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building a marketplace

Started by langsholt Jun 21, 2012 at 2:23 PM 6 replies 1.5k views

Original Post

Jun 21, 2012 at 2:23 PM

I have an idea, to make something functional in the gaming world. What about creating a virtual marketplace for different games and "worlds". Have pasted some of it from a other thread I have. The idea could contain many aspects but "designed" in a traditionally way like finn.no, qxl.com or other. The thing is to give game developers a second option of earning money on funds and people to trade with their virtual goods and things needed.

Lets say if we make a tradeportal where people can sell and buy stuff they need. Fuel, food, minerals, and other daily things. Other game developers could hook their online games on to the tradeportal wheter it,s farming, virtual gambling, adventure games, settler and other. The thing is that people could buy and sell thing they produce like in the real world. Also if people wanna cheat they can buy credits and buy the goods, upgrades etc eventually a subscribe gives the user a given set of credits. Anyway there must be developed a standard that every game needs to apply to. of course, users also can earn credits in their games to use in the trade portal. also the tradeportal could be a real internet webpage. People could buy credits with i.e through the marketplace.

What do you think about this, has it been done?
It will be a alternative way of earning money for game developers to fund more developement and paying the bills?

What needs to be done so multiple games can use the same trade portal?

Good or bad idea?

Stormynature

Jun 21, 2012 at 2:33 PM

Anyway there must be developed a standard that every game needs to apply to. of course,

That there will be your largest single issue beyond the technical and business related aspects. If you have read through the threads you will note that there are a lot associated with the difficulties of managing ingame economies, adding a completely new economy system in addition to each game's existing system would be fraught with a lot of problems as each game's economy would have different effects related to that particular style of game...not too mention standardisation of economies to the same type of economy would imo meet a lot of resistance amongst developers. Not too say that the idea doesn't have merit...just that you would have a lot of work ahead of you simply selling the idea well enough to so many different devs. However I believe something such as your are discussing is already forming/formed on facebook with a credits system in place. But then Facebook does have the advantage in this case of being the platform upon which their games sit. I also believe something on a similar if not quite economic scale is occuring through Steam with the ability to gift ingame items etc.

langsholt

Jun 21, 2012 at 8:37 PM

okey
do you think it could be profitable if such a thing could be developed?

Tom Sloper

Jun 21, 2012 at 8:43 PM

okey
do you think it could be profitable if such a thing could be developed?

You're asking "is it possible." The answer to just about ANY "is it possible" question is "yes."
Ask a different question.

Ravyne

Jun 21, 2012 at 11:08 PM

Premature monetization is the root of all evil.

You seem to be worried whether you can make money at this before you even have a valuable service. Unifying the economies of a few games, much less tens or hundreds of them, means that those developers are beholden to some group-think economy, rather than one that's designed explicitly for their needs. If its easy to earn 100 gold in Game A, but much more difficult in Game B, what happens? Either people game the system or you try to implement some kind of exchange rate -- but who administers the exchange rate?

A better idea might be to develop the core service -- that is, complete infrastructure for in-game sales: A secure back-end, a semi-skinable front-end, subscription and payment processing, analytics -- and offer that to developers as an API that they can use in their games. At that point you're basically building a whole appstore (save the actual apps). Then, of course, the trouble here is that you're locked out of iPhone, Windows Phone, Steam, and probably Android and other markets because none of those guys want a third-party billing service horning in on their turf. I suspect that what's left over (indies and perhaps smaller, self-publishing studios) isn't that big of a market.

Then, you have to think that all of this is very hard to do, requires significant infrastructure to do at any scale, and leaves you liable if things go wrong (if not in a court of law, certainly in the court of business and of public opinion)... I doubt its a sustainable venture unless, perhaps, you're an unemployed veteran of the payment processing world with a list of client contacts as long as your arm.