Almost 1 year ago today my partner and I had the idea to gather accurate video game prices from multiple sources on the internet and give this info to people FOR FREE on a website. VGPC.com was created from that idea.
First we would like to thank our loyal blog visitors for reading our articles and giving us more ideas for aspects of video game collecting to analyze. And thank you to the visitors to our website who use the daily updated prices and price charts to help them with their buying and selling. We have grown from 2 visitors our first day (myself and my business partner) to about 400-500 visitors a day now. And one day with 2,000 visitors!. Thank you.
We want to know how we can make VGPC better the second year.
If you could add one thing to the website what would it be? Should we tell you which site online has the lowest prices? Let you customize the charts to see weekly and/or daily prices instead of just monthly? Or is there is some little thing that annoys you like the page listing all the games for each console loads too slow or the format of the site makes it hard to read? I'm sure everyone who reads this can think of something to improve so please post it in the comments below.
We will try to add some of these features and fix problems you find as soon as we can but we both have real full-time jobs and this site is just a labor of love for now. It might take a while to get to them all. Thanks again for a first year.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
How Can We Make VGPC Better For You?
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16 comments :
I'd love to see a way to integrate your prices with video game collection software. I use Gamepedia and Delicious Library to keep track of all my games, and I'd love to have information on how much everything is worth right there in the program. Gamepedia has something like that, but it grabs the information from Amazon, which is not always accurate (not to mention that it doesn't differentiate between used and new).
But other than that, I think this site is a great resource and I really appreciate it.
I run a game store, and I use your site constantly. One thing I would like to see on the site is an average price for games on a certain system. Say, average price for N64 games is $7 and average price for PS2 games is $10. Whatever it would be that day, or for the past 90 days. It's difficult for me to look up every individual price for every game.
Perhaps adding in an equation that drops say the five highest prices, for those few rare games, and the ten lowest prices, for the plethora of cheap sports games, and average the rest of the data for all of the other games.
Giving an average price for games of a particular system would make my life, and the life of others, easier for pricing games.
I would like to see more import games added to the list. It wouldn't have to be all inclusive, but like Shenmue II for the Sega Dreamcast, which many people have imported from the PAL region. Or the Jump Superstars and Jump Ultimate Stars games for the Nintendo DS.
I'd also like to see charts for systems like the Sega Master System, but that may already be in your plans as you've continued to add systems and games.
Keep up the great work!
I personally use iGoogle all the time, I'm on it pretty much all day while I work and I would love it if there were an app window option for vgpc.com. Even if it was a simple option to allow me to type in the name of the game and it gives me the current new and used price of the game that would be fine. It would be ideal to see the chart on there too but I understand it's a decent amount of work for that sort of thing.
Great work on this site. I use it all the time.
Thanks for all the comments so far. Keep them coming.
Zachary - integrating with existing game collection software would be very cool. Does gamepedia allow imports or prices or anything like that? We are actually thinking of adding a collection tracking feature on our site so you can see how much all your games are worth and track the value of your collection overall.
James Dozier - This is a great idea. Someone suggested something similar in an email too. We have that on our list now and will probably show a chart of the average value over time so you can see trends too.
D Sanford - I think this would be very helpful if we can find good price sources for them. We are trying to add more rare games to our database with manual entry so we might be able to do the same with some import games too. If you have a list of import games you think should make the cut let me know so we can look for them.
tanookitravis - I think this is a cool idea. I will have to pass it off to our programming guy to see how hard that is with igoogle.
Hey there! I love this site! I found it when some of the members of cheapassgamer.com talked about the price of used games on the DS. They linked to your site and I have been hooked.
Suggestions to make things better? How about a quick page of TOP TEN USED GAMES for each system? Filter out all of the systems - I would check back weekly to see what games topped the charts (or which ones I should try to find at garage sales).
Another idea I have is a price drop page. Sometimes, games drop suddenly in price at stores. It would be nice to have a wiki of titles that have dropped. I know CAG does a little of this, but a database format would be pretty cool too.
Thanks for the site!
I'd really like to see a section that keeps track of the values of all consoles and handheld consoles in existence.
Start up a podcast! I think there are lots of neat things you could talk about. For example, you could follow up on sealed auctions, discuss the latest or most interesting trends in game prices, etc.
i agree about includng more import titles. like oendan and daigasso band bros. would be great!
No one thing, but I know how I'd improve the whole thing.
1. UK prices? ok, a small thing, but would it be so hard to have prices for different geographical regions? I mean, it's not like there's only one eBay...
The main things though -
2. More sources. I don't know how you do this, but if you're only using 3 or 4 sources for a game, it doesn't sound great. I guess you're using multiple sources within each main source though (ie. multi sellers on ebay, multi sellers on amazon). so that's alright, but...
