Best Buy: Purchase New Game for Used Price

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ethanolson

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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.
 

NuclearShadow

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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.
 

Jerky_san

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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..
 

thejerk

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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.
 

wempa

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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.
 

gto127

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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..
 
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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.
 

demonhorde665

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[citation][nom]gto127[/nom]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..[/citation]

this si the reason why i hate game stop , here i have alocal game trader that gives you a ton more than game stop does for your used games (for example halo 1 GS will give you 5 bucks while my local trader will give me 15 bucks for halo 1 still njto goods since both palces sell halo 1's at 30 dollars
 

dtemple

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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).
 

yao

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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.
 

JonnyDough

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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.
 

shqtth

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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.
 

4lc4pon3

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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.
 
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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.
 

CaptainObvious

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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!
 

mcbowler

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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.
 
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