>How are prices in your local pawn/thrift stores? Have you ever gotten a good deal?
I’ve never, ever, had any luck with local thrift stores. All they’ve ever had as far as games go are a few licensed, sports, and shovelware games, especially for the Wii and PC (since next to nowhere else will take the latter). Granted, the only ones left in town these days are St Vincent de Paul and Goodwill, and the latter opened an electronics and media-centric branch somewhere on the east coast years back, which I assume all their actually good stuff goes to, to sell as full price. Pawn shops are a bit better, but still shit selection. I assume people only sell them the stuff they can’t get more for elsewhere.
Where I’ve actually had a lot of luck in the past was a local multimedia chain, which had a habit of not knowing what they actually had. Sometimes it meant absolutely outrageous prices on stuff that would be cheaper literally anywhere else, but you could also find stuff for a fraction of what other stores asked at the time. Got a lot of games I was interested in for an average of a half to a sixth their usual prices from them, and occasionally even less. Someone eventually caught on to how much money they’d missed out on though, and now they do what everyone else does, and just check ebay instead of whatever their system used to say it previously sold at. And of course, most people these days just seem to sell their used games online anyway, so they don’t even get all that much interesting in anymore, and the video game sections at all of their locations have been heavily downsized as a result (the cleared shelf space going to manga at one of them, and funko pops at the other two). Last really good finds from them were Rising Zan ($20) and Senran Kagura: Shinovi Versus ($9) just before the chink flu spiked demand for both video games and prices even higher. Stimulus checks didn't help things either.
>>218265
Far as I’ve heard, the remaster having ridiculous prices was because SCEA (but apparently less so SCEE) shortprinted it, and only sold it online rather than at brick and mortar retail, as if they had next to no faith in it. That said, I have been seeing a noticeable amount of NTSC-U copies available locally, so maybe they finally got around to reprinting it the way NoA did for Xenoblade Wii and Metroid Prime Trilogy. Prices are still about $50-60 where I am, though, so maybe it’s just been an influx from people trading in both their PS4s and their games in order to buy PS5s or something.
>>218388
A few of the local gamestops where I’m at do actually still have a handful of seventh and eighth gen games on a small shelf and cabinet. Not even just shovelware or licensed shit, but proper games someone might actually want.
>I wonder where the fuck those hundreds of used PS3 games they had in their various stores ended up.
If they were worth playing at all and not common as dirt, they probably sold them long ago, either before or during clearance sales to make way for newer systems, while the rest were eventually broken and trashed (destroyed product can apparently be written off for taxes, even if self-destroyed), back before Gamestop started to stock retro games on their website. Funny (or sad?) thing is that the above seventh and eighth gen games; the DS, PS3, 360, Wii, even 3DS, weren’t even being sold at bottom of the barrel clearance prices despite not being current, but for as much as they feel they can get away with. Like a full $30 for Super Smash Bros, or $50 for Pokemon ORAS. I feel like, rather than them being eager to get them all out of the store again, they want to hit the “seventh and eighth gen are now retro” crowd with the expected prices, no matter how long they wind up sitting there. And sadly, on a few occasions, their prices are still about the cheapest compared to other stores here, by a long shot actually. Like a complete Pokemon HeartGold for $100 instead of $180.
>I rarely bought any used game from them as most of them were usually in such disastrous conditions that put me off, but i do remember not long ago getting a pristine copy of MGR for only 5 bucks and its code for a Grey Fox skin still working.