3. UPC? please, if ebay.com is anything like ebay.co.uk, only major sellers with the highest BIN prices are gonna list by UPC. a search by name, although a little harder and less precise, will give a much wider range of games from a wider range of sellers and give a much better average market price for items.
4. Do you have records of min average sale price and max average sale price? It's all very well if a few go for $50, but if there's still loads going for $5 it'd be useful to know.
I guess it all depends on what you're trying to achive with the site. Personally I need to know the minimum auction sale price on eBay.co.uk over the last month, as I can't afford to assume anything will sell for more. But if you're just aiming for a "someone managed to sell this item for $1337s, you can too!" kinda list, I spose you'd go about things differently...
More great ideas. Keep them coming.
Marc - I really like the idea for the top 10 expensive games page. We can definitely do it programming wise. I have added it to our list of features to add.
Gamechamp - So it would be one page with all the consoles for every system shown? Maybe we should just create an advanced search feature so you can see results for certain genres. It would let you see the values for each console but would also let someone else see the values for every RPG or Sports game too.
Geozelaude - I am trying to think of the best way to get import prices without being inaccurate. I think I might have a solution but the problem is searching by title only on ebay since imports don't have UPC. Someone listing "Diagasso key chain" in the video game section would show up in our prices along with real Diagasso game auctions. Or "Diagasso poster", etc. We don't want those kinds of mistakes so right now we would rather have less data and accurate prices. Hopefully we can add this though at some point.
Pepsi_Max2k - I really like the other geographic areas idea. We have discussed this before and should be able to add them at some point. We want to nail the US prices for though.
We do only have 3 or 4 sources but each source has multiple price points spread over multiple days so for very popular games like GTA IV we might have 200 different price points in a 7-day average price. That being said we are always looking for more sources.
UPC on ebay.com in the US is used on almost every listing where it is available. When listing the item ebay makes it very easy to know the UPC if it is available. And like I explained above, not searching by UPC adds some problems in terms of accuracy. We decided we would rather have more accurate prices and less data, instead of inaccurate prices and lots of data.
I would LOVE to see something based on PAL versions of games. I know this can be hard since the PAL releases varies from country to country but an estimate wouldn't hurt. I for one find it annoying that all US titles are cheaper and when I use this as a reference PAL sellers laugh me in the face :)
Having more ideas...
Deffinately still would like to see different geographical locations added, as there's always so much difference between them.
>> We do only have 3 or 4 sources but each source
>> has multiple price points spread over multiple
>> days
sounds good :) I just thought of something though - it might be nice if you could select to only view prices calculated from a single source. in the UK I've noticed places like play.com and amazon.co.uk always sell things for a premium, which would no doubt knock up average prices, though maybe you weight prices or something but... still might be nice to do :) and I'd still like to see average / mean / mode / min / max prices listed.
upc thing - yeah, sorry, hadn't noticed it's used loads on ebay.com, lucky :) ebay.co.uk users can only search by title as practically no one uses EANs here (it's not even possible on .co.uk for games). names are ok though. i can pretty much get away search "partial game name" "console abreviation" eg. "san andreas ps2", and if it's done under the correct category (vg > games > ps2) you get pretty much no abnormal results. not so easy for stuff with sequals though. i can only assume you'd have to do that by hand if you listed uk ebay prices *volunteers* ;) unless you got something to recognize and sort by images.
game covers! would be nice to see them on game listing pages. especially if you did do multi region titles, easy to recognize the difference.
Hey guys, Great site and could be very useful. However, typing in every game title and then having to filter out to the console your game is for, and then having to click on it to see the total data is very time consuming. This is a HUGE drawback when considering integration into our operation. Yes, the Firefox "hack" is nice but still not any difference when a customer brings in 10 or so games and of different platforms.
My recommendation... (1)add another search drop down above the currant search, include the filter there for different consoles, problem solved. In that drop down still include the field "all" (as default)that would still complete the search in the currant form.
(2) integrate the UPC standard for searching. this would allow for bar code scanning the game.This would have to be yet another field as a option to search. Your data collecting method technically would not change, but from that field would have a different "get". This data can be collected easily from your currant data sources as they already use this information in there databases. If necessary, there are sources for for standard bar code data for every VG ever made. Along with all the other relevant info as well(ie) developer, release date, genre, and so on.
Lastly, the ability to, after your account is created. To "personalize" your results based on your private settings of cash or trade. The personal setting of a percent of the returned results of your search. This would provide the user to dictate what to pay for the title based on there individual markup percent or desired profit based on the market prices that the search returned.
I would love to discuss this stuff in greater detail. Most of which doesn't seem to hard to deploy.
Fell free to call me 585-589-1602
Thanks for reading and your comments are certainly welcome.
Thanks,
Mike Barnett
President/CEO
Unlimited Electronics Group, Inc.
Add Pier Solar to Genesis list!
@anonymous - Thank you. We have added Pier Solar.
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