The Ingame Items Market is Broken… But Here’s How it Can Be Fixed
In our previous article, we examined the problems you’d face if you want to buy or sell ingame items. And given how many problems there are, most likely you’d give up on trading and just keep playing, even at the cost of losing potential income. But we at FiPME believe those problems can — and should — be solved so that trading becomes simple and efficient for all. Here’s how.
Today, we are all used to quality service wherever we go and whatever products we use. And it seems illogical to us that most ingame items trading platforms are so complicated to use and so inefficient regarding how users transact with each other. In the end, it not only impedes gamers from monetizing their hobby — or work! — but also spoils their overall gaming experience.
Furthermore, as gamers and traders ourselves, we not only personally suffered from the lack of decent trading platforms but also saw how it restrains the growth of the industry and hinders commodity traders from jumping in and bringing more liquidity and better prices for all. So, instead of waiting for the change to come, we decided to spur this change by our own forces. Here’s what we came up with in regard to each problem outlined in our previous article.
1) Choosing between secure transactions and affordability;
Why do buyers and sellers always have to choose the lesser of two evils: either insecure transactions or the expensive ones? We believe they don’t. At FiPME, traders will be offered both low commissions and escrow accounts to ensure the money transfer happens only once the item has been delivered and neither side can cheat. Furthermore, even if for some reason the seller does not pass over the item to the buyer once buyer’s money has been deposited to the escrow account, the buyer will be automatically offered the next available item straight away and we’ll be there for any questions.
2) Hard to execute the best price — both for buyers and sellers;
At FiPME, we solve this by introducing two-way trading and automatic deals matching. It allows both buyers and sellers to simply place their offers with the prices they desire and leave the rest to our matching algorithm. It will automatically execute the transaction once there are offers with coinciding prices and quantities — just like they do at other exchanges, e.g. when trading Bitcoin. Say, John wants to sell the Genuine Weather Sirocco from Dota 2 for $1,5 and Ishmael wants to buy it for $1,5, too. They both place their orders and wait until FiPME’s matching engine automatically executes the trade between them, simply sending the money from one person to another if the transaction has been completed successfully. In fact - only if it has been completed successfully!
This also gives FiPME another edge over the current ways of trading ingame items, e.g. through shops: with us, anyone can see the average price of each item and the full order book with all active offers and prices. This lets our users be instantly price-informed when setting their own price instead of having to search and analyze all possible offers themselves.
Additionally, it’s much easier to understand the real value of an item/service when you can see what people are willing to pay for it — instead of looking at the price that sellers are willing to sell it for as this one can be (and very often is) heavily overpriced.
3) Impossible to buy/sell your items instantly;
Unlike the majority of ingame items trading platforms, we believe in free market where the best offers or bids (buying interest) should be processed first. That’s why FiPME’s matching engine ensures that the cheapest seller sells first and the buyer who is ready to pay the most gets the first actively sold item. This way, anyone who needs to instantly buy/sell an item can do so by simply setting a good price. No need to pay us for promoting your offer in the search results, no need to come up with catchy pictures and descriptions: pure efficiency.
Eventually, this not only enables our users to buy/sell fast but also establishes a fair trade by linking the item’s price to its supply and demand rather than somebody’s particular fancy or sellers’ “bribes”.
4) Nowhere to trade the items from unpopular games;
We know that all games take time and effort to play — and these should be rewarded! That’s why we don’t care if a game is played by 300 or 3 000 000 people. If anyone wants to have a marketplace for trading a small game’s goods and services — they’re more than welcome to open a new market at our Exchange! What’s more, the person who requests to open that market will receive commissions from all transactions that take place there in the future.
While this helps FiPME to better respond to the arising needs of gamers, it also poses another great opportunity for gamers to monetize their love for gaming — win-win for all!
5) Hard to exchange ingame items between games;
FiPME offers direct cross-game swaps by automatically matching buy/sell orders from different games. All you have to do is put your buy/sell order at a certain price and let us execute it, just like as if you were trading within one game market. No need for cash and a bank account, no need to spend hours searching for different contractors in different games.
6) Nowhere to trade ingame services;
Being players ourselves, we know how valuable this sort of services is when you’re stuck on a quest. We also know how big the demand for your services can be when you’ve reached a certain level and how great it would be if there was a simple way for you to find customers. That’s why we want to let our users trade services at our exchange and do it as easily as when trading ingame items. In the end, such transactions are as valuable as ingame goods both for buyers and sellers.
7) Hard to monetize your ingame efforts if you’re not a professional player;
At FiPME we believe that the time you spend executing tasks in the virtual world is as valuable — and often as difficult — as the time you spend doing things in the real world. That’s why no matter how much time you spend playing and how devoted you are, you should be able to monetize these efforts. Such opportunity should be there for you no matter your connections, background, industry knowledge or anything else. It’s simply your right and FiPME grants you to fulfill it.
8) Impossible to invest in ingame items and trade them as assets;
With our background in commodity trading, we see a great promise of ingame items to be traded as commodities. And in order to fulfill that promise, FiPME aims to serve as a reference point not only for gamers who need an item for their gaming endeavors but also for external traders that are willing to enter this lucrative market thus adding liquidity. In the end, both the traders and the gaming community will benefit and take trading to a new level in terms of speed and price efficiency.
As you’ve probably noticed, most of the solutions we envision are not only beneficial to hardcore gamers. In fact, we expect the spectrum of FiPME users to go far beyond that and involve all sorts of gaming industry participants — or even those outside of it, like in the case with traders.
Who will be those? Read in our next article!
