Gaming item trading platform

trading, gaming, stocks, finance

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Inspiration

In the past few years, the Covid-19 pandemic has imposed significant challenges on the traditional job market, pushing many individuals to leave the traditional workplace and start their own businesses. Under the growth of E-commerce, an increasing number of people have shifted to remote work opportunities and online investment like the stock market. The gaming industry has also seen a huge boost during the pandemic and has surpassed the film industry as the number one entertainment industry in the world. We hope to offer new opportunities to people who play video games and especially those who have the expertise or those who spend a significant amount of their time playing.

As we pondered how someone might take advantage of their gaming expertise, we thought of the trading of in-game items. Game investment is related to the stock market in the sense that it is a form of investment that involves buying and selling shares in companies involved in the gaming industry. Just like any other publicly traded company, the value of these shares is determined by the performance of the company and market demand.

What it does

The platform consists of users who either want to sell or buy in-game items such as a gun from CSGO. The values or the prices of different items will be shown on the website, and players can buy and sell shares of different items based on their actual prices in the corresponding games.

For example, if a player could purchase a 30% share of a weapon from CSGO, and when its price increases after a period of time, the player can make money by selling it to the next buyer. Once an item’s all shares have been purchased, no additional shares can be purchased, and new players can only buy them from the current holders.

If a player purchases 100% of the share of an item, the player will get the actual item in their account. However, all items that are collectively owned by multiple people will be stored in a restricted access account owned by the creator of this website.

From buying and selling, this website creates new opportunities that allow people to make a living directly from video games.

How we built it

We took the approach of building a website with an e-commerce framework since we are essentially helping to sell and buy digital goods. For our front end, we used native HTML, CSS and javascript for our front end component, although in the future a more robust framework will certainly be implemented. The majority of the development time is spent on the backend, with a backend consisting of Django and Stripe. We used Django to call Stripe APIs in order to make efficient and secure transactions.

Challenges we ran into

Because there are other platforms targeting a similar market, we had to consider what gives us the competitive advantage and find the product market fit. We are different because we support the transaction of items from multiple games, essentially any game that has the feature of gifting an item. We are unique in that no other platform treats the in-game items as something that can be owned separately by many owners. We thought of this because many items are extremely expensive and it is unlikely that many people have the financial capacity to purchase these items frequently.

Since we are all beginner programmers, especially in web dev, actually building our website and integrating all the features were definitely a challenge. We learned everything from scratch, especially on the backend side, with Django and Stripe, because no one in our team had previous experience with them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

First, we are really happy with the idea and concept we came up with. Our product targets a wide range of audience and could benefit a lot of people. The concept of making in-game items into stocks fits nicely with the vertical of "Global Economy: Money Makes the World Go ‘Round". Our platform has the potential to open a new path of managing finances and investment through in-game items, therefore re-imagine how we spend money.

Another benefit we think our product possesses is educating video game players on topics relating to finance and investment. Our platform simulates a stock market because users need to make investments and sell assets at the right time to gain profit. In lots of games, valuable items can cost up to tens of thousands of dollars, which is unaffordable for most players. While having fun, gamers can utilize their advantage with familiarity with games to earn some profit, with the bonus of expanding their financial knowledge.

What we learned

We think in the mental aspects, we grew a lot when it comes to identifying problems that are both possible to solve and worth solving. In ideation, we learn the importance of keeping an open mind, and how a brilliant idea can emerge from a group of passionate people through thoughtful discussion. We learned the importance of balancing trade-offs, and we opted for a more robust design on our core feature which is transaction and payment, therefore spent the most time there.

In terms of skills, we learned how the different components of the web come together, and each of us learned skills specific to our parts in the project, frameworks such as Svelte and Django. Online payment API Stripe, and the basic but important fundamentals of HTML, CSS, and javascript.

What's next for Gaming item trading platform

As for now, with limited time our platform only supports choosing and buying an item and making payments, however, we will need to include specific UI and client-side applications to submit a post to sell. We also hope to provide the ability to search and filter through all the items by their price, color, game, etc.

It will certainly be interesting to explore the impact it will have on the video game company itself, and whether a collaboration could be possible because as of now, the website functions perfectly without the involvement of the video game itself. But if we hope to expand to cover the video games that do not have an explicit functionality to gift items to another player, then we need to be able to access the game database itself.

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