Goozex Game Trading Reviewed

Face it. Video games are expensive. That's why your friends download the hell out of them and laugh at your little jar of nickels you are using to save up to buy Murder 3 or whatever other sick video game you hope your mom doesn't know about happens to be. Games are expensive, money is tight, downloading is illegal, so what are you going to do?

You could try selling your games on eBay, once you pass through the gates of Mordor to prove your existence and the fact that you have a bank account. Or you could take them to the local Gaming Stop (see what I did there?) and get $5.00 for a game they are going to sell to your richer friend tomorrow for $35. Or you could get smart and trade it away on Goozex.

Goozex, one of the most unfortunately named companies in the history of capitalism, is a website where you can take your games and send them off to someone else. In exchange for your generosity you will get points that can be used to request games from other nice people all over America (maybe Canada too, but really?) The good news is that you will get much better value for your games than through any other venue. If you just bought Murder 3 for $50, then most likely it will still be worth the equivalent of $50 in points on Goozex. Goozex doesn't treat your games like used cars, knocking 50% off their value as soon as you walk out the door.

This is probably the best thing about Goozex to be honest. Let's say you go to the store and buy a a brand new release game cause it has a nice shiny box and all the magazines said it was going to be great. Then you go home and start playing and after about 5 minutes realize the game is terrible. Thanks to Goozex you can now dump that game on someone else and get 98% of your money back in trade value. One man's trash is another mans treasure as they say. Or in this case one man's trash becomes another man's trash, but it's in his house now so what do you care?

Another great thing Goozex - you're not going to get ripped off (probably, see below). The bad thing about Goozex is that (surprise!) everyone wants the same game - so if Murder 4 just came out yesterday then everyone and their little brother and the kid your little brother beats up are probably already in the Goozextrading queue ahead of you. If you decide to only go after AAA titles on Goozex then you better sit down and find a block of wood and your best whittling knife. Goozex is not the site to get the latest games fast. Goozex is the site to get good older games fast, and hot new titles every once in a while.

Hey, you can't blame Goozex for this. Goozex doesn't sell the games, they just offer a matching service, kinda like match.com, but for gamers - not creepy guys who can't get dates in real life. The reason getting a hot title is hard is because of supply and demand, something you heard about or will hear about in college and then quickly forget after the test.

I know that you are getting worried about Goozex, wanting to know how they could possibly be making money. Calm down, I will tell you about it right now. In addition to the points that you use to get games, you also have to have Trade Tokens to get games. You get some free tokens just for signing up and completing your first trade. After those tokens run out then they are about $1.00 each. You don't have to use tokens to trade your games AWAY, just when you are receiving a game from another user.

"But," you are thinking, "the internet is full of jerks, what if they don't send me my game and steal my points!" Good question! Goozex (sigh) offers multiple forms of protection. First of all you can see the feedback score of people you are trading with, kinda like ebay, but with a lot less "A+++" and fake accounts. You can reject trades, protecting your precious points and tokens if you think that BernieMadoff32 might not be a legit account. If you do get burned, then Goozex also has a refund process and you can leave negative feedback for the scoundrel that tried to swindle you. Goozex entices people to be good by limiting the number of trades they can have open based on their feedback score. You can't sign up for an account and do 100 trades at once, you have to earn additional trade slots by being good.

So to sum up, Goozex is great if you are like me and don't care that much about having the newest games on release day and burning through them in 12 hours. Goozex is for people who can live with games that are a few months old, or for people who are trying to build their game library. The number of games stacked on my shelf has grown considerably thanks to Goozex, and some day I might even get around to finishing all of them.