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Amazon launches game trade-in program

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March 5, 2009, 4:57 PM EST

In a move sure to irk some game developers, Amazon.com has just introduced a new used game trade-in program that lets consumers send in their old video games in exchange for store credit. The process is fairly simple: Find the game on Amazon’s trade-in beta site to see how much it is worth, print out a free shipping label to send your game, and once received (assuming all is well with your copy of the game) you’ll get an Amazon gift card credited to your account.

Other companies such as GameStop make a good percentage of their revenues from buying and selling used games. However, according to data gathered by CNET, Amazon is for the most part offering higher trade-in prices than them and you can use that credit to buy not just games but pretty much anything off their vast catalog of products.

Retailer Toys“R”Us also stepped into the used games market recently and, of course, you could always avoid the middleman by selling directly through eBay and even Amazon’s own Marketplace to keep the extra profit. In the end, increased competition for used games seems like nothing but good news for gamers.

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User Comments (2)

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tengeta
on March 5, 2009
5:14 PM
Too bad for developers IMO, until they produce quality games and make them less than 50 dollars within the first three years of it being out people will resort to these tactics to buy and sell games. Deal with it, when you act like the music industry people will treat you just as bad.

sbonneau
on March 7, 2009
12:44 PM
To date there hasn't been anyone the size of Amazon to offer this type of service to consumers - I believe Amazon will iterate their offering (as well as other successful buyback sites) to add more benefits and successfully differentiate from Gamestop’s in-store trading. Gamestop has recently said that online trading will fail. This is like Blockbuster saying that Netflix will fail because why would people want to receive new movies in the mail rather than go to their local Blockbuster store – we now know how that story line has played out.

Though buyback sites have been around since 1996/97 (with the debut of SecondSpin.com) this category of ecommerce (consumer to business) has been a sleeping giant. No one with any significant resources to date has offered consumers the type of service that really compels consumers to trade online in the numbers consumers do with online ecommerce or rental of movies through Netflix type services. With Amazon’s entry this sleeping giant of an online commerce segment will wake up and challenge brick and mortar stores (who trade) like ecommerce did with brick and mortar for the last 10+ years.

As far as game developers they should buy back their own games and resell them on Amazon and other marketplaces (with added content) as third party resellers do today. Game on!

Disclosure – http://www.Buybak.com provides a buyback software platform as a service for online retailers.

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