When a popular video game has been out for a while and its sales have slowed the publisher may release a discounted reprint. The requirements and names for these reprints vary by system and region. In North America Nintendo calls them “Player’s Choice” or “Nintendo Selects”, Sony calls them “Greatest Hits”.
This isn’t a comprehensive history of the practice though, what I’m interested in is the secondhand market for these games. Due to the addition of strongly colored banners and other changes to the box art many collectors will turn their nose up at these, considering them an eyesore. Some may consider them too “common” or “cheap” to be worthy collector’s items. Consequently, the common thought is that they are less valuable, and thus sell for less.
It has occurred to me many times that these reprints must actually be the rarer versions, since they are only released once a game has sold most of the copies it is going to sell and the publisher is willing squeeze whatever extra money they can from a game. What an unusual situation, where the rare version of something is cheaper and less desired. Collector’s editions and other variant printings are also less common, but generally sell for more than the base game in the secondhand market.
I wanted to quantify this, just how much rarer are these discounted reprints, and how much less valuable are they? I started with Wikipedia’s lists of games to receive these reprints and recorded the complete price and sales volume from PriceCharting. While I added a few from PriceCharting’s lists that weren’t on Wikipedia, I found I had to remove far more. PriceCharting just doesn’t list the reprints separately for dozens of games.
In total 1,075 games were used, although 38 discounted reprints did not have price data, seemingly because they were so rarely sold. I only used data for “complete” games, this is more common than loose or new. PriceCharting gets its data by looking at completed listings on eBay.
Sales Volume
PriceCharting has a quirky method of displaying how often a game is being sold and I must start by explaining it. Rather than displaying the average number of sales during a standard period of time such as a year, it instead uses the format “X sale(s) per day/week/month/year”. X never contains a decimal, so it has been rounded.
Fifteen different sales volumes were observed from the games I recorded, and it is likely there are no others.
On the right is how PriceCharting describes the sales volume, in the middle is how much this comes to per year, and I broke these down into tiers for some of the graphs I will be using, shown on the left. The two gray tiers, 15, and 16, were never observed and are probably very rarely, if ever, used, considering that tier 17 consists of a single game (try guessing what it is before we get there).
This is a somewhat haphazard way of describing sales volume, and the gap between tiers varies from a factor of 1.2 times to 2.34 times.
Right away we can see that discounted reprints sell less often on average than the original version of a game. No original release was observed as being sold less than once a month, but keep in mind these are some of the most popular games for each system.
The most commonly sold discount reprint version of a game (at 2 a day) was also the most commonly sold original release of a game (6 a day): Wii Sports.
The three original releases at tier 14 (3 sales a day) are all Gamecube releases: Super Mario Sunshine, Super Smash Bros. Melee, and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.
Another thing I wanted to look into was how sales volume changed over time. This isn’t based on the games market overall, just games that have a discounted reprint. I wasn’t able to include the discounted reprints themselves because very few of them have reliable release dates.
The earliest games included were for the Game Boy, but there weren’t many with separate Player’s Choice listings. Volume remains pretty stable starting from 1998, probably due to 4th generation systems phasing out. I would have expected a gradual increase over time, as older games have more time to find permanent homes or be thrown away, and fewer people are interested in the retro scene. There was only one 2018 game included, God of War for PlayStation 4.
Price
I’ve done other studies on game prices before so I didn’t look too deeply into prices alone, but here’s how much the original versions of games with a discounted reprint cost over time. The three Game Boy games from 1989 (Super Mario Land, Tennis, and Tetris) aren’t terribly expensive, but the 1991-1994 games that used cardboard packaging sure are. As games get newer from there they slowly get cheaper.
Price vs Sales Volume
This scatter plot gives some idea of how spread out the prices are in some tiers, but it’s difficult to see much of any correlation between sales volume and price since so many dots overlap each other.
You might not expect the least sold games (remember, tier 1-6 are all discounted reprints) to be so consistently cheap. The most expensive of the discounted reprints was Super Mario World at $287.08, while the most expensive overall was the original release of Super Mario World at $580.00.
Are the rarest (or at least the least often sold on eBay) games actually the most expensive? It actually seems to be closer to the opposite, although there is not a clear a progression. Some of the wild swings are due to small sample size – tier 8, 14, and 17 among original releases have no more than 4 games each. Discounting them the average tends to creep up the more common a game is.
Discounted Reprint Vs Original Release
This graph shows just how much rarer discounted reprints tend to be. If a discounted reprint sold half as often the original release, it would be 50% here.
More than three fourths of discounted reprints have less than 15% the sales volume of the original release.
Curiously, for 48 games studied both versions sold in equal amounts. I did not see any particular pattern among these other than none of them being from before the 5th generation.
Here is another way of looking at the price difference between discounted reprints and original releases, we can see the overall trends better than the scatter plot. The price difference is small in most cases, but cheaper is a bit more common.
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within’s Platinum Hits version for Xbox is for some reason over 10 times more expensive than the original release.
And here are the price differences in absolute dollar amounts. For most games the difference is within $5.00 either way.
Super Mario World again holds a record for largest price between versions, with the Greatest Hits version being $292.92 cheaper, while the Sega All Stars version of Ready 2 Rumble Boxing for the Dreamcast is $165.00 more expensive. While I don’t have dates for either release I imagine Mario World’s Greatest Hits release was available for much longer and in much larger quantities.
Some More Trivia
The average cost of the discounted reprint of a game in this study was $16.59, while original releases went for $19.35 on average. Not as large of a difference as I suspected going in to this project.
The average reprint sold 52.09 times a year, while an original averaged 313.53 sales per year.
The biggest difference in sales volume was The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King for PlayStation 2. The original sells 2 a day, while the reprint sells 1 a year, or 0.14% as often.
Sources
Greatest Hits (PlayStation) – Wikipedia