What can be better on a rainy Sunday than kicking back on the couch, controller in hand to spend a few hours with your favorite video game. We’re PC gamers by choice, but we realize that there are those unfortunate souls who prefer consoles, and we’re OK with that. What we’re not OK with is the problem of old games littering up the room, when they could be put to better use as recycled product to help us get newer titles.
VGFive is a service which lets you trade in your old games for ‘credits‘ which you can then use to obtain more games from others. It’s not a new idea of course, but it’s one of the latest iterations of the genre, and one which seems quite well done.
100 points are worth a notional $1, but all the trading is done via points, so you sell your games for points, which you then use to buy a game you want in points. Nice and clean. You can also cash out your points after a while, so you’re not locked into the system after selling.
The interface is nice and simple, and makes good use of thumbnail images, although the service does miss out on actual box shots to get an idea of the condition of a game. Presumably this cuts down on complexity and bandwidth costs. The service only works in the US and Canada at the moment, and sellers pay for postage (typically $2 to $3 they say).
Selling your game is painlessly easy, just mark up the condition, how much you want for it and any notes for buyers to read. It looks as though the service is doing around 7000 trades a month, which is not bad, and certainly good enough to have a decent stock of recent games on offer. There are games for most of the main platforms including PC, XBox and Playstation naturally.
There’s also a disputes process in the event that games don’t arrive or are not as described, and there’s a user forum for shooting the breeze and getting help. All in all it’s a pretty cool site, and a place which should definitely be in your bookmarks if you’re an avid game player. As the blurb says, it’s gotta be better than getting pennies on the dollar for your completed game in stores like GameStop.
