You might have noticed the new ad in the sidebar for Goozex (disclosure: the link is an affiliate link for me… if you join and complete a trade I get some credit). It’s a game trading site I’ve decided to use in lieu of renting from GameFly. GameFly annoyed me with their implicit promise of NetFlix-like priority queuing, while failing to deliver anything in the top half of my extensive queue twice in a row. No thanks.
So to save money I figured I’d give Goozex a shot. It’s fairly simple: you list games you wish to trade, you list games you wish to receive. Each game has a value determined by a variety of considerations but it boils down to a supply and demand economy. If a game is in high demand, it is valued at 1000 points. As that demand drops, the value drops. Your “offers” sit in a queue with everyone elses’ offer for that game.
For games you wish to trade away, you place it in the queue for that game. You also select what you’re offering: the whole package, the disc and manual or just the disc. Once your offer percolates to the top of the offer queue for that game as the queue is depleted, the site will finally match your game offer with someone who wishes to receive the game. You are then given the chance to accept the offer and, if everything goes according to plan, you send the game to them, they receive it and tell Goozex they got it and the appropriate number of points is transferred from the receiver’s account into yours. Simple.
For games you wish to receive it works similarly. You make your request and it gets put into the queue for that game. It should be noted that high profile games have fuller queues so this is rarely a method for instant gratification. Once you reach the top of the queue you will be matched with someone that is offering the game as long as you have enough points to “pay” for the game. If you don’t, you’ll retain your position but won’t be matched for an actual trade until you have enough points.
I should note that Goozex gets its due through “trade credits”. To receive a game, not only must you have the available points for the game but you have to have an available “trade credit” which you can really only buy from Goozex for $1 a pop. These are only required to receive games, not trade them away. Reasonable, really. You can also pay Goozex for additional points instead of trading games to get points. 1000 points — the going rate for a new game — is $50, so even there you can “buy” a new game for a $9 discount essentially.
At this point I’ve sent out 3 games and received 2. It has mostly been a success, though the primary thing to keep it from being a great success is the thing that always keeps things from being great successes: the people.
My problem is I treat people in my commercial transactions as valued customers. I always ship first-class mail, I package carefully, my items — if I have control over it — are always clean and typically pristine, I notify the recipient when I ship, thank them for their business and provide feedback in a timely manner. Unsurprisingly, I am in the apparent minority.
My first trade was to ship out Gears of War 2 and it went swimmingly. I shipped it, the guy got it and I got my feedback shortly thereafter. Poof, I’m 1000 points richer. Someone then requested MS Flight Simulator 2002. Again, I shipped it out and watched as the delivery confirmation link told me it was received 3 days later. 14 days later I sent a reminder to please provide feedback. Even more than with eBay feedback is important. Until you get positive feedback, you don’t get your points. The system will time out a transaction after 21 days if no feedback is received so you eventually get it, but until then it’s points that are doing you no good. Sure enough, 21 days later the system timed out and gave me my points.
Another common occurrence is canceled transactions. Twice now I’ve had dunderheads get a request to percolate up, I accept them and start preparing the shipment and then they want to cancel. The latest “reason” was brilliant:
sorry, but i cant get it sorry.
You can’t get it? You obviously have the available points, you obviously have the available trade credits otherwise the system wouldn’t have queued you up for a match. No, Simpleton McJackhole, you changed your mind. I allow the cancellation, of course, because otherwise I would almost certainly be out both the game and the feedback as they leave negative feedback out of spite.
The receiving of games is subject to the whims of humanity as well. When I finally popped out on the top of the queue for both Dead Rising and Resistance: The Fall of Man the corresponding sellers accepted and agreed to ship within 3 days. One guy confirmed the shipment 8 days after accepting, the other guy confirmed 11 days after. Buh? One of the flaws of the system then occurred to me: there is no impetus built into the system to honor your shipment dates. Negative feedback is only appropriate if the game doesn’t work. So why not sit on the game for a week or two? There’s no reason not to.
Once I finally received the games another flaw reared up: there’s no way to determine or demand a particular level of quality. The disc for Dead Rising looked as though a terrier had been savaging it for the better part of a week. I installed it to the 360′s hard drive and the game functions but I imagine it was a near thing. Again, the system doesn’t really allow for this type of feedback. I could have said that the package didn’t meet my expectations but by my interpretation that’s supposed to be used only if you didn’t receive everything you were supposed to receive. I did receive everything even though it was used as an aerial plaything.
I’ll still continue to use the service, though. As a stored value mechanism it’s fairly straightforward. I injected capital into my bank with my Gears trade and some PC games that I will never play again and I convert that capital into games that I desire to play and, if I’m conservative, I should never have to jump start that capital again with an outside purchase. To me that’s better than $17 per month to rent things.
