I was thinking about the state of import gamers in the US/Euro/anywhere that's not Asia and I've noticed there are two major annoyances.
1. Unlike Japan, where game prices drop weekly, and gamers can buy a month old used game for $20-30 less than the new price, those living in the west never see any price drops. Want a game that's 2 years old? Unless it's been re-released in greatest hits type packaging it's still gonna be $60-70 + shipping.
2. There's no where besides Ebay and maybe GAF threads to sell used imports. In Japan you can beat a game or decide you don't really like it and then walk into any game store and sell it back for 70%+ what you've paid for depending on how old it is and other factors. But in the US you can't just walk into EB and sell off your old imports.
So I was thinking what if there was an online store that specialized entirely in used import games. The store would take the Japanese approach of A/B/C/D condition, with D meaning in pretty bad shape but still runs perfectly and A being pristine good-as-new quality, and list buying prices of all import games at the various condition levels. People would then send in their game and the store would check it out and rate the quality and offer the price that goes with that game+condition level. If the person says "ok", the store would pay them, if the person says "no" the store would ship the game back to them.
Then the store would sell these games and of course sell them at different prices depending on the condition level with probably about a $3 drop per level so a D quality version that still runs is $15 cheaper than an A quality version that's still $15-20 cheaper than a new copy at any online import store. That way people could buy import games at $20-40 cheaper and could make some money selling back their old imports for $20-40.
I dunno, I just find it annoying that I have a decent amount of import games in perfect condition I'd like to dump off for real money but there isn't really a place to sell them besides e-bay.
1. Unlike Japan, where game prices drop weekly, and gamers can buy a month old used game for $20-30 less than the new price, those living in the west never see any price drops. Want a game that's 2 years old? Unless it's been re-released in greatest hits type packaging it's still gonna be $60-70 + shipping.
2. There's no where besides Ebay and maybe GAF threads to sell used imports. In Japan you can beat a game or decide you don't really like it and then walk into any game store and sell it back for 70%+ what you've paid for depending on how old it is and other factors. But in the US you can't just walk into EB and sell off your old imports.
So I was thinking what if there was an online store that specialized entirely in used import games. The store would take the Japanese approach of A/B/C/D condition, with D meaning in pretty bad shape but still runs perfectly and A being pristine good-as-new quality, and list buying prices of all import games at the various condition levels. People would then send in their game and the store would check it out and rate the quality and offer the price that goes with that game+condition level. If the person says "ok", the store would pay them, if the person says "no" the store would ship the game back to them.
Then the store would sell these games and of course sell them at different prices depending on the condition level with probably about a $3 drop per level so a D quality version that still runs is $15 cheaper than an A quality version that's still $15-20 cheaper than a new copy at any online import store. That way people could buy import games at $20-40 cheaper and could make some money selling back their old imports for $20-40.
I dunno, I just find it annoying that I have a decent amount of import games in perfect condition I'd like to dump off for real money but there isn't really a place to sell them besides e-bay.
