Paying cold, hard, real-life cash for in-game currency is a tough concept for people who don’t live and breathe in the virtual world. In Indonesia, there has long been no real marketplace for gamers to deal in in-game items. But now there is, according to Virdie Haqmal, product and business manager at a startup named FiveJack. The company’s latest product, Itemku, is a price comparison and marketplace portal for trading game money and items in Indonesia.
According to HaqmaI, Itemku has been live since June of last year but is still running in bare bones form. He says the startup wants to be careful that Itemku first becomes accepted by the right audience before proceeding further with development. “The real-money trading market in Indonesia is very big, in terms of the Indonesian population and the [number of] Indonesian online gamers, but it’s not yet been touched seriously by anyone,” he explains.
Haqmal believes that online games today have too many players that just hang out and create in-game spam (selling game currency, items, and more), which ultimately interrupts the player’s experience. According to him, with Itemku’s separate marketplace, publishers get the benefit of offering their players a gaming experience relatively free of interruptions, while also reinforcing customer loyalty from a portal outside of the game. Currently, Itemku gets around 20,000 visits per month. The site has a total of 150 sellers, all of whom were curated via an application process monitored by FiveJack. Haqmal says the system is rigorous, as Itemku is first trying to establish a high quality-over-quantity user-base.
Featured games include Aura Kingdom, Clash of Gods, Dragon Nest, Elsword, Lost Saga, and Perfect World. Haqmal says Itemku currently offers its service for free, so for now it’s not generating any revenue from the trades. Additionally, at this early stage, users can not actually make purchases through the site. They can, however, get in contact with the sellers directly. “Around February, we are going to release our escrow service, Itemku Safe Trading, to allow buyers to order and make transactions within Itemku,” explains Haqmal and he claims that Itemku – which now has 11 local employees – has no direct competitors in Indonesia. However, he says traditional consumer-to-consumer ecommerce marketplaces could be used in the same way as Itemku, and therefore sites like Tokopedia, BukuLapak, or Kaskus could be seen as indirect contenders. Item trading for online games is still like an underground market. It’s like hidden treasure inside the game industry, especially in Indonesia. From our research […] total sales in this space are already more than Rp 20 billion (US$1.58 million) per year.
Haqmal says that the biggest challenge associated with a real-money trading marketplace related to games in Indonesia is earning the trust of potential users. As it’s still a relatively new concept in the archipelago, many gamers are likely to fear fraud and other complications that could arise from disintermediating a game (especially in terms of what should constitute an in-game purchase). Haqmal adds that some players may even be afraid their favorite games would ban them as a result of the out-of-game circumvention.
Via Vondroid
