Will be interesting to see retro items for sale in store
Of course, mark-up will be insane
EB Games Trading Retro Gear
spackbace on 12/03/2025 - 20:04
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Would be nice to buy some moddable 3/DS and Wii/U consoles easily again. I bet the prices are high though, might still be better off importing a used 3/DS LL from Japan.
EB Games as a business are likely not doing very well.
Back around 20 years ago, EB Games used to always be full of people - "on sale" signs everywhere, really loud, "in your face" marketing. Stashes of pre-owned games in crates or just spread out on a table. Really great deals, I remember something like 4 for $20 pre-owned. Most of the games were crap, but you could always find really cheap gems, and it was just a cool place to come and hang out.
It was really a great place to go if you were into games, they had great staff who were often really into gaming themselves, they carried niche or rare titles that you wouldn't be able to get from Target, Kmart and the like, and their prices were generally competitive (particularly for consoles).
These days, all of the traditional brick and mortar shops have a decent gaming section, almost all games are cheaper at BigW or JB HiFi, easy to trade pre-owned games on Facebook Marketplace, online retailers have all of the niche titles you could ever want, and a lot of people just buy digital instead of physical games.
Think this is just another move from EB to stay relevant (after they started moving more to selling collectables and merch over selling games). It's sad to see really - even the marquee EB Games stores now seem to rarely have more than a few people browsing at any time, and more often than not, in the merch sections rather than the games sections.
they need one thing
more pokemon cardsmost stores have been sold out for months. if they can get more stock they will be fine
Pokemon TCG Card are basically impossible to get everywhere.
They have dedicated Discord Groups/Bots that monitor all the vendors so good luck competing with them.
The market for Pokemon cards today genuinely baffles me - I would hazard a guess that most people buying Pokemon cards today don't even play the card game.
The Pokemon stores in Japan have daily limits on the 151 boxes and try to enforce it with UV light stamps. It's not unusual for them to be sold out mid-afternoon each day.
There's good money to be made reselling them. A quarter of my suitcase was cards.
I wish EB had lounges where you could come in, buy a coffee, and just try out all the new games. I guess I wish libraries had games.
Depends on the library/council I guess. Some libraries have lots of games in both physical and digital formats.
I noticed today my local EB Games had shutdown. I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did!
I was looking for my local EB one day. I could have sworn it was next to the reject shop. Then after walking up and down the shopping centre a couple of times, realised it had closed down. Then I was sad.
agree, big w/target/jb/amazon always seem to have cheaper games (i speak for ps5, not sure about other platforms)
even when they have massive 'sale's on, no real discounts on aaa games.
massive discount on 5 year old fifa, madden and nba games though.
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Especially since prices are not published online and you have to visit a store for valuation.
You think cashies or some other random pawn broker or second hand games store is going to give a sweet deal?
I remember many years ago, in one of my local games stores a kid brought in a copy of GTA 5 to sell, they told him he'd get $1.80, he almost cried in disbelief.
All those places are ruthless.
I'm interested to see how this goes. I don't expect prices to be great. EB games has to cover their overheads after all. But more availability of retro gear is a good thing.
However I'm worried about how they will handle fakes. With the volume of fake cartridges I've seen coming out of China, I'm dubious that your average EB games teenage clerk will be able to tell the difference.
I used to see a lot of fake DS/3DS games at EB, same with cashies, don't think either of them employed anyone with an ounce of knowledge on older systems.
i remember i sold my N64 and 10-12 games for like 600 bucks on eBay a bunch of years ago
Reminds me of Akihabara 6+ years ago vs now. Back then you could get Gameboys for under $40 and now they're behind cases at double the price or more. They're just going to make everything more expensive now.
The prices going up in Akihabara is mostly due to it's growing popularity & increase in tourism. And it's become sort of an attraction park for tourists now, just from my visit last week all the used game stores and otaku goods stores were all frequented by either gaijins or mainland chinese.
So all the goods there are priced accordingly for tourists who are converting from strong currencies like USD and can take advantage of the instant tax-free shopping. They are not really catering for local populace anymore.
Yeah Akihabara has always had that attraction. Years ago you'd go to Super Potato to see the massive collection and laugh at those paying $50+ for the Gameboys off the shelf and now those shelves are completely empty, as all the other cheaper stores have sold out. Even comparing 2023 Akihabara to now there's a big difference. There used to be stores filled to the brim with used GTX 10xx, RTX 20xx/30xx GPUs and now all those stores have been gutted. There are of course a few with overpriced GTX 1070's for $400.
Now you have to go to a really, really rural Hard Off or Janpara (catchy theme) to find the retro bargains.
I don't suppose you made it to the Maywa Denki store in the Tokyo Radio Department Store? I always go there for an otamatone jam and once managed to meet Nobumichi himself.
do they sell them as well ? couldn'f find any NES games etc.
People need to start trading them in first. It hasn't been 24 hours yet.
ah! :)
They're going to make a killing on these, and they'll charge whatever they want and people will buy them.
Probably bodes well for the value of my collection, but it will make collecting games a more expensive habit than it already is. Glad I've already got most of the games I want.
They probably realised everyone else was doing the same and thought hey - we’re missing out! nostalgia sells.