I’ve heard that question quite a lot over the years as people have brought me their used games.  People who, understandably, are a bit unhappy with the disparity between what they think that their game is worth and what I can offer them for it.  Sadly, though there are good reasons for this, knowing that doesn’t make it all better.  However, I can offer some insights into the used game market and how trade pricing works, and hope that this helps at least a little.

1.  The Gameschtappo, the Hasty boys, or other retailers are NOT taking your trade from a sense of altruism or generosity.  They are doing it to make money.  They are buying your game with the intention of reselling it for profit.  Consequently, they are NOT going to give you what the game is going to resell for.  They are going to buy it for a percentage of its value so that they can resell it for more.  Different places will offer different percentages.  The industry standard is to offer 50% of resale for hot/new releases which will steadily drop to 30% or 25% for older titles on the current platforms, or lower for older platforms.

2. Businesses have bills to pay, just like you do.  They get the money to pay those bills from the difference between what they pay you for your used game, and what they resell it for.  If they buy it from you for what they sell it for, then they don’t make any money, and soon they are no longer there.

3.  Not all games are created equal.  Yes, you may have ponied up $60 for that game you want to trade.  However, that has no bearing whatsoever on its trade or resale value. If it’s a game that you wish you hadn’t bought, chances are that no one else wants it either.  Sadly, and I wish there was a nicer way to say this, you just paid too  much money for it when you bought it new.  Try buying used next time.

3a. Buying used to resell is risky.  On top of the chance that no one will actually want to buy the game again, is the risk that it will fail to work.  No one will buy a used game from a retailer if there is not a guarantee that it will work.  However, the game reseller has no such guarantee when they buy your game.  AND, there are lots of people out there who purposely sell defective games to the resellers.  A side note for this is also that the resellers have to protect themselves from the people who sell games that don’t really belong to them.  If the real owner happens to show up and demand their property back, the reseller is out the games AND the money that they paid to get them.

4.  Time passes.  The video game industry is VERY time sensitive.  Once a game has been on the market for more than two weeks or so, its value is going to start to drop.  Unfortunately for gamers, new prices don’t drop as quickly as used prices.  If you paid $60 for an unopened copy of a game that has been available for 3 months, again, I’m sorry about that, but you paid too much.  Next time try used.

5.  You got use out of it.  Most rental establishments are now charging $1.50 to $2.00 a day for rentals of video games.  How long have you owned that game?  If you had the game for two weeks or more and you are getting $25ish, you got your money out of it.  If not, maybe you should look into renting.

6. Convenience.  You can always get more for your used games if you want to take the time to resell them yourself.  There are plenty of venues available.  That way, you are going to the end user … the person who wants to keep it for themselves.  When you take it to a game reseller, part of the reason for getting less is that you are paying for the ease and convenience of being done with it, and passing all of the work to resell it, or store it, etc. on to someone else.

Sure, it would be nice to be able to get back all or most of your money when you trade in your used games.  It would also be nice if the government didn’t take taxes, if food grew without people having to plant it, and if I had a pony!  However, back here in the real world, I have no pony, the government most definitely DOES take taxes, and we all need to be a little nicer to the poor people behind the counter at the game shop.

Tags: Buying, editorials, New Releases, trading, Used Games, used prices