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TalkBack / Re: Secondhand Games on Wii, DS Retain Most Value

« on: January 13, 2009, 08:59:11 AM »

They did a study on used games and didn't include data from GameStop? That's crazy.

Hi insanolord.  I'm one of the developers at Video Game Price Charts.  I thought I'd try and explain why we don't include GameStop in our data.  To include a video game retailer in our data, one of two things must be true.

• We can obtained raw sales data indicating that a specific game, sold at a specific price on a specific date.  This is the case for eBay and JJGames
• The retailer's listing mechanism allows sellers to list a specific game for a specific price.  Once that item is sold, it's removed from the listings.  This is the case for Amazon and Half.com

We have no way of obtaining raw sales data from GameStop, so #1 doesn't help.  GameStop's listing mechanism also doesn't agree with #2, since there's only a used and a new price without any variation within those condition categories. Essentially, there's no way for us to tell whether the GameStop price is above or below market value because there's no mechanism to detect whether people are actually buying at those prices.

Our eventual goal is to have all of our pricing data come from sources like #1.  We're working on some changes so that our data from Half.com is like that in the future.  If we can ever get raw sales data from GameStop, we would definitely include them as part of our data.

I hope that helps.