tl;dr

UPDATE: I no longer trade any of my games in at high street stores — the nifty new web-based game swap system, Goozex, has launched in Europe and I’m getting a much better deal from there. Read my thoughts on Goozex for more details or take a look at the site yourself.

Original article: As an experiment, I scooped up a pile of no-longer-played games and took them to four major stores to compare their trade-in prices.

The games:

• Assassin’s Creed (Xbox 360)
• The Darkness (Xbox 360)
• Ghost Recon: Advanded Warfighter (Xbox 360)
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attourney (Nintendo DS)
• Phoenix Wright: And Justice For All (Nintendo DS)
• Meteos (Nintendo DS)

The quotes were (total for the six games):

• CEX – £40
• Game – £30.90
• Gamestation – £26
• HMV – £40

Firstly, I think it’s interesting that Game came out ahead of Gamestation. Historically I have always found Gamestation to give better trade-in prices, and I expected the firms to normalise when they merged last year. But today, at least, the prices were not only different, but Gamestation was the lower of the two.

Secondly, I wasn’t surprised that CEX came out on top, as they specialise in trade-ins and have always offered the best prices I’ve seen. They are also the only firm to publicise stock levels and trade-in prices on their website, which is very useful. However they didn’t have any stock of the game I wanted to get in return for the trade-ins (Dead Space). This is always a weakness for CEX; as they only sell preowned games, it’s never going to be the place to go for very recent releases.

Thirdly, HMV’s prices are interesting. HMV only launched their trade-in and preowned service, Re/Play, last week and I theorised that they would be very competitive, at least initially, because they have no historical pricing information to derive trade-in prices from and so have to guess. I suspect they are guessing (deliberately) a little high in order to create a good first impression. Also, I suspect their pricing algorithm has a stock level weighting built in, and of course they have very little stock right now. It will be interesting to run some more price comparisons in the months ahead to see how these prices change.

In the meantime, if you are trading in games (or DVDs for that matter), you should certainly consider at HMV. Note that the service is not available at all HMVs though, but only 160 of the larger stores.

Games