Best online method for getting rid of some unused stuff [Video Games].
June 25, 2009 – 2:59 pm | by rchung |
These days, there are a multitude of options when it comes to clearing stuff out of your house. While different options require different levels of sweat equity, you have a lot of flexibility when it comes to maximizing value, it just depends on what you are looking for in return. For today’s example, I’m going to focus on moving some of my older/unplayed video games.
A little completely unnecessary background info: we’ve been in out apartment for well over 8 years and I will fully confess that I’m a closet pack rat. Our “storage room” has basically been a dumping ground for all manner of items that have not seen the light of day since we’ve been here. Oh, we’ve had our excuses. “We’ll unpack it when we move into our real place.” “We need to clean the house before we can put these out.” “Next weekend, for sure.” This year, we actually decided that if we were ever going to do this, it needed to be now. As a side note, since the storage room was also the room we stuffed the cat’s litter box, over the years, the cat was given a smaller and smaller lane to work his way to and from his place of business, so the whole two birds, one stone argument put us over the top.
Anyway, aside from a mountain of CDs, a scanner, lots of old computer parts, and some other random junk which will go in the junk sale pile, I also found some old PC titles that I had completely forgotten about. One of the games was The Quest for Glory (Hero’s Quest to the hardcore) Anthology CD-ROM by Sierra On-Line. I have a lot of fond memories of Hero’s Quest, as well as most Sierra On-Line that came out around that time (King’s Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, etc.) and I figured a lot of other people out there did as well, so I started my valuation footwork. I decided to focus on selling the CD-ROM using one of the three sites I’m most familiar with: eBay, Amazon, and Goozex.
eBay
When you’re looking to sell or buy an item, eBay is one of the best ways to figure out what the going rate for an item is. Sure, there are going to be aberrations on value here and there, but you’ll be in the ballpark. So I went to eBay and in the search box entered, “Quest for Glory Anthology”. Here’s a link to the results. To my surprise, there were people selling copies in a condition similar to the one I was holding for between $85 and $225! Now granted, these weren’t auctions, but items on sale in eBay Stores, meaning that the person that had the item slapped a price tag on it and just slapped it up there, but it was still waaaay higher than I had expected. Pleasantly surprised, I moved on to Amazon.
Amazon.com
Amazon Marketplace is similar to eBay Stores in that if you have an item, and you know how much you want to sell that item for, you set the price and the condition of the item, and you wait for someone to place the order. In the past, I have found Amazon to be a great place to sell stuff, since they used to offer Amazon Gift Cards as a payment option. They have since ceased this practice and will only pay you directly to your checking account. Performing the Quest for Glory Anthology search on Amazon netted the following page. 8 people selling the game used, prices ranging from $40 to $180.
Goozex
Goozex is a game trading site that uses a system of points and tokens to create a marketplace where you can mail your games to other gamers looking for them in exchange for points which can then be used to purchase games that you yourself are interested in. When you are trading in points for a game, Goozex requires you to use a trade token which is $1. Not a bad deal all-in-all, and new users are given 5 tokens as a signup gift. I’ve traded in many games and received many games using Goozex, and have almost nothing but good things to say about the service. If you’re more interested in using the value of your old games to get new games, this is definitely the best route.
Goozex has some type of supply/demand system that they use in order to determine the point value that each game is worth. I’ve received email alerts on games in my queue as often as 2 or 3 times a week saying that the point price on a game I’m looking for has gone down 50 points or up 100 points.
Given the prices I had seen earlier, I was expecting a pretty decent point value for my Quest for Glory CD-ROM. Unfortunately, it wasn’t meant to be. 100 points?! You can buy 100 points for $5, making this the least appealing candidate for selling my game. Slightly disappointed, I evaluated my options.
Summary
Goozex was obviously out of the question. At 100 points, I would have had enough points from the trade to request one of those demo discs that come with a magazine. Goozex is typically very competitive when it comes to pricing points based on demand (I have quite a few games listed), but in this case, it was a total bust.
Amazon could have been a good choice because I would have been able to set a price and just waited for the first person that was interested, but with an item that had such a huge price range, it would have been tricky to gauge a good price point for me. Seeing the wide range on Amazon was a nice confirmation that the eBay prices weren’t completely off, but what concerned me was that it didn’t look like any of these items were really moving. Yes, I could put my copy of the game right up next to these guys, but it could be years, if ever, before I actually sold it. Since the original goal here was to clear space in the house, hanging on to items waiting for them to sell was not ideal.
Ultimately, I decided to put the disc on eBay with a reserve of $50, which was half the price of the lowest copy on sale. After watching it sit online for days with 6 watchers, but only 1 bid at $9.99, some last minute back-and-forth bidding heated up and I ended up hitting the reserve just as time had expired. Here’s a link to the actual auction.
Could I have shot for the higher price and maybe waited a bit? Sure, but this was basically free money for doing something that needed to happen anyway. I’m totally satisfied with the amount I got for it, and it’s one less thing I’ll have to haul downstairs for the tag sale.
Give middle finger to the people who got you there, while rewarding the one that tried to screw you over. The old boys club rules looks to be in full effect, as Senator Joe Lieberman has emerged from a caucus to determine his status as Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee unscathed, ceremonially “stripping” him of his seat on the Environment and Public Works subcommittee. 
So I turned on the 360 last night to play some Fallout 3, and my Xbox informed me that it was downloading an update. As it turns out, anyone who previously signed up to beta test the NXE (New Xbox Experience) was allowed to download it a couple of days early. I didn’t mess around with it too much, but I did create this avatar and took a quick peak at the Netflix functionality, which was a separate, albeit small, download. 
