This week we feature three companies in our in-depth look at gold farmers. Let's start with two of the top 20 gold sellers in terms of revenue:
Lewt is rather well known. At least by the 40,000 people who bought from them so far according to PayPal. More numbers and comparisons are available in our short report on the site.
Another well-known seller is Guy4Game who reported to have served 100,000 distinct customers with a staff of 150. More details are available on the seller's review page.
Both are said to have a significant portion of their administration offshore - Guy4Game in Malaysia, Lewt in Singapore. According to available traffic and reported business data, Lewt is roughly three times the size of Guy4Game. However, at this point this information could not be verified and thus hasn't been included in the companies' profile pages yet.
A much smaller seller with a very different business model is GMBar. His profile and an interview tells the story of a Chinese entrepreneur who decided to give RMT a shot.
Guy4Game - In depth
Guy4game provides MMORPG services such as game currency, items and power leveling for popular game titles. It has been around since mid 2004 and is being managed by Flora Chen. The company is based in Canada though it has operations in China, Korea, Japan and Mexico. Chen said in an interview with Cnet Guy4Game has a staff of 150 full-time workers and a client list of more than 100,000 customers.
Based on the traffic ranking of Alexa the company has enjoyed a decent growth from the launch date, peaked in the late 2006 then slightly dropped to a steady level. Competing with IGE's ranking at 27,465, the website is not as popular sitting at 108,250.
Guy4game has received excellent reviews from Verigame scoring 4.1 out of 5 and 4.67 at GamePriceWatcher. There is a small complaint about the lengthy checkout process from the review as well as another reviewer complaining about the company asking for a lot of personal information. On BuyWoWGold Joe complained that he did not receive 300 gold he ordered. A shopper from Shopzilla reported a bad deal with Guy4game.
Lewt - In depth
Lewt is one of the top retailers of virtual currency and MMO services with a 4 year history. Lewt was founded in August 2004 by two small businesses merging together and led by Jesse Powell. The company was incorporated in California USA although its employee are working remotely from different countries. The company caught attention of many gamers when rumor spreaded out that the company was buying fansites such as Diablo2.com, Wowguru.com to compete with IGE`s acquisition strategy. Diablo2 forum was sponsored by Lewt and administered by Jesse and Wowguru.com was claimed to be owned by the same company as diablo2.com.
In terms of web traffic, IGE`s recent plummet took Lewt a bit closer but Lewt is far behind IGE. According to Alexa, Lewt ranks at 73,800 while IGE takes up a spot at 27,235.
The history of this company started in 2001 as a seller in eBay since then it had been selling to 6,408 members earning 99.8% of satisfactory feedback. According to PayPal, the company has more than 35,000 customers. Some of them have criticized Lewt for slow delivery of gold; Becky even called it a rip off in the Rip Off Report website, Kthanx from Edge of Nowhere forum commented delivery from Lewt took a lot longer then he expected.
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