I'm still waiting for the PC version of GTA IV

Last time I traded one in for a guy at work, it was £10.

Even if the game's still looking shiny and has only been used for, say, 2 days? Isn't a new Xbox game like 50 quid there? 1/5th of your original buying price would seem a little low.

heh...I guess it's better than the alternative, which is 0 and space on your gaming shelf.

Not too long ago I gave a crapload of old PC games away to a neighbor's kid. I'm talking a huge stack. Original price probably $2,000. Worth now...$0!

Ox, the thing is GTA is £45 brand new, or £30 second hand (from us). But the trade in price is based on:

Brand new price
# Traded in
# Second hand in stock
Rate of sell-through for second hand
If it's in a deal (brand new or second hand)
and probably a few other things.

Thing is... GTA has been out 5 months or so. Probably... 80% of 360 gamers have played it. Probably another 80% of them have already traded it in. Our company has an excess of 2nd hand GTA IV in stock. We can't sell them on very quickly at all (we rarely sell 'em at all actually) so we don't want more of 'em really, hence the lower price. Not only that but customers buying a 360 can get GTA for free with it atm (or on the PS3, they can get it for £10), so they don't want to be giving you £30 for something you mighta got from us for free.

As a general rule, a new game for £40/45/50 will trade in between £20 - £25, so yes, we do tend to get about 50% profit on preowned (hence we push preowned games more than mint; that only gives us around 20% profit, less if it's an EA game). Oh and the old Fifa/Pro Evo/Need for Speed games that come out every single frigging year and are again bought/traded in by everyone... 1p. Fifa 07 still trades in for about £2 I think, Fifa 08 is about £6 (and that will fall in 3 weeks when Fifa 09 comes out)

PC games are the worst though; our company won't trade them in due to how they're easier to pirate + access key problems (i.e. used once, no more multiplayer account usually), and those companys that do will rarely give you more than £2 for it, even if you just bought it yesterday for £30.

Mmm, I see...thanks for the explanation. I didn't stop to think about the distributor's share in all this (ie popular games fetching less return fee because you're flooded with them). But of course, all those games they don't sell/get returned don't just vanish into thin air.

It's like with the morning papers every day...what happens to those that don't get sold? I'm sure there's an excess of papers pretty much every day left at the newspaper stands. And it's not like you can do anything with yesterday's newspaper a day later.

The world is a magical place! Weeeee!

the old newspapers are soaked in salt water, twisted up and bound, then allowed to dry. They are then used for building houses in London.

http://www.creative-city.co.uk/8.html

lol. No wonder they had that fire!!

rofl London might look a little nicer if that were the case...

Haha, like the old Atari/ET cartridges

http://www.snopes.com/business/market/atari.asp

What's with the rehashing lately? First Satis re-posts Gfree's LHC webcam thing, now Mole re-posts Satis' Atari cartridge joke.

Some fun facts on Spore...

Spore most pirated game ever thanks to DRM

EA slowly comes crawling back wrt DRM

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?si ... 7&from=rss

(link wouldn't hyperlink)

Before long, DRM will get nuked.

let's hope so. I'm not buying any more hardcore DRM's games. I'm through with it. To be honest, I was through with it when Ghost Recon 2 broke 2 of my computers.

well, remember how we predicted that EA would be selling expansion packs for Spore in an effort to turn it into a money tree like the Sims?

Our predictions are coming true.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2 ... X1K0000532

So glad I didn't buy it!

I dunno, I might still buy it one day...if they remove the securom restrictions and if it's really really cheap, that is. But yeah, not gonna reward them by buying it at full price, that's for sure.

The main feature of the expansion sounds like something that was actually in the original game (so straightforward?!) but then taken out to be able to use it as a selling point for an expansion.

I wonder, will the same people who played the Sims 2 turn to Spore now? Ie is it the same crowd? Because the games don't look all that 'sim'ilar to me. Heh.

Maybe Will Wright has a cult following buying anything he publishes now, I dunno.