Razer will stop its zSilver Paid to Play system in March. This is supposedly due to negative feedback from its community. The company hasn’t explicitly said what the comments are, but it is giving people one last opportunity to cash out their hard earned virtual currency.
zSilver is the “free” counterpart to Razer’s paid zGold currency. Earning it was simply a matter of running games through Razer’s Cortex desktop launcher. Providing people with an amount of currency for playing the games that they normally would be on anyway. zSilver can then be exchanged for Razer peripherals and goodies through the catalogue.
This ability to grind for real world items appears to be at the heart of the customer complaints against the system. People were supposedly grinding in games to buy Razer gear, and then selling it off again on eBay.
Profiting in such a way is clearly not how Razer envisioned its virtual currency being used. Especially as it was created as a method for rewarding a community that has allowed the company to experiment and create some extremely ambitious concept devices.
It’s unclear how long zSilver and the Paid to Play programme will be suspended, but it’s unlikely to make a return at any time soon. Perhaps after Razer can come up with a way of preventing scalpers from profiting from it. In the mean time, people can still spend their money on picking up zGold; which is a somewhat more traditional virtual credit system.
[Source: Razer]
