doing the "keep your cash in our system" model. I was also sure there were some legal issues with a cash system, but in the end it was mostly about differentiating.

I only ask because it seems like the only barrier to entry. I know the math is easy, but it still is math for the user. Are you comfortable sharing numbers about how many users are repeats? It seems like a very sticky system.

True. It does take some getting used to. I think it's better now that it's a simpler $1/100 translation.

Among users who complete at least one trade, the raw average is 15 trades/user (that just a trades/users calculation). Right now, 91% of users who complete at least one trade come back to trade again.

There's a fairly stark divide I've seen while using this and other game trading sites between users who want to see a dollar equivalent and users who want to see a micro economy like this function independently of real currency. The direction that the major sites seem to be moving is more closely aligning with actual dollars, so VGFive explicitly stating 100 credits == $1, for example. Its initial model tried to act more independently, following what was more or less an economic collapse in the competitor site that first used that model, but after VGFive was bought, its internal economy also suffered massive inflation. Mathgeek obviously has more internal knowledge of how the economy reacted to the various changes that were introduced, but from a user's perspective it seems likely that trying to create something like this with an "independent" economy is more or less unsustainable (much to my dismay because I actually don't like the credit/dollar equivalence and much preferred the queue & supply/demand system).

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