Live Gamer gets funded
VentureBeat are reporting that one of the first portals for publisher-sanctioned trading of virtual goods announced its first funding, promising to add structure and protections to transactions for items that only exist online.
Live Gamer will stay on the good side of publishers by only allowing trades according to the rules of the game, and will seek to prevent strategies like “gold farming,” in which some players use the game only to accumulate goods and sell them for real-world currency.
Several competitors to the company already exist, part of an unapproved “gray zone” of trading that publishers find undesirable. Two of the largest are GamePal and IGE.
Live Gamer plans to split revenue from sales, with 10 percent being split between Live Gamer and the publisher, and the remainder going to the seller.
The company already has some clients on board, including Funcom and Sony. However, Vivendi, the publisher of the current most-popular online game World of Warcraft, has said it will not work with Live Gamer.
Charles River Ventures, Kodiak Venture Partners, and Pequot Ventures provided the $24 million funding, the company’s first.
