How Used Game Prices Change During the Year

Posted on February 1, 2021February 2, 2021 by SpriteCell

As someone who buys a lot of used video games, especially from older generations, I have long wanted to know how game prices change throughout the year. Do they tend to decrease and increase at predictable times of the year?

If you search for the answer to this question you will find many articles that are more about new and currently popular games, which mostly suggest looking for deals on Black Friday, or perhaps in January. That doesn’t really apply if you’re looking for something more than a few years old.

So in late 2018 I made a new account on PriceCharting.com and added 50 complete in box games from 23 systems to my “collection” so I could track its price; a sort of price index of 1,150 used games. Every morning at just about the same time I recorded the value of the collection. The systems I included were the North American versions of everything from Nintendo, Sony, Sega, and Microsoft, but not the most current systems at the time (Switch, PS4, Xbox One), or some small and short lived systems (Virtual Boy, Sega CD, Sega 32X, Sega Pico). The newest system’s games weren’t included because their prices haven’t stabilized. I chose the 50 most “popular” games for each system on the site, the games that were getting price checked the most.

I excluded all games that cost over $200. My thinking is, games over this price are being searched for because they are known to be rare, and people are curious about how high the price is now, are looking to complete a collection, or are looking to buy games that they suspect will go up in value, not that they are personally interested in playing. Perhaps I should have set the threshold higher or lower, but I think this was useful in not letting speculative market manipulation have an outsized impact, and to keep the data more useful and practical for more people.

That said, two years later 59 games now had a value of over $200. Most notably, as of this writing, Kuon is selling for $564 on average when complete. Pokemon Crystal, Emerald, and Sapphire also rose over $200. No games from the 7th generation rose to this price.

There were a few anomalies with the PriceCharting site. Twice a game was removed from my collection, and I assume from the site. I didn’t keep a list of every game included so I have no way of knowing which these were. There were also a few days where the total value of the collection changed by less than a dollar, which probably means that sometimes the site didn’t update prices for an extended period of time.

I was initially just going to do one year. Then in early 2020 thought I maybe two years would be good for a comparison, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep recording. Eventually it became pretty clear that the pandemic was going to be a big thing and that there wasn’t going to be a nice comparison year, but a year that should be interesting in its own right.

The Data

Please note that the Y-axis does not start at 0, which makes the change from highest to lowest look more dramatic.

On January 1st, 2019 the average value of a game from the included systems was $40.59, and on December 31st, 2020 it was $61.68.

Assuming 2019 is a typical kind of year that we may return to in 2022 and beyond, prices grow most quickly in February and March, continue to grow in April and May, and then decrease or grow very slowly June through November. I’m quite surprised November was the biggest decrease in price. There’s a lot of Christmas shopping in both November and December, yet the change between these months is the most dramatic of the year.

2020 starts much like 2019, but in March people realize they will be spending a lot of time at home and game prices spike, hitting a high in May, and not approaching pre-pandemic price changes until October. November again sees the largest price decrease of the year, but it’s an even larger swing.

While prices have begun to shrink a bit, we’re still a long way from pre-pandemic. I don’t expect prices to get anywhere near what they used to be, or for the price decreases to last much longer. We just experienced an unprecedented surge, but game prices have always increased over time and I don’t think anything will stop that.

The Video Game Catalog and Circular Ad Archive

Posted on June 14, 2020December 4, 2024 by SpriteCell

Overview

This archive aims to preserve catalog, circular, and newspaper ads for electronic games. These ads show how much games cost when they were new, and how quickly or slowly that price changed as they became older. We can compare prices of games across stores and see how different stores pushed different games, and we can directly compare disc and cartridge based game prices. The way games are seen and the language used to talk about them has changed significantly over the years, and how stores have tried to entice sales is a good example. Some of these have beta or mockup cover art that is not well preserved. This can also be fun nostalgia trip back to a time when you used to daydream about what games you hoped you would get for your birthday or Christmas.

To be included the advertisement has to be from a retail store and it has to feature an electronic game or an accessory for such. Electronic game for our purposes includes consoles and games that are played on a television, handhelds with or without interchangeable media, computer games, plug and play games, and some miscellaneous gadgets that you can play games on, such as watches. All ads are from American stores and prices are in United States Dollars. Magazine ads and catalogs made by game publishers or hardware makers aimed at retail stores are not included. I usually require that there are prices included, as some advertisements only say that products are a certain amount off, but I have made some exceptions. The included ads come from catalogs, circulars, and newspapers.

The quality of these images will vary considerably. Some have many watermarks, some are small, some were not scanned well, and some are not scans, but pictures of a page. I am not withholding anything on the basis of not meeting a quality standard in the name of preservation. I don’t take credit for scanning anything or taking any of these pictures, I have only collected what I have been able to find, asking permission when I am able and it makes sense to do so. I encourage you to check out the sources, many of these people and websites have more to offer.

The archive currently has images from 1975 to 2024 including more than 40 different stores. The ads are organized alphabetically by store on each year page and by page number when applicable. When there are multiple catalogs or weeks of circular ads featured within a store section I have ordered them chronologically when possible. Sometimes I have had to guess what year the ad was published based on the games featured, please let me know if I have made a mistake.

You can click the images in the galleries to make them full size, either press the left or right arrow keys or click near the left or right edge to go to the previous or next image, and press escape or click outside of the lightbox to close it.

I typically update every year with the new Black Friday ads during December. For a few years in the late 2010s I was looking through every weekly circular ad but that became too much, especially for GameStop.

If you can find or scan any ads that aren’t on these pages, please send me an e-mail at thespritecell@gmail.com, or message me on Bluesky or X.

Current total images: 4,460

Sources

Christmas Catalogs & Holiday Wishbooks has hundreds of text searchable catalogs.

Hughes Johnson has personally scanned a number of catalogs for his site and blog. His scans are available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license . No changes were made to his scans.

WishBookWeb.com had a number of Christmas catalogs.

Video Game Art & Tidbits has personally scanned a number of catalogs, as well as other art & tidbits. The individual tweets are: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18

Black Friday Archive has many ads from many stores from late November.

BlackFriday.com has many Black Friday catalog ads.

Weekly Ads has many weekly circular ads from many stores.

RadioShackCatalogs specializes in RadioShack catalogs. Some of their scans credit AlliedCatalogs.com.

Totally Target has many Target weekly ads.

Archive.org has all sorts of miscellaneous items. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 , 9

GottaDEAL has a lot of ads, especially for Black Friday.

BFAds.net had a lot of ads, especially for Black Friday.

Plaid Stallions has scans of catalogs from the 70s and 80s.

Vault 1541 is a gaming and toy blog with some scans: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Kotaku by way of reddit user Sketchbreaker.

BassGuitari from AtariAge contributed the Spiegel 1977 scans.

Mother to Earth on Twitter thinks that this image is from Earthbound Central, but I couldn’t find it there.

Earthbound Central via “a fellow by the name of Mother_fan”

Vintage Computing took credit for scanning a Toys “R” Us ad which I got from somewhere else.

Vintage Ads from Target’s Holiday History

Victory Pellet

The History of How We Play

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IGN 1, 2

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Comparing physical video game prices

Posted on January 10, 2018May 10, 2020 by SpriteCell

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.

The Data

Overview

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010s

2020s

Sources

Some notes and takeaways

Methodology