“The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.”
- BC Forbes
The virtual currency market is currently estimated at over $2 billion dollars annually and predicted grow to $5 billion by 2011. That is greater than over 30 countries GDP among them: North Korea, Greenland, and Aruba.
Although not exactly economic powerhouses it’s mindboggling that a virtual world full of imaginary Warlocks, Jedi, Lizards, and Space Pilots could team up together to create $2 billion dollars in real world transactions trading gold pieces and digital space credits.
These virtual worlds present a new frontier for academics particularly in the fields of economics, psychology, and sociology. It’s an exciting field and one we here at GameRates find intellectually intriguing.
We saw an early opportunity to try to create a Wall Street Journal for these virtual game economies and sprang on it. We pictured blog headlines of, “Chinese gold farmer strike causes the USD/Gold exchange rate to skyrocket 15%,” and with that idea in our heads immediately set out to create our vision.
“I want you to go to the window, open it, stick your head out and yell: "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore.”
-Network
The site was not started solely out of intellectual curiosity however. We also started the site out of a disgust that such a large market continued to be populated by scam artists and thieves. We saw a rapidly growing billion dollars plus market with absolutely zero accountability.
Many Western game developers have yet to officially sanction virtual currency sales and Western governments have yet to regulate or legalize the industry (unlike many of their Korean counterparts). This has created a black market power vacuum where if a vendor cheats you out of 1,000 virtual gold pieces, you’re basically stuck.
You can’t complain to the game developers as they don’t recognize the virtual currency market and you can’t complain to the police that someone stole your “virtual” currency as they would only laugh at you. We saw this void and created GameRates to allow the consumers to regulate the market themselves. With equal access to quality information consumers can reward the trustworthy vendors and punish the unreliable ones. Hopefully this will end the Wild Wild West era of unaccountability.
“The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis'. One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity.”
– John F. Kennedy
Then again, we aren't doing this solely out anger or academic curiosity (although that is what emotionally motivated us). To provide all of the charts and technology behind the site along with the enormous time investment required, we need to generate income.
All of the links on this site that take you to currency vendors are affiliate links (which means we make about 10% every time you buy through one of those links). However, this type of tradeoff keeps us honest.
If we write poor reviews, provide incorrect prices, or generally do a poor job of referring or you, you aren't going to come back. As such it's in our every interest to only refer you to top quality sellers and write (brutally) honest reviews not only for our own economic profit, but out of disgust that some of these companies can continue to operate.
We love helping honest companies succeed. We equally love trashing dishonest companies (and hey, it’s a lot more fun to write about those!)