If you have been involved in gaming or playing or collecting video games for several years you might have faced the issue of not getting your money back from a game that you bought just some months ago. You are trying to trade the game and get a good price, right? Obviously this doesn’t work this way. Because the game shop you are dealing with has to make a living. You can get maybe 20 percentage of the money you paid for the game…if you buy a new game…with that money. Does this seem complicated or unfair? Let me explain this to you so we all can understand this issue better.
Of course if you are willing to sell the game yourself and directly to another collector or player you can get a decent amount of money out of the game. Game shops are facing the fact that they have to be profitable. There are lots of expenses. Shipping of products that are coming into the store, rent of the premise and or web services for a web shop and of course the subsistence of all of the workers. Now this is a business right here. You can make a living out of this. Easy it isn’t but possible it is (did that sound like Yoda from Star Wars?).
There are several companies here in my home land, Finland, that operate this type of business that I have described right here. They might have a shop, maybe even two or three shops, and of course a web shop. There are also many smaller shops that sell games here. You can also find some people that are interested in selling some of their game collections and we have platforms like Huuto dot net and Tori dot fi for someone who wants to sell any used stuff. And I must mention also re-use centers and flee markets whose prices are usually lower since they get the stuff they sell mainly for free. And this is where we get to people that take advantage of this and…it isn’t very nice as you can figure.
Where do you get games for a low price that you can sell to some collector? I know some people that have received an estate that has contained games. Usually there is a huge collection to be sold. And if you buy the whole stack you get it in a fair price, right? Now we are starting to figure this out. You can sell these games piece by piece. A game collector is someone that needs maybe one game or two or three games that he or she is missing from his/her collection. So you can sell a few game for a decent price and make a profit a bit by bit. This is the magic of selling used games. You buy a large batch and check the unique games prices and you will get a profit out of this.
What makes the used game’s price high or low? One important thing is the condition of the game. It can be a sealed copy. It can have a manual and all of the covers. Or maybe its a loose game with generic cover or no packaging at all. PC games can be packaged in so called “big boxes” that make them more valuable. And the condition of the box matters. It matters also how the labels look like and does the CD/DVD disc have scratches on it. Sometimes the condition of the game can be enhanced quite easily. I am not going into that so deeply.
Some games can also be rare ones. They might be so good that no one just wants to sell them. They can be rare in a way that they weren’t even so popular when they first got released. These types of games are just uncommon. Some games gained popularity and valuation only when some retro hobbyists noticed their true value. Some games are so amazing that they seem to define a whole gaming system. These types of games can be something like Super Mario for NES or Sonic for Mega Drive or something similar.
Should you sell your old games? This is a tough question. I regret selling my old PS1 back in the beginning of the 2000s. The system and all the games I had for it would have been so much more valuable for me today compared to the price that I got from them then. Like, I sold all of them for under 200 euros. If you consider only the money this is clearly a financial loss for me. And I would have liked to play these games still. I just didn’t seem to have such an interest for retro games back then. You have to consider how I got back into playing video games in 2006 when I got my original Xbox. And…it was 2017 when I started my plans for starting to collect older and retro gaming systems again.
For some years already I have been writing to this blog. It is very interesting. However this is only a way for me to express my thoughts. I am not currently getting anything financially from this. And so is the way also that game collectors necessarily don’t get anything from collecting games when it comes to money. Game shops do make profit. That is a good thing. Without them we wouldn’t have a place to trade and buy games.
What is it like to work in a game shop? Sometimes it is busy and sometimes there’s only a few customers. It can be a place to build your dreams and fantasies. It is definitely a technical job. I also got to write, of course, blog posts for the game shop that I worked in for six months. The biggest parts of my job were handling and shipping orders, responding to customer feedback and being a customers servant face-to-face and also in some other ways. It was a fun job. It was a busy job. And ultimately…it was barely profitable.