A Momentary Lapse of Awesome
|
|
|
|
|
Awhile back Mr Shadow introduced me to http://www.pricecharting.com/
It is a website which automatically tracks prices of games from across the web. Seemingly it pulls most of it's info from ebay and amazon. I think it is fun to look at the range of prices for a particular console. I recently got a Sega Saturn and can now quickly find which games are normally the more spendy ones and which ones don't cost too much. If a person was into reselling games they could easily look up, say, the copy of Shinobi Legions they found for cheap. They would see that for the last couple of years it sells about 1 per week for $20 to $30ish.
I have been trying to complete an Odyssey^2 collection, so I have been using Price Charting to see about what I should expect to pay for certain games. The thing about the O^2 system is, its not a popular seller. Most of the games sell in the low single digits...per year.
When I decided to have a concerted effort to go after a complete O^2 collection I figured I needed a plan. I needed to keep track of what I had, what I needed and what the normal prices were.
With a freshly printed out checklist from RFGeneration, I highlighted all the games I had left to buy and proceeded to pricecharting.com. Most of the O^2 games sell for just a couple of bucks, even with the box. But a few are more costly. I expected Power Lords! and Atlantis to be near the top but a couple of them surprised me. Who knew that Demon Attack or Nimble Numbers Ned! were in the $20 range? I was pretty surprised to see that S.I.D. The Spellbinder! had been increasing in price over the last year. It never came up in my research as a expensive O^2 game. The last one to sell was at $56.
S.I.D. The Spellbinder! is not unavailable on ebay. I've seen several of them for auction or buy it now. There was a CIB copy with a buy it now for $20 which was a serious consideration. Boxed copies are nice but I'm okay with loose and with a little experience of watching ebay, I knew a cheaper loose copy would come up, regardless of pricechartings $56.
The other day I bought S.I.D. The Spellbinder!, loose, for $2.99 plus S&H. It didn't show up for a little while but you can see here the difference I made on the site:
[img width=700 height=302]http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7135/7624081110_565a66b0cb_b.jpg[/img]
So pricecharting.com isn't perfect in all situations but I still think it is pretty neat. I'm going to keep using it. I just need to keep in mind that low volume sellers may not be too accurate. Having a service like this would be of great use to a reseller, I think many of us on this site come across such great deals in our hunt we might pick up if we knew there was a good market for them at many times the price we found them for.
I'm hoping the person who paid $56 got a mint sealed copy. Unfortunately pricecharting.com doesn't keep any record of condition, which has a big affect on value. It was kinda fun to have a negative 95% affect on the value of S.I.D. The Spellbinder!
What are your thoughts of the site? Do any of you have a similar experience? Let us know!
|
|
|
|
Site content Copyright © rfgeneration
.com unless otherwise noted
. Oh, and keep it on channel three
.
