Again, from one of my favorite websites. Overall it isn't too shocking that Ebay and Amazon Marketplace are the best way to sell your games, however if you don't have a collection of boxes you received for free you'll probably do just as good at ToysRus, but be stuck with a gift card. Gamestop still has the advantage of being the best known by the uninformed shopper, but this may cause gamestop to increase their payout for used games.

http://blog.videogamepricecharts.com/2009/08/wheres-best-place-to-sell-your-games.html

Ebay*	$10.54	0
Amazon Marketplace*	10.11	0
Toys R Us	8.78	10
Best Buy	8.46	54
Amazon	5.67	32
Game Crazy	5.02	16
Game Stop	4.09	3

* eBay and Amazon Marketplace prices are after subtracting selling fees

Column Definitions:
Average Price - The average price for 26 games that all seven stores offered prices on.
Can't Sell - The number of games that the store won't buy from customers.

Toys R Us

• Best prices of all the stores
• They don't pay for 10% of the games we tried
• Will take trades on all systems from PS2 era & next-gen consoles
• Every vintage game is the same price, $0.50 for Earthbound
• They pay you via Toys R Us gift card
• Offers instant online quotes

GameStop

• Worst prices of all the stores
• No online quotes
• Will take trades on all systems from PS2 era & next-gen consoles
• They can pay in cash or store credit
• More than 4,300 stores in the United States

Well this is handy list.

I was becoming sick of Gamestop and their bad trade-in values. I'll be sure to trade my games in elsewhere now that I know.

I would like to see more data.

For example, the percentages don't make sense -- you cannot get 3% or 10% with an N of 26.

Allowing for this rounding error, it appears that Gamestop took in two more games than Toys R Us.

That would indicate that these were low value trade-ins (25 cents), which could bring down Game Stops' average. (It would only increase it to $4.43).

Furthermore, it is interesting that Toys R Us has a multi-tiered system of complete and incomplete (game only) games.  I wonder if the analysis took that into acount. (Also, it does not say whether there were any deductions for poor condition of games.)

Finally, I wonder how long Toys R Us can continue to operate with small margins. For example, it pays $27.30 for Cursed Mountain and Gamestop sells it for $39.99 used ($35.99 for card holders).

Mike from Morgantown

follow the link I provided for the full details. I chopped out portions to make it a smaller post.

Essentially what they did is randomly select 100 games, and they then counted how many each store refused to take which converts directly to %. They then took the 26 (rather a low number, I wish they did more) games that they could trade in at every single store and averaged the prices. This actually favors only taking games worth more money, as stores tend to stop carrying games that they can't sell for a lot. So they wouldn't have counted a game being traded in at gamestop for $0.50 if BestBuy didn't also accept the same game.

I see that now. I also modified my original post, wondering if the analysis used the full game or incomplete game price from Toys R Us, which can make a big difference.

Personally, I only buy complete used games, so I am very happy to see a store do this. Unfortunately, the nearest Toys R Us is nearly 30 miles from me.

Mike from Morgantown

Interesting data. I've been looking to sell off some of my games and have been thinking about Amazon or TrU. This'll help me a lot.

Do they do controllers and accessories like Gamestop does?