New Tool: eBay Game Sniper

We've launched a new feature on the site we are calling eBay Game Sniper.

The tool constantly monitors eBay video game listings and instantly updates the page when it finds a game with a fixed price below our estimated value.

The page starts off with just a sample link and as new deals are found they are added to the top of the list.

Each listing shows the:

• Condition - Used, Complete (CIB), or New
• Game Name - The name of the product the seller selected when listing the game
• Listing Title - The title of the listing on eBay
• Savings - The difference between the fixed price and our estimated value
• Price - The price the seller is asking for the game
• Estimated Value - The value we estimate for the game in this condition

eBay Game Sniper Settings

There are a couple settings for the eBay Game Sniper.

Connection Status - If you are connected and receiving new listings as we find them. The tool automatically tries to reconnect if disconnected.

Desktop Notifications - If you click this box you will see notifications like the one below show up on your desktop. This allows you to do other work and still know when a new listing is found.

Other Details about eBay Game Sniper

The tool will notify you 1-2 minutes after a new listing has been posted. BUT the best deals sell quickly. The better the deal the faster you need to act to win it.

The tool is created as a web app so you can install it to your mobile device's home screen. Read how to do it on iOS or Android devices.

After using the tool please give us your feedback so we can improve it. There is a feedback link on the Snipe page.

Average or Median: Which To Choose

A good number of readers and users of VGPC asked to see the average price for all games for each console and a chart to show the pricing history like we do for individual games. During some of the preliminary research into adding the feature I ran into an interesting dilemma. Do we show an average price or a median price? Which one we choose makes a big difference in the price we would show. Let me use the NES as an example. The average NES price is $17.55 while the median is $3.09. Why is there such a big difference?

We have prices for about 750 NES games and the vast majority of them sell for less than $10. From the chart below you can see how the game prices are distributed. The red bars show the number of games in a price range and the blue line is the cumulative percentage of games that sell below that price.


From the chart you can see that 60% of NES games sell below $4 and 80% sell below $10. There are about 60 games that sell for $20 or more, or about 7.8% of the total. These 60 games are the ones that skew the average so much higher than the median. Many of these games sell for well over $500. Nintendo World Championship alone adds $5.68 to the average price.

If we were to show the average price NWC and other expensive games would dominate the prices. For example, if NWC were to sell tomorrow for $6,000 the average NES price would jump from $17.55 to $19.87. But the median price would still be $3.09. Below is an example using the real average NES prices during the last 30 days. Between Dec. 4th and Dec. 5th the price jumped more than $2 because of a high priced game.


This same problem happens with other systems too. Newer systems like Xbox 360, Wii, and PS3 would see price spikes every Tuesday when new releases come out and older systems like SNES, N64, and Dreamcast would have big swings when rare games increase or decrease in price.

Because of this we are leaning towards using a median price instead of an average price when we start showing price charts for every console. What do you think?

The Median price for those who don't know is the cutoff where half the prices are above and half the prices are below that price.

How Can We Make VGPC Better For You?

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.

Video Game Pricing Hack with Firefox

The "Price My Game" search feature on VideoGamePriceCharts.com is a great way to find the price for any video game I want. But It's kind of a pain going to the home page, then clicking the search box, and finally entering the game I want to look up (I know its not that many steps but when you do 8-9 searches per day, it gets to be annoying). I have a little hack for all our Firefox users to do these searches in one step (directions for doing the same thing in Opera and in Internet Explorer).

You will be creating your own custom search using Firefox. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Right Click on the "Price My Game" search box. It's in the upper left corner of every page and looks like this.

2. A prompt will come up. Choose the "Add a keyword for this Search" option.

3. Name the bookmark and keyword. I used Name = "VideoGamePriceCharts.com Search" and Keyword = "vgpc". Do whatever will help you remember this, but keep the keyword short. You will be typing that a lot.

4. You have officially created your own custom search. Congratulations! To use it, hit "Ctrl-L" or just click on the address bar at the top of Firefox. Now type "vgpc" followed by a space and what you want to search for. I did "vgpc final fantasy" which brings up every final fantasy game in our pricing database.

Now you can search for any video game prices you want with one simple step. Thanks to our great programming/technical staff for the heads up on this ability in FireFox.