I was just surfing some sites, like always, and came upon a pricing sheet that was leaked from compusa, with their markup for some nintendo wii items - if I'm reading this correctly, left price is how much they're going to sell the items for and right price is how much they pay for those items.

WII CONSOLE - 249.99 / 237.50
WII REMOTE CONTROLL - 39.99 / 32.00
WII POINTS CARD - 24.99 / 17.00
WII CLASSIC CONTROLLER - 19.99 / 14.50
WII NUNCHUK CONTROLLER - 19.99 / 14.50
WII GPAK ORGANIZER&TRAVEL - 29.99 / 18.95
WII RAYMAN RAVING RABIDS - 49.99 / 41.2
WII THE LEGEND OF ZELDA:TW - 49.99 / 40.00
WII RED STEEL REVOLUTION - 49.99 / 41.22

Retailers only making $12.49 on the wii console apparently.

nothing new here, retail stores have never made a lot of money on new system sales.

It's the software baby!

Knowing this almost gives used video game traders a bad name. Here in Florida, and I believe 1-2 other states, we have a lot of Rhino Video Games stores popping up every where. I probably told this before but I'll tell it again.

When rhino games was small, just breaking in to the retail stores, they moved in to the old babbages store at the local mall. This was when Sega CD games were still selling on most store shelves. I took a bunch of sega cd games to rhino, probably around $600+ retail, all in great condition, all complete, and they offered me $17 for them all.

When the lady at the desk started to pull back the games closer to her and pull out money from here cach register, I pulled the games back. She said "what's wrong?" I said some thing like "No fucking way. You're trying to rip people off."

I knew rhino games before they were in retail as well. They started by setting up stands in flea markets, and then when they got a large ammount of games stocked up, they started re-packaging them up and having companies like Toys R US and Media Play re-sell them.

I also remember another vendor that I bought a lot of stuff from. Him and his brother had a flea market booth in different cities, with quite a bit of games. I bought from him every week and traded in stuff every week, but kind of felt like I was being ripped off each time.

Any way, I do remember wondering why some of his "new/sealed" games were so cheap some times. One day, I asked him a question about a game, and he took one of those new/sealed games and opened it up to show me - and ya know, there was no instructions or any inserts in the game. I even remember the game: prince of persia, the snes version. So, one day I asked him if he had one of those package re-sealers. His quick response was "yes," and then he thought about it for a second and said "but I never seal up used games and sell them as new."

One thing I also remember is he asked me if I had any boxes and instruction manuals to trade. I had like 100 of them or more. He wanted them so badly but I never closed any deal with those. Any way, he was definately taking used games and boxes and selling them as new.

Going back to Rhino Games - this place sold their used video games almost as much as new, some times the same price, and the bad thing about it was that I remember thinking that I could go to toys r us or best buy and buy the same game new for what they wanted used, yet they pay pawn shop prices for them.

Game trading and prices should, I hate to say this, be regulated, to protect innocent children from being taken advantage of by these used game trading shops. I remember when I was a kid, trying to trade games to several of the game dealers at flea markets and such, my mother use to wonder why they would not offer a fair trade-in, especially after she paid her hard-earned money for the game. So, she had several run-ins with the dealers at the time. Parents see it as spending $50 or more for a game and then just wasting it. Psychologically, trading video games to used video game traders or pawn shops could be more like an addiction, just like gambling, shopping, etc.

When a parent wonders why, the answer is simple: They do it because they can. There's no one to regulate what's fair or not, and kids do it. So, they have a market.

If they only profit $5-$10 per game for new sales, they shouldn't profit $40 for used sales.

Hey guys

Good to be back!

Not much has changed for me, but as long as I can make time for here, I guess that's ok.

This is not really that new to me. Rhino is still just a 'new' part of the gaming problem. This went on before there were Gamestops posted on mall walls. To me buying low and selling high has been more effective for these retailers than expected. My guess is it "pays the store bills" if you will

Doesn't Video Game Collector tell you the value of just about anything? It would make a good tool somehow to at least try to fix this problem regarding trade-ins, cause I know these stores and ebay are not ideal answers.

Yeah, I think Rhino was pretty fair when they were in flea markets. I think they did all trading as 2 for 1 and had a list of like several different categories, with a list of games in each category. So, if you traded 2 games for some thing in category 2, you get 1 game from category 2.

I understand that this was merely a way to build up stock and never really thought they were going to stick to it, if they ever got bigger. Of course, I never thought they'd get as big as they are now either.

And as far as EBAY goes, you're right. You can't really go by what ebay sells stuff for, as a pricing or collector's guide. For 1, the prices can change dramatically once or more times per year. Secondly, there are a lot of people that pay more for what's popular or in demand, while more rare titles often get ignored.

I see why sony said before that they may be putting in protection in their games to make them only useable on the first system they were played on now. I still think it's kind of over the edge, because systems could blow up over time, and you wouldn't be able to easily replace all of the games. So, in the best case scenario is that you have the same unit repaired multiple times until you get tired of it.

Sony claimed that the used video game business is taking money away from video game makers, but I don't think that's the problem, for consumers at least. We don't want used video game traders making more money off of used games than they do with new ones.

It's really up to consumers to put rhino and other companies that take advantage of children out of business. Unless you have to have a reall fast sell, put it on ebay or even local classified ads. It may not sell for what it's worth, but I'll guarantee you it'll say for a lot more than what rhino or a pawn shop would pay.

It sounds like their version of Digital Rights Management. Do they not carry the same objective? (Use special coding to keep games out of outside third-party reach.)

Also, suppose Final Fantasy XIII-2 was a rare release that lasted on the shelves for six months. Suppose you are the unlucky one who missed the chance of owning the game (borrowing or renting are already out of the question). How would you gain access to one and call it yours without going through all the ownership rigamoroll? Just one mini example.

I'm certainly glad companies discuss things before trying them.

I think they've also said it would be easier to put out rentable games that self destruct over a certain ammount of time with blu-ray. I've even heard that microsoft was looking into self destructable windows install cds, and I believe we'll eventually see these as well. Microsoft is moving more towards this with longhorn, which they claim can only be moved from 1 pc to another 1 time.

I think in the case of longhorn, it'll be complete activation via the web, but in the future, who knows.

The main problem with renting self destruct cds is that rental stores will probably be put out of business, since every major store (Best buy, media play, k-mart, and probably even walgreens, cvs, and convinient stores) could carry them.

It's also possible that companies make renter discs, that can be used on multiple systems. There have been a few vhs and laserdiscs movies in the past years that were made for renters, which usually got the disc a few weeks or even a month before they came out for sale, but from what I can tell, they were pretty much the same movie, and they cost around $90 for some of the vhs ones.

I suppose on-line activations in games is an option, but in the long run, it's not a good one. A true collector/gamer will want to play the games off and on for many years, and it's pretty much proven that all servers eventually go offline.