I’m a hoarder. I don’t trade-in, I keep forever. No matter how bad the game or how much I will never play it again, I keep it. However, the used game market is massive, so I’m pretty sure that I am the minority. If I did trade my games in, I would assume that I would want the most bang for my buck. Before a few days ago GameStop was basically the only nationwide place to do this sort of thing, but as of Sept. 10 Toys “R” Us has begun to offer trade-ins for games. So where should you go?
Well, if you want more money back for your game the answer seems to be Toys “R” Us. Hot Blooded Gaming did some research by using Toys “R” Us’ online trade-in center (convenient) and calling three GameStops. They discovered that Toys “R” Us is offering significantly more across the board. You can in fact get a whopping $13 more for Wolfenstein from Toys “R” Us, and most other games have a $4-$6 difference. In my eyes that’s a game changing amount if I’m making a trade-in. They also did some research on older games and discovered that no one gives any amount of worthwhile money for them. The full chart of price comparisons is below.
How can they be offering more? I don’t really know, but there are a few guesses we could make. The ridiculously high trade-in price for Wolfenstein tells us that they aren’t really working off a supply and demand model quite yet as Wolfenstein didn’t really sell that well. So it could be that they’re just finding where their prices need to be. A more likely cause of the bigger payback though is that Toys “R” Us isn’t doing cash back at all, but gift cards to Toys “R” Us. It’s easy to offer more money when they know the person will turn around and spend it at their store, especially since the majority of people spend more than the amount of the gift card. So do you stick with GameStop for the cold hard cash (which often nets you another decrease in their trade-in value) or do you duck over to Toys “R” Us so you can use the card to spend less on your next game purchase?
