Bad idea...

the whole idea of making games or any other entity that is completly virtual is to invest money into development of virtual assets that can then be freely duplicated and sold to an unlimited amount of people, vs. traditional manufacturing where you pay production cost per unit. You just re-introduced that into a formerly virtual economy, congrats.

Then there is the whole thing with gambling... in most countries, there are strict laws cncerning gambling. They are much stricter than anything imposed on games. Is your game still a game, or is it gambling? I would put my bet on the latter...

I wouldn't invest a dime into such a project. In the end, if you don't intend to haemmorage money, your game will be incredibly hard to beat, at least to get up to 3 stars. Which in turn makes it even more like "gambling, but with skills involved"... which would prevent me from playing. I am not into gambling, and I am not into wasting many hours on a game that replaces content with difficulty.

Apart from the fact that this is obvious spam, this is a stupid idea! Gold definitely has value, but so what? I can't buy groceries or pay bills with gold. I cannot deposit it in my bank account. I could sell it to a jeweler or one of those gold buying places, but for approx. 30% - 40% of its value.

Essentially, I play the crap out of your game for the *CHANCE* to win a chunk of pretty yellow metal. Whooo!

im pretty sure you can deposit gold in your bank account. I mean, legally you can go to the Bank of England vault and demand they give your bank balance in gold. to quote all british notes: "I promise the barer of this note the value of X" - lizzie. and IIRC you can do it the otherway around? I could be mistaken though , because come to think of it, this would put the cash for gold things out of buisness

Why not pay out the prices in dollar, or whatever the local currency is? As gold has its own value fluctuations not directly linked to any currency, that might favor the winner or the game developer dending on if the value is high or low...

Still, apart from a stupid marketing stunt (some people go all giddie over winning a small amount of gold, even though it is worth not that much... most people not knowing the price of gold is most probably helping here in making prices look more valuable than they really are), using a real currency would give the game developer more chances to adjust the price, and not be bound to some stupid fluctuating gold value that might either drive his business into the ground or force him to change the amount to be won directly, thus making some players angry when the gold price goes up.

In the end, the bank will take care to convert the amount paid to the currency of the winners bank account, so it doesn't really matter. If the game developer is smart, he will never send physical gold, but will just transfer the value of the gold to an account. Sending physical goods is just unecessary expenses.

If the euro is too strong (wishful thinking I know), maybe switch to a price "paid" in dollars? What do you do with gold, switch to silver prices? I think switching currencies will go down much better, even though the intention is still obvious.