So here’s a new use for virtual goods from GameWager that might seem familiar to some people. Remember the old school arcades and all those tickets that you could win for cheap plastic prizes? Well, GameWager is doing just that, but with virtual coins and sans lame gifts (in fact, the rewards are far from cheap as some include Alienware laptops). The whole idea is acquire users by offering rewards to players for, well, playing.

CEO and co-founder of GameWager Thomas Marriott describes the concept as such: “It’s kind of like Chuck E Cheese’s, only instead of playing Pac-Man you’re playing a game you spend hundreds of hours playing already – Counterstrike or World of Warcraft. The virtual token currency is tied to various in-game actions, like kills, objectives, and team wins. As you complete actions in-game, you get tokens, and you can spend them to get tickets for a raffle-style reward zone.”

Marriott, however, sees the company as a social network and as such, offers a number of ways to earn tokens beyond just the arcade style. Perhaps one of the most interesting methods of doing so will be a wager system, in which players can challenge one another to matches and win tokens from the loser. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg as other methods of earning tokens comes from the filling out of a new profile, the inviting of friends, and eventually the inclusion of various contests.

Marriott also claims that the site will be adding more than just the raffles for rewards as well in the future. Unfortunately, he was unable to say much more beyond that, but did mention virtual goods for customizable profiles such as widgets, which will actually play into the monetization of the space.

Eventually, the site will use the typical free-to-play strategy with a cost for premium memberships, but that the current state of the site will still remain free. Non-premium members won’t miss out on anything critical it seems, but will be denied access to some premium vanity items and features such as special raffle prizes, new wagering features, and greater profile customization. Nonetheless, until such time, the site will be sticking with its main incentive – raffle prizes.

Raffles take place daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly, and the better stuff is always offered for the quarterly drawings. As such, the cost of tickets is equivalently more expensive. The reasoning behind this is, logically, two-fold as it not only means less spending for the company (sorry, but daily Alienware laptops just isn’t going to happen) but it also allows greater chances for new players to win rewards as well.

“We structured the reward zone like a raffle in part to address the extremity between really good players and the new players. We didn’t want only the really good players winning all the time, which is what would happen if you just paid tokens for a prize,” says Marriott. “So even some guy who is just terrible at Counterstrike, they can still buy a ticket and have a chance to win. We have multiple winners who just bought one ticket and still ended up with a prize.”

Currently, GameWager has had 71,000 users who have spent 43 million tokens since July 2008. Once the site had its first raffle (November 2008) 750,000 tokens were spent on tickets within the first 48 hours. Marriott estimates a rather ambitious growth rate of doubling its users every month.

[via Virtual Goods News]