Best Buy: Purchase New Game for Used Price

Sweet... first to post, and I live near that Best Buy.

Anyway, how are they planning to make money? If you sell a new game near cost, that part's a wash. Then buy it back used for 25% under new but resell it for 15% under new, you made 10%. Gamestop might pay an extra $1 than Best Buy but that's one less stop for a gamer who probably was gonna stop in at Best Buy anyway.

I don't think this will work. Retail stores actually make very little profits on game sales and rely on mass sales to get a sizable profit. Individually profits are literally just a few dollars. Taking just $5 away from the price could mean no profits and a extreme $10 would certainly mean a loss.

However if Best Buy does do this it would be possible for them to accept a loss for a while they could potential put places like GameStop out of business and then simply normalize their price afterward. I wonder if this is their plan.

They make money by selling you those retarded product service plans..

Might be the game companies subsidizing the new games to = the used.. Thus they will not have to use their dreaded DRM so freaken much.. The "if you can't beat them join them" approach..

All this is going to do is drive the overall market price down, for both new and used games, and piss off the publishers for devaluing a product.

I don't see how this is going to work. If you sell a new game for a used game price, wouldn't that just drop the value of the used game ? Hence, everything would just shift down. Also, as others are saying, there is very little profit margin on games. So, they stand to make no profit from a game sale unless they themselves somehow get a reduced cost for the game.

So modern warfare 2 will be $45 instead of $50 when it releases, lol.

Someone needs to give Gamestop competition. They buy a new release game for about half then resell it for 5 bucks off list. That's only on the new games. They really put the screws to you on the older stuff. Example I bought a used game for $10 & took it back afew days later & they offered me $1 for it. I wish the used game industry was regulated-it would actually help them in the long run because they would do more business by not screwing people..

They aren't screwing you. Did they have a return policy? if so they would have just taken the game back for the same price, and if they did not, well, you're trying to screw them by buying games and then after having played them, returning them. What did you expect? to just give you back $10, if you want to rent a game, go rent a game, stop trying to scam the store and then come here whining.

This is probably an excellent idea. If they continue to honor their current price-match policy, they won't have to price-match if the closest competing store does not have it in stock... If Gamestop doesn't have it used (and for an awesome game like MW2, they probably won't have many used copies coming in for a while), then they will still rake in $60 a copy on launch day. And considering they make like $5-10 in profit, they'll be losing MINIMAL profits, still turn some positive margin, and get a LOT more traffic in their video games department... which gives the opportunity to sell more high-margin accessories. (Say you buy a 3rd party headset with your copy of MW2, even if they pricematch it down by 5 bucks they'll make that back on the headset).

I support anything that lowers the price of my favorite hobby

Bestbuy should offer online game download service rather than in store price match. The online convinience of Steam succeeded in luring me to buy more games than I can play.

I see this as more of a move to undercut competition (other publishers) than anything having to do with used game sales. EA is such a massive IP holder/developer that they're trying to take over market share using a massive pricing strategy. They're attempting to muscle smaller companies out of big retail chains and then buy them up. A great strategy since EA can't come up with anything original. Let's just buy up the IP of the little guys that can't compete with us on price. Another attempt to monopolize. Where's the FTC when you need them? I really wish they'd start cracking down on the big retail stores. I myself feel like we should take molitov cocktails to them and run them out of town. It would be great to see small business and local economy again.

They already sell new games as used at Future Shop in Canada (bestbuy) and they sell some used games too. I guess they are just trying to build up a collection of games for that section. I got a few new games for cheap. They are just re-shrink-wrapped, but I know its new from the seal licence sticker still being intact.

I think they are referring to console games, not PC. I still get my best PC game deals from Amazon, huge selection too.

thepetey 08/08/2009 3:07 AM Hide Insert quote.
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-5+ .They make money by selling you those retarded product service plans..


I cant agree with this because the Console service plan they have now is great. for an xbox360 its 30 dollars for a 2 year plan and for a ps3 its 60 dollars. if it breaks at anytime within 2 year u bring it back to bestbuy and they give you a brand new one off the shelf.

