Tuesday, January 6, 2009

2008 Game & Publisher Resale Values

This report looks at the Publishers, Consoles, and Games with the best and worst resale values. It includes over 1,000 games released during 2008 for Nintendo DS, PSP, Xbox 360, Wii, Playstation 3, and Playstation 2.

Publishers | Consoles | Games

Publisher Resale Values


The list of publisher resale values below includes every publisher with six or more games released in 2008. The '% Change' column is the average change in resale price from the original MSRP to the average price during December 2008.

Top Ten Game Publishers By Resale Value


Top Ten Game Publishers By Resale Value

All Game Publishers By Resale Value


All Game Publishers By Resale Value

Console Resale Values


The list of resale values by console shown below is an average of all the games released during 2008 for each console with the average MSRP and average price in December used to calculate the '% Change'.

Console By Average Resale Value Per Game


Game Consoles By Resale Value

Video Game Resale Values


The top 10 and bottom 10 games by resale value and shown in the tables below. The games are ranked by '% Change' from the original MSRP to the average price during December 2008.

Best Game Resale Values

Top Ten Video Games By Resale Value

Worst Game Resale Values


Bottom Ten Video Games By Resale Value

What Causes High or Low Resale Values


There are many factors that effect a game's resale value like the quality of the game, the genre of the game, if its a collector's edition, and if it is aimed at casual gamers or hardcore gamers. If a video game is horrible with no replay value, the resale value will generally drop really quickly. While a top-notch game with great single player, compelling online play, and lots of re-playability will keep its value longer because fewer people want to sell their copy and lots of people want to buy it.

Casual games generally have better resale values as well because casual gamers are buying games that they can continue to play over and over with friends. Casual games also don't have front loaded sales where the vast majority of copies sell within the first month. They will continue to sell consistently for months (Wii Fit and Mario Kart Wii in the top 10 NPD sales every month since their release is a good example of this).

Many hardcore gamers on the other hand buy games the day they come out, beat it very quickly, and then resell it so they can buy another game. The demand for the games is very front loaded. With demand lower in the months following release and a big supply of used games hitting the market, the resale prices drop.

The three consoles with the best resale values are the ones generally associated with casual gamers and games, Wii, Nintendo DS, and Playstation 2. The two worst in terms of resale value are the two with the highest concentration of 'hardcore' gamers, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

Another factor causing higher resale prices on casual consoles is retailers themselves. "It is no surprise that Wii titles hold on to their value more than any other platform." says Jesse Divnich from EEDAR "Retailers don't fully understand the Wii consumer yet which often leads to retail sell-outs, which correlates with higher resale prices." The top four titles on the top games by resale price list are Wii games that were sold out at many stores at the end of 2008.

This post is part of our 2008 Video Game Prices in Review series.

5 comments :

Anonymous said...

another nice article. i'm curious about how the median price of games for older platforms rose or fell in comparison to other platforms in 2008 as well.

JJ Hendricks said...

Good question. I can do a post about the median prices for each system during 2008. Probably a table showing the price at the beginning of 2008, end of 2008, and the % change.

I am going to be doing a series of posts looking back at 2008 and hopefully I will have those finished up by the end of January.

mndrix said...

Thanks for this analysis. You make a good point about the difference between the casual and hardcore games/gamers.

It would be interesting to see numbers comparing the average price change per game-day for 2008. This would remove the variable of the release dates during the year. For instance, I would expect that by December a game released in January would have depreciated more than a game released in November. If a publisher released more games early in the year, we'd expect a higher depreciation from them, all else being equal. By dividing each game's 2008 depreciation by the number of days it was on the market in 2008, you'd eliminate that factor.

Travis Hendricks said...

mndrix - I agree with you. What makes the top 2 games the most impressive (Mario Kart Wii and Wii Fit) is that they released far earlier in the year than the other games on the list but they still have higher resale value. Even though they were on the market for sometimes 5 or 6 months longer they still maintained their resale value.

Great article.

Game Business said...

Surprise by rather high wii resell value.

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