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I was really excited to do this one, I buy almost all of my games used and wanted to quantify some things people kept repeating about prices. Originally posted on reddit.

People often say that Nintendo games are more expensive, or even that they never go down in price. Sometimes people clarify that they only mean first party titles. As someone interested in collecting I’ve been curious about this for some time, so I decided to look into the average price of games on different platforms. I entered the prices of 50 games in loose, complete in box (CIB), and new condition for 19 systems, generations 5 through 8.

Since I grouped by company, here are the generations for reference:

5th: N64/Playstation/Saturn
6th: Gamecube/Gameboy Advance/Playstation 2/Dreamcast/Xbox
7th: Wii/DS/Playstation 3/Playstation Portable/Xbox 360
8th: Wii U/Switch(I guess)/3DS/Playstation 4/Vita/Xbox One

Some notes and takeaways

None of Switch’s games are even a year old yet, while most of XBone’s and PS4’s are, which is part of why its games are so expensive. I also had to include almost every physical release on the Switch, so there is some obscure stuff there.

Nintendo games are indeed more expensive on average, although I expect the gap to be smaller when the Switch is as old as the PS4, and 3DS is basically tied with the Vita.

One to two generations old seems to be the sweet spot for cheap games.

The Xbox 360 has the cheapest games on average, but Xbox, PS2, and PS3 are pretty close.

I thought first party games would be consistently more expensive than third across the board, but it was only true for Nintendo games (sans DS) and Saturn.

The Gamecube had the largest difference between first and third party prices.

Some systems had many more first party titles among the games I used than others (N64, Wii, DS), so the third party prices could be fairly different if more games were included.

New prices don’t become too crazy until 3 generations back.

Panzer Dragoon Saga was the most expensive game included – $510.1 CIB, while Madden NFL 2002 for PS2 and World Series Baseball on Xbox were the cheapest CIB at $2.78

2,850 prices were used in total for this data.

Methodology

It’s difficult to know what a good representative sample is, but I wanted to focus on games people are likely to want to buy, and cut out shovelware. First I looked for a wikipedia page like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PlayStation_4_video_games

and added the 15 best-selling. Then, I went to metacritic and added the 15 highest highest rated games that didn’t include anything I’d already added. I filled out the rest by going back and forth between these lists. For systems without a nice wikipedia list, or not featured on metacritic I googled for best of lists.

I only included games released in the U.S. with a physical release. Why only physical? When people discuss these game prices it’s usually in the context of the second-hand collecting market. Digital stores price games based on very different criteria, and there’s less complete data available. This means no DLC, or digital-only, and few indie games were included.

Only the most basic edition of a game was included – no collector’s edition, no Nintendo Selects or Greatest Hits, no plastic instrument bundles.

This method includes a lot of yearly sports titles, which possibly shouldn’t count. The original Xbox’s games are especially sports-laden. I’m not very familiar with these games, but someone who loves sports games, and is buying older games might pick up the ones with the specific mix of mechanics they like, right? Or maybe the ones with team rosters they enjoy. Regardless, I didn’t want to pick and choose which sports titles would count, so I included whatever came up. These sports games are a bit cheaper than other genres (it’s hard to quantify how much cheaper), somewhat dragging down the average price of systems with many of them.

I considered first party to be games published by Nintendo, Sony, Sega, or Microsoft. I originally was considering only games developed by those companies, but things get complicated and subjective quickly that way.

Price data was retrieved from https://www.pricecharting.com/ from late December 2017 to early January 2018. All prices are in US dollars.

If you want to see the whole spreadsheet with the specific games, here you go: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ssPpo68hAx3y2TjZ9I5knR26-qgprINnD0dmegrHfp8/edit?usp=sharing

It’s ugly and I didn’t care about writing the complete names or fixing typos. Scroll down for the bar graph.

While this was originally posted on reddit, it was quickly removed by automoderator. I messaged the mods about it and they restored it, but the post was almost a full day old by then so it was buried and almost no one saw it. Months of work went almost unseen. I taught myself how to make python create images by placing text and smaller images in nice rows and columns, which I found to be a horrible experience that was made more difficult than it needed to be in many ways. This data is now old news, and I don’t know if the second part of the project I had planned would be relevant anymore. This post has been edited a bit.

The following charts (on the bottom of the page) are a graphical guide to which pokemon can use moves of at least power 60 of which type, only taking into account moves they can learn in gen 7. These can be interesting to just see at a glance what move pools are like, or useful to find a pokemon with a combination you need. There are many asterisks to this data, explained below, but first the links:

Anything less than 60 power I considered to just be “flavor”, or a move to use while leveling up, not a move to be used in any kind of end game. No one is going to choose Peck as one of their 4 moves, even if it’s their only flying type move available because it just doesn’t do enough damage. It is ultimately an arbitrary line I had draw somewhere, but there are a few reasons.

I don’t believe the elite 4 or the champion ever use moves below 60 power, although I didn’t exhaustively check this. Smogon and other build sites rarely if ever recommend such moves. Hidden Power has 60 power and is considered useable. Also note that I include STAB bonuses in a move’s power. Some abilities are taken into account and assumed, such as Sheer Force and Technician.

I’ve only included moves available in gen 7 for a few reasons. If I were to include every move ever learnable by every pokemon, the earlier pokemon would have a lot more available than the newer ones. By only using gen 7 moves I have the most “up to date” version of what Game Freak considers each pokemon’s move pool, that don’t include “legacy” moves and special giveaway moves that are no longer available. I don’t have to research every move to see if it was only available to 1000 Japanese schoolchildren who participated in a tournament in 2001. If you’re playing through Sun/Moon (generally) or participating in (at least some?) official tournaments, you’re using pokemon from gen 7, so these are the moves available to you. There’s also the hard break between gen 2 and 3, and none of these move lists do it by generation in an easy way to view all at once.

Moves were not counted if they did not use “power”, so no Night Shade or Counter. Multi-hit moves assumed their average damage. Moves with difficult to achieve requirements or very limited uses (Trump Card, Belch) were not included. Moves that depend on speed or weight differences were included if you have a reasonable ability to use the move with at least 60 power against at least half of fully evolved pokemon. Moves that take two turns were averaged to how much damage they do each turn, which led me to include Fury Cutter since using it twice averages to 60 power. I know such moves will rarely be used against other players, but they are fine against the AI.

I did not include special pokemon that don’t have any moves that deal damage based on power (Wobbuffet), pokemon that can be any type (Silvally), or pokemon that are very gimmicky (Ditto, Smeargle). I did include mega evolutions, Alolan forms, and some forms if they changed enough about the pokemon.

Yes, some the attack stats overlap with the type boxes.

I originally set out to do something different with this data, I’ll be posting that in a few weeks perhaps. [Note from the present: I may do the thing I was planning in the future.]