I have used the 2 year 360 plan a couple of times already for red ring so i know this works.

I used to work for Gamestop, and the margin on NEW video games is 25-50%. Meaning that if a game sells for $50, they're making anywhere from $12-$25 profit. There's no reason Best Buy can't succeed with this plan, but whatever they are losing in profit per item, they will have to make up for in increased sales.

I miss the days of heading out to the local hobby shop to buy my computer games.
The used to come in ziploc bags with discs (5.25" floppies) made by the programmer, and a handful of xeroxed pages of instructions, sometimes even in book form (though only printed on one side of the page).
Unless there was good word of mouth on a game, you took your chances and payed your $10 (or there abouts) and took it home to see if it would even run (and figure out which memory settings worked best for customized autoexec.bat & config.sys files).
Those were the days...
CGA FTW!

Dude.. Half.com I use it exclusively. I loose $5 per game for shipping. I buy the game, play it till I'm done, and sell it for about the same as I bought it for. Problem solved. Unless I forget to sell it and the value drops to the point of worthlessness. You know that game Ninja Gaiden 2? Piece of crap that only sold good because of constant commercials, marketing. It sold so many copies so fast and because it was so terrible, after 2 months it was worth $10 on the black market. I was lucky to get $30 after the first month.

Im sure best buy is making more then 5 or 10 dollars per game.

Ive sold games in a small retail shop, and i know at least for the small shops its only 5 or 10 dollars mark. If you sell a game for 50, the shop bought it for 45, 40 if they are lucky.

However best buy has the ability to buy 10,000 to 100,000 copies at a time, instead of 10. So, im sure they get a much better deal. They likely are making 20+ per game.

That's what competition is all about. All the advantage to the customer, each time 2 companies are fighting and my company is not onvolved than I'm happy, because in that particular situation I'm a customer.

This won't effect PC game prices at all. I haven't seen a single store, franchise or "Mom & Pop", "trade" PC titles since the mid-late 90's.

Console owners should be rejoicing - only the current status-quo or better new title pricing can come of it. Aren't you console owners sick of paying around $20 more for a game than the PC version anyway?

Gee, wonder why. I guess when you can just steal the game for free, that kind of destroys any market for used games. Plus the PC market isn't big enough to support an used game industry, again due to pirating.

I doubt that Best Buy will expand this little experiment. Used games are messy, you need people to make sure the game works when repurchased and that all the manuals and so forth are there. Some games come with maps and other additional crap that is necessary. You need people who have played those games or at least understand something about games so they won't screw it up. It just seems to me that the people in Gamestop only deal with games and generally know what the current games are all about, while Best Buy people couldn't tell you what USB stands for.

The used game market is hard because you don't want to cannibalize your new game sales too much or else big problems pop up. The game makers get pissed off, and buyers might wait until they start seeing used games if they're priced too low. Well you can't get used games unless enough people buy the games new. I just have no confidence in Best Buy's ability to pull it off nationwide.

Lower prices are ALWAYS a good thing. I can't understand why some of you idiots are against this. Games are overpriced in general.

This is a good idea...

#1 they will make money of the suckers purchasing service plans.
#2 Ever find yourself @ bestbuy for something and end up getting something else as well? OHH i need batteries... OHHH i Need CD-r's

Anything that gets more people through the door is a good idea. Also this will crush two competitors.

im sorry, but
"would no comment..."

I haven't read any of the other posts.. but what I think will happen is gamestop will just stop ripping people off so much for used games are charge $10 less. What will best buy do then? They already give people maybe $25 and then sell it for $45, its not like selling it for $40 will hurt them. They may even lower the trade in value to something like $22 or $23 and there will still be people naive enough to do it.

This is yet another plot by the evil publishers, to put the used game business out of business. They don't see a penny of the money Gamestop makes on used games and they want their cut like an Italian Mobster.