With the horrible state of the economy today, people are endeavoring to save money in any way they can. In a clever move to take advantage of this, GamersGate, a site that offers video game purchases through digital downloads has started a new program by which both the site can get advertising, and customers can earn store credits.

The new service revolves around the use of a “GG Tag”, an affiliate link that can be placed on any site that uses HTML which leads to your profile on GamersGate. It shows what games you are playing, what games you have purchased, and so on. Then, if someone purchases a game while visiting the site through your GG Tag link, you get a percentage of credit back from it, which can be used for future game purchases on the site.

This sounds pretty great in theory, but what you aren’t told is how small your kickback from a friend’s purchase is going to be. The site runs on both regular money and what they call “blue coins”. Blue coins can either be bought or earned through buying games, posting reviews, referring friends who buy games through your GG Tag, or by writing on the site’s “Gametutor”. The Gametutor is a forum-like section where people can post information about technical issues they are having with games, and other people will help them. You’ve got to give a hand to GamersGate here for an ingenious business idea–they’re basically paying people pennies or less to do their tech support for them.

A blue coin is worth about .001 cents, or $1.00 to every 1000 blue coins. So even if the site gives you back 200 blue coins for purchasing a game or working on Gametutor, you’re actually only earning back 20 cents. While it’s true that they don’t specify how much you can earn through buying games or through using Gametutor or writing reviews isn’t specified, so for all I know they’re handing out 5000 blue coins every time that you help someone ($5.00), but the evidence leads me to doubt it.

The return on the GG Tag program isn’t great either. The way that it works is that every time a friend makes a purchase through your link, you get a percentage of what they’ve spent in blue coins. The exact percentage that you get is determined by your “Color status” with the site. Everyone starts out at “White status”, and then the colors cycle up through Green, Yellow, Red, and then the top color, Black. You earn status points to contribute to these levels by earning Blue coins; you don’t spend the status points like you do the blue coins. So if you happen to get 1000 blue coins by doing a review, you have 1000 status points.

Frustratingly, even though you can see what color status you are and how many points you have by clicking through your account on the site,  I could find neither how you earn status points, nor how many you have to have to progress from each level. After an exhaustive search on the site I finally had to contact Tech Support to find out. (I will say to their credit that they did respond to my query quickly). Also, the search function on the website only allows you to search for games, not other subjects or for help topics.

When you start out on the site, you’re at White status level, which allows you to get a 2% kickback from the games that your friends buy through your link. So if someone buys a $50.00 game through your link, which is 50,000 blue coins, you get back 2% of that–1000 blue coins, or one dollar, and if someone buys a $20.00 game that’s 20,000 blue coins, and you get back 40 cents and so on.

My GamersGate "GG Tag"

Even if you’re at the top status level, Black (which requires you to first earn 1,000,000 status points with the site) you’re only placed at 2.8%, so you’ll get 1400 blue coins, or $1.40 for a $50.00 purchase. At those rates, you’re more likely to find money to buy games faster by searching your couch every three months for spare change, unless you happen to have a bunch of rich friends that will make purchases with the site through your link. It’s also important to note that you can only get the bonus from customers making first time purchases, though I was told that that might change–but for now, if you have a friend that has already bought through GamersGate, you won’t get any credit from them clicking through your GG Tag.

In short, I do think that it is pretty cool for GamersGate to offer their players the chance to earn credits through the GG Tags, because many sites offer you nothing for repeatedly buying games or referring friends to their sites; but I wouldn’t expect to be making enough money with blue coins through a GG Tag to actually buy a game anytime soon. Still, it’s not a bad way to reward frequent and helpful customers, especially since some people will do things like review games or help with technical issues without being paid at all–our lovely site being a prime example of that, of course.

If you’re looking into joining GamersGate under the premise that in a short period of time you’ll be able to buy games entirely on credit, you might want to rethink your strategy, though the program is still extremely new and they do promise to be making changes as time goes by. If you’re still interested though, feel free to visit the site… Through my GG Tag, of course