Myth-busting the murky world of video game trade-ins

December 18th, 2013, 23:25 Posted By: wraggster

<section style="font: 14px/18px Proxima, sans-serif; text-align: left; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); text-transform: none; text-indent: 0px; letter-spacing: normal; word-spacing: 0px; display: block; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">The business of second-hand video games - pre-owned, trade-ins, used games, whatever you want to call it - is mysterious. Shops make millions while developers and publishers shake their fists in rage. Or do they?
Ben Grant and Matt Precious are "magicians that have come out of the magic circle", they tell me. They ran GAME and Gamestation's colossal, thousand-store trade-in and pre-owned business for more than a decade. They know their stuff. Now they're ready to share it.
Not for nothing, mind you. They're plugging their new business, Trade In Detectives, at the same time. But it's worth a look. It's a website that compares trade-in game prices - the kind of index Precious used to employ someone full-time at GAME to produce, and even then he could only keep up with a top 20. "We scrape and obtain around 110,000 prices per day," says Grant. "I wish it existed when I was at bloody GAME!" adds Precious.
Grant continues: "People don't necessarily know the true value of what their games and consoles are worth."
This article aims to bust a few myths about the trade-in and pre-owned business while providing you with some savvy shopping tips at the same time. 'Tis the season after all.
</section><section style="font: 14px/18px Proxima, sans-serif; text-align: left; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); text-transform: none; text-indent: 0px; letter-spacing: normal; word-spacing: 0px; display: block; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">[h=2]Do publishers really hate trade-ins?[/h]Publishers fund trade-ins. When Precious and Grant worked in Australia trying to improve GAME's standing, every single trade-in deal was funded by publishers. It's not trade-ins that publishers hate - it's the subsequent sale of pre-owned games.
"There was this myth about how much money was being dragged out and taken," says Precious, "but you've got to look at it two ways. When we talk about pre-owned we always split it. There's two sides to it: there's trade-ins and there's pre-owned.
"You'll find it difficult to find a publisher who has an issue with trade-ins, because trade-ins drive the market."
Non-trade-in customers would buy an average of 2.9 new games a year, recalls Precious, citing statistics collected from GAME Reward Card users. Trade-in customers, meanwhile, would buy an average of 6.4 new games every year.
"It was a phenomenal difference," he says. "It's not rocket science why, because they can afford it, because they were using their old games as currency to buy new."
Think of the world's best selling video game, Grand Theft Auto 5, the pair instruct me - do I think that would have sold anywhere near what it did had people not traded in their old games to afford it?

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...game-trade-ins
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