jasoncross.org

There’s no love lost for GameStop among the core gamer demographic. My friends bitch about them all the time. The “exclusive” preorder deals, putting money down to reserve a game, and of course, the used game ripoff. Sell your game that came out two months ago for $15 in store credit, then go buy a used copy of some other game that came out two months ago for $45. What a deal! This is why I now buy all my games on Amazon. (Note to Publishers – if your super special collector’s edition of the game isn’t available on Amazon, you’re losing that sale on me. I’m thinkin’ about Forza Motorsport 3 here.)

So a friend recently turned me on to a pretty neat site called SwitchGames. It’s not officially launched yet – it’s in “beta 2.0″ – but I kicked the tires and it looks like it’s in pretty good shape and definitely usable.

The whole point of SwitchGames is to serve as a trading community, where you directly swap games with other gamers. You make a list of games you have available for trade, and a list of games you want, and the site recommends trades with its other members. You propose a trade, they accept, and you ship your games to each other. The interface is clean and it all seems to work rather well. You can trade systems and accessories and stuff, too.

It’s free, but not really. Signing up is free, and trades are free (except for your shipping costs, duh). But you get these “badges” for doing things like getting positive reviews and completing a certain number of trades and so on. They’re mostly superfluous, but the “Verified Membership Badge” is important. It means you have paid $1.95 to verify your shipping and billing addresses. This helps assure users that you’re not just on there to propose a bunch of fake trades and screw people over. I don’t expect a lot of people are going to want to trade with people who don’t have that badge. Still, two bucks to verify yourself and then just the cost of shipping to trade is a much better deal than you’ll get from GameStop.

The site even does stuff like print shipping labels for you. Of course, even though almost everything is “free,” there are a few upsells. There’s the aforementioned Verified Membership Badge, and they sell a “SafeTrade” for $5.95 where they guarantee your trade and provide first-class USPS shipping. There’s a YouTube walkthrough of the site/service here.

I’m not here endorsing the service, to be clear. I haven’t completed a trade yet, for starters. But I did sign up, get the Verified Membership Badge, and kick the tires a bit. I thought it looked pretty interesting, and given the amount of GameStop griping I hear from my circle of friends, I thought you all might want to check it out.