The Miser’s Guide to Gaming On A Budget
The Miser’s Guide to Gaming On A Budget
How to save money
Continued…
This is where you turn to sites like GameCrawler or Cheap Arse Gamer, which track the lowest current game prices with several retailers (and in Cheap Arse’s case they map price trends over a thirty-day period). What’s great about these kinds of sites is that you can set it up so that they send you a notification e-mail when that title drops below a specific price – and this is precisely what you should do.
The other thing is to keep an eye out for more short-term deals, and sites such as SavyGamer, Postabargain and HotUKDeals are a fantastic resource for them.
Retailers, especially when they’re desperately trying to shift stock before a major release, slash prices to move units. Keep these deal websites in your RSS feed so you’re made instantly aware of when this happens and can jump upon it when it does. These sorts of sites also tend to report what vouchers you can use to get money off purchases. Most of the time the vouchers they advertise work; other times they won’t. Either way, it’s worth a shot.
This ethos also applies to misprices, where a retailer has made a pricing error, reducing a product which was supposed to be sold at £34.99 to something like £3.49. It happens, and sometimes you can get away with it, but generally retailers will cancel the order before it’s already dispatched, alerting you and apologising for it. What is good is that they do like to offer money-off vouchers for the inconvenience caused, which is certainly better than nothing. This is why when a misprice comes along you may as well take a shot at it. The worst that could happen is that they offer you a discount on your next purchase, kind of like free money.
Also, for PC gamers specifically, Valve just love to do crazy-insane mass price-cuts around holidays and other special events via Steam, their digital distribution platform. Leaving aside arguments over DRM, Steam is a very good service most of the time, is a pleasure to navigate and is a pretty reliable piece of software.
But when to buy? That’s the question, isn’t it? There’s always the temptation to wait as long as humanly possible before a deal goes super-low, but my experience is that £17.99 is the golden price point, the one with which you can be very happy at saving money. Even £22 or £25 is a good deal for a high-quality title, and you should be patting yourself on the back if you make that purchase. Remember, these are great games that will give you hours of entertainment. Of course try to get the best deal you possibly can, but don’t get bent out of shape if you lose out on £5 because of a price drop further down the line. Consider it a learning experience, if you’d like.
Sell! Sell! Sell!
Sadly, most video games have an end point, and now you might be thinking of sharing the love by selling it on to someone else. Just a few tips on this.
Do list your finished games on Ebay; however, only do so if people are offering to pay a price that makes it worth going through the bother. On the bright side, it is often the case that it is worth doing.
On the pros of using Ebay, it’s the most well-known, most trusted marketplace in the Western world, and there are a lot of people who will pay way more than a second-hand game is actually worth – meaning that I’ve been in positions where I’ve bought a game, played it, finished it and sold it for only £2 less than the first-hand price I paid. It’s a little crazy that way. This, I think, is attributable to the way consumers in the EU markets pay more for games than we do – and which is why you absolutely should be making yourself available to ship within the EU.
On the cons, most people want you to use PayPal, and the fees for using it and Ebay are a pain in the back-end. But, you know, it’s the price you got to pay. Additionally, if you’re taking money out of PayPal you have to pay a fee. For this reason I hedge towards leaving money in the account. There are video games retailers out there using PayPal, the most notable one I can think of being ShopTo, so it’s not like that money is going to stay there for very long.
Don’t, whatever you do, trade in these games to places like GAME and Gamestation. They rip you off, take a massive cut and ask you to only spend the money you made in-store. That’s what I call A Bad Deal.
Afterword
Hopefully this guide has been useful for those wanting to buy games on a budget. This is a wonderful hobby, and if it can be made more affordable to many more people, so they can experience what’s out there, then I think that’s a great thing.
Do follow Mark on Twitter: @MCRayRay or take a look at his blog.
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I did some analysis on this a while ago. You can find a few examples of it at http://biggamehunter.100webspace.net/Analysis1.htm. You can see that prices to not ’stick’ at £15-17 (except in high street stores). On Ebay they continue to fall smoothly with age, although the rate at which they fall depends heavily on the ‘quality’ and ‘uniqueness’ of the game. For instance the annual FIFA or ProEvo will lose value rapidly while ‘Shadow of the Colossus’ or ‘Viva Pinata’ will retain its value well. Since there is a predictable decay pattern for prices it is possible to see how each game performs relative to this. As you would expect the large franchise games do tend well but not always, and there are also plenty of examples of ‘cult’ games that tend to hold value.
That’s very interesting DrEru. I looked for some hard data to support my anecdotally-spurred theory, but I couldn’t find much. As you say, the prices may continue to fall with age on Ebay but that it might not apply to e-tailers. I would really love to get a hold of numbers relating to the latter.
I have a considerable amount of data on Ebay sales but none on retailers. I do not consider the retailers numbers to be that informative as they do not represent the workings of a free market (in the sense that Ebay does). The price may be influenced by stock levels, the financial position of the retailer, the retailer customer profile and so on. For instance supermarkets routinely overprice games as the buyers will not tend to be the gamers themselves but their parents etc. I believe that whatever useful information on true demand for games that can be gleaned from retailers pricing policy derives ultimately from the second hand market (like Ebay) anyway, but Ebay is a much richer and robust source of this information.
a good option is to also look at any game which you like the look of but you know won’t be mainstream and sell much, in these cases you can get a fairly new game for less than you may have expected. Generally if a game really doesn’t sell well then it can take less than a month for them to drop below £20, which could be seen as quite a bargain. i remember buying games like bayonetta, blazblue and madworld, all for less than £10 within 6 weeks of the game coming out, not because they are bad games, just because they didn’t sell very well at all.