Getting the Most Money Out of Your Game Trade-Ins

Games today come out in greater numbers and at greater prices, however the length of most games has become shorter, some games can be beaten and almost fully experienced in 8-10 hours or less. This means that if you're like most gamers you will have more and more games that you are done playing that you want to turn into cash or into trade in towards another title or accessory. Here are some tips that will help you get maximum trade-in value or max money from all your games just collecting dust.

The first part of these tips will be focused towards gamers who wish to obtain in store credit for their games. So you take a game to a retailer like Gamestop and they tell you that for your perfect condition almost new game you paid $60 for you're gonna get only $15!! Well that seems like just an insanely quick amount of depreciation in value for you, but wait....There ARE ways to get more for those titles. Gamestop offers what they call an Edge Card that can be obtained for a small fee, now it may seem you're spending more money here and going the opposite direction but that's far from the truth. That card will score you 10% extra trade-in on games and 10% off on used games as well as a subscription to the Gameinformer magazine.

So that alone has earned you $1.50 extra trade-in credit. Now Gamestop also runs specials quite often where if you trade in 2 games for example you get 20% extra trade in or 3 games 30% extra trade-in and on top of that if you put that credit towards a reserve or game you get even more credit!! So its obvious that if you can wait and accumulate a few games to trade and hit up one of these specials that card will pay for itself and then some in one transaction! So lets say you have 3 games at $20 dollars and you catch the 30% bonus for trade-in on top of an extra 10% for putting it towards another game you want to buy. Instead of $60 you will end up with $84 dollars, quite the difference in profit! But keep in mind if you have a newer game don't wait a great amount of time or the game won't be so new and its value will decrease further.

Now lets say you don't want trade in, you want cold hard cash...well if you go the retail store route you're gonna get 20% taken off your total for cash, ouch. So this leads us to ask, how can you get good amount of cash for your games? Well one route is online auctions such as eBay, check the prices of a particular game on the internet sometimes the average going price will fluctuate up and down a bit. When the price is about to your liking post your game, put a buy out for what you would like to make (within reason!) and set your reserve price. If you use their shipping calculator and have a way to ship things cheaper like say from your work through UPS you can earn a few bucks that way too. There are other ways too to make cash, have a friend that wants to play the game in question? Make them an offer to buy the game you'll more than likely get more cash than you would at a retailer this way too. So if you are smart about the process of game trading you can really maximize your profit, recently I traded in 3 games, one newer game and two older titles and got 30% more credit towards a $60 game and I ended up having $4 left over after the transaction, not a bad deal at all!