GameStop is convenient. Even though selling a game through eBay would virtually guarantee a higher selling price, whenever I've turned something in, it's always been at GameStop. The problem always being, however, that GameStop operates on the capitalistic principle of buying low and selling high. They take your games at dirt cheap prices and put them on the shelf at double, maybe triple what they gave you. SwitchGames proposes a different solution: actual, physical trades between gamers.

SwitchGames isn't as fast or convenient as walking to a local GameStop, but when SwitchGames founder and CCO Jason Crawford stopped by the G4 offices last week to give me a tour of his trading baby, he at least convinced me SwitchGames could really be onto something.

The difference with SwitchGames is the distribution of product. You're not sending in games in exchange for points (as, for example, SwitchGames competitor Goozex does), nor sending games away to a SwitchGames warehouse to be swapped for something else. SwitchGames looks like a web 2.0 version of eBay (have you looked at eBay's design lately?) focused squarely on gamers. Either by selected browsing or through a dating service-esque member matching system called SwitchBot, participants volunteer games up for trade or propose trades and the whole concept is built upon sending a game to someone and receiving another one back. A game for a game.

"This is actual trading," said Crawford. "There's no membership fees, there's no trade-in fees, there's no subscription fees, there's no queues. There's a lot of no's. [laughs] Basically, you list the games you want, you list the games that you own and then SwitchBot will connect you with other users. And we have things, mechanisms in place that can make trading with other gamers safer, faster and easier. That's how we make our money."

He's not lying, either. You don't have to pay a dime to participate in SwitchGames and start trading with other users. The SwitchGames model hinges upon delivering convenience-oriented trading and shipping options that users will want to regularly take advantage of. One such option is becoming a "Verified Member," which automatically places you further up the search results of SwitchBot. Becoming a Verified Member costs $1.95 (that price isn't locked and will most likely increase in the future, noted Crawford) and results in SwitchGames running a brief background check to "verify" you. Another convenience option involves printing a shipping label with postage from your computer.

Crawford claimed his website's database had everything. Jokingly, I proposed trading the phenomenal E.T. for the Atari 2600 (yes, the game that bombed at retail, causing millions of copies to be buried in a New Mexico landfill) for trading. It took a little finessing of the search engine because E.T.'s name is pretty short, but eventually, we tracked it down and -- voila -- E.T. was in my trading pile. I don't know who would want E.T. for Skate 2, but hey, SwitchGames will let me try.

While most users will probably use SwitchGames to swap newly released titles for another newly released title (like, say, Uncharted 2 for Brutal Legend), as E.T. proves, SwitchGames does include support for trading old releases. The SwitchGames database is huge. To help protect your investment, SwitchGames also comes with a $5.95 "Safe Trade" option. Safe Trade is $5.95 for each participant in the trade but is the only way to 100% guarantee you cannot be screwed out of a transaction. If the buyer or seller never sends the game, sends the wrong game or something else goes wrong, SwitchGames will protect you, either by covering the cost of the missing game or providing a copy of the missing game. It wasn't immediately clear how the value of a game like Chrono Trigger for SNES, which might not be easily replaceable, would be determined.

When Crawford came by my desk to show off SwitchGames, he'd spent the entire day touring his website around Los Angeles, just after staying up the night before to push a new build of SwitchGames live. The new build includes support for sending notifications about trades to Facebook and Twitter. But Crawford's enthusiasm and determination for uprooting the current trade-in system is palpable. He doesn't even seem to mind if plenty of folks never pay a dime using his service.

"What's here is really an opportunity to do something big," he said. "Gamers could take over and I love that whole idea, just flipping the entire model upside down. GameStop doesn't care about SwitchGames, they couldn't care less about this. 'Game peer-to-peer trading? Okay, whatever.' Until, you know, 350,000 gamers are using it and then they're like 'whoa, oh no, we can't control this' and you can't control that, the gamers control it. That's the way we built the whole model. You can see that we don't force anything on anybody and that's the way it will always be. You spend the money if you want to spend the money."

Under his theory, if GameStop is losing trade-in volume from a site that's offering gamers a better deal, GameStop will have to raise the value of its trade-ins. Even if you don't use SwitchGames -- though, obviously, he'd prefer you did -- that's a win for gamers, in his mind.

The best way to understand SwitchGames is by signing up. Go ahead, it's free.

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