A few weeks ago, popular videogame hardware company Razer has released their virtual currency platform, called Razer zVault. This platform consists out of two services, zVault Gold and zVault Silver. After using it for some time, I can say that the service certainly looks promising.
zVault Gold
zVault Gold is basically Razer’s own currency that can be used to buy games or digital content on websites that support this service. The exchange ratio is 1:100, so $1 equals to 100 Gold Units. Currently, there are only two videogame webstores that accept zVault Gold as payment for games, which are GamersGate and Indiegala. While both stores offer some recently released AAA-titles and popular indie games, their amount of offers is not that impressive and don’t give you a reason to use zVault Gold over regular currency services, like PayPal. However, Razer has just released this new currency and is still working on adding additional webstores that will allow their form of payment. If Razer can do that, then zVault Gold may become a valuable currency to use, especially if it can give you some exclusive deals.
zVault Silver
The other zVault service is Razer’s own loyalty reward program, called zVault Silver. This service rewards you with Silver Units for logging in daily or buying products with zVault Gold Units.
But more importantly, you can also earn Silver Units by simply playing one of the supported games. These games include:
- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
- DOTA 2
- League of Legends
- Overwatch
- Paladins
One minute of gameplay earns you 6 Silver Units, which can go up to 900 Silver Units per day, meaning that the maximum amount of time you can spend on earning those units is 150 minutes (2,5 hours) per day. But why would you want to earn those units?
Silver Units can be used for discounts on Razer products or, even better, to buy said products. Not every Razer product can be discounted or bought with Silver Units, but it’s still nice to see that Razer rewards their loyal customer base for using their products and services. They also offer an item that’s made exclusively for zVault Silver users, which is an electronic mug holder that you can connect to your computer.
Early impression
While it’s still too early to judge this new platform, I must say that this looks promising and can become a worthy alternative service for buying games. Just imagine if platforms like Steam or Origin would accept zVault Gold and offer exclusive deals. However, at this moment they do not and the current platforms that do support the currency are a little underwhelming. The zVault Silver is a nice loyalty reward system for Razer fans and gives you some extra motivation to play the supported games. In short, the zVault is currently a decent service that has the potential to become a great one.
