GameStop catches a lot of flack for their used games trade-in program. Most people feel that the scheme gives sellers too little money compared to what GameStop is able to resell them for. When you take a look at the setup of the program, you can see that it’s geared very specifically to keep money inside GameStop’s “ecosystem” and throws a whole bunch of qualifiers at clerks and customers to do so.

Now, GameStop’s overhauling their trade-in scheme. It simplifies all the variables that affect the price sellers get and increasing the base price for reselling a game by 20%.

It may not have seemed like it to some but GameStop says that the base value of trade-in games was $9.00. Starting on August 18th, the new scheme increases the base price to $11.00. They deem that to be a 20% increase in base value over the previous base so I’m guessing they’re not going to give you the full 22.2% elsewhere. The current scheme offered a whole pile of extra incentives on top of that for trading in and applying the credit to new items or trading in a bunch of new games at once but this new scheme simplifies that to differentiating between trade-ins for cash and trade-ins for credit.

One would assume that the tiering of games and their values wouldn’t change with this update. After all, that copy of NHL 2002 for the PS2 that I probably have gathering dust somewhere won’t be worth $11.00 if I trade it in next week (despite the awesome soundtrack that game had). Similarly, trading in a copy of The Last of Us: Remastered would probably be worth a couple of dollars more.

Kotaku was able to snag slides from an internal presentation to GameStop employees about the new trade-in program.

The reasons for GameStop trying to jump-start the trade-in program with increased values are twofold: 1) With more people going digital with games, they’re trying to keep the physical market alive with trade-in incentives. It’s a consideration that some gamers will probably undertake when deciding between buying from their console’s digital retailer or from GameStop. That $10 price difference for digital might not be worth it if you can go physical and get more than $10 in trade-in value for your game. And 2) Other games retailers are moving into the used games market and offering trade-in values above GameStop. They’re now competing with the likes of Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Amazon for your used games. Considering how important used games are to GameStop’s bottom line, they don’t want to lose ground.

Source: Kotaku