The Frugal Geek: Saving Big Money with Used Games

How much better is Bioshock 2 compared to Fallout 3?  Heavy Rain to Metal Gear Solid 4?  Now try to compare fun comparison in terms of dollars.  It’s hard to do, but some simple math can help you save a ton of cash.

It is a very obvious statement that purchasing a used copy of a game will save you money.  It is even more obvious that if you buy a used game originally released two years ago, it is going to cost you less money than a used game which was released two months ago.  Can you really say, though, that the best game of 2010 is three times better than the best game from 2008?   If you were to step into a crowded video game store and yell this question, I would expect it to set off a nerd war.  Although it is very contentious which game is actually better, it is an undeniable fact that the new release costs three times more than the game from 2008!

I know what you are thinking.  “Why would I want to go back and play old junk just to save a few bucks.  Stop being so cheap.”    Unless you are still in high school or below, I seriously doubt you have time to play every single hit game that comes out, meaning there are some really good titles you have missed over the past couple of years.  Personally, my free time dropped off once I went to college, and I fell 2-3 years behind the current releases by the time I graduated.  My free time still has not come back to those pre-college days, though, and I value both my time and my hard-earned money.  Therefore, I have developed this simple system for maximizing how much fun I can have, while minimizing the amount of money it costs.  Simply put, this system will get you the most bang for your buck.

Here are the rules:

• Rule #1: Never Buy a Game Until You Have Finished Those You Already Own.
  Most people have a “pile of shame” sitting right in their living rooms.  You know what I’m talking about.  It’s starting at you right now like a big nerdy version of the Geico money.  Once you finish playing these games that you already spent your money on, you’ll probably be a few months behind already.

• Rule #2:  Use Data to Plan Out Future Purchases
  In order to know what game to buy next, you will need some important information.  First, you will need to know how good it is, so write down the game’s review score from your website of choice.  Also, you need to know how much it costs, so take a few minutes to do some market research.  Once you are done, compare the results to the other games, and the numbers will help you decide what to buy next.  I will share my favorite sources for info, as well as my excel formulas to perform the comparison, at the end of this post.

• Rule #3: Never Overpay For a Used Game.
  You need to stop shopping at Gamestop right now.  When you are planning out your purchases ahead of time, you don’t have to overpay on used games at a brick-and-mortar store; there are many cheaper places to buy them online.  Also, don’t you dare let me see you selling a game to Gamestop!  You can get twice as much online, selling it at half the cost Gamestop will turn around and sell it to someone else for, making it  a win-win situation for both buyer and seller.  Don’t believe me?  You can check out recent trade-in values here.

• Rule #4: Always Have Fun
  If a game is truly awful, do not force yourself to play through it solely because it is in your “pile of shame.”  Video games are supposed to be fun, they are games after all.  I personally like to hold onto any games that I enjoyed, but if the game is no good, don’t waste your time on it!  Cut your losses and sell that thing online immediately.  Hopefully if you follow all the rules above, this will only apply when clearing out your initial stock of unplayed games.  From now on, you should only be buying the good stuff.

Now that you know the rules to follow, lets get into the details of how to plan out your future purchases.  Prepare yourself, for there will be math!

• Step 1: Start a spreadsheet listing new or upcoming games you want to buy.
• Step 2: Create a second column for review scores.  If you don’t have a favorite trusted source, I recommend GameRankings.com, which takes the average of many reviews and provides an easily searchable database.
• Step 3: Before buying your next game, find out how much each of the games on your list cost.  I recommend Half.com for used purchases.  Create a new column and use it to store these prices.  Updating this list should take just a few minutes each time you go to buy a new game.
• Step 4: Create another new column for a “composite score”.  In this field, you will enter a formula for the review score minus the current used price.  For example, the perfect game would be rated 100% positive, and be free.  Therefore, the formula would be 100 minus 0, for a total perfect score of 100.
• Step 5: Here is where the statistics come in.  Determine the average and standard deviation for your list of composite scores.  In Excel, this can be done with the AVERAGE and STDEV functions applied to the entire column.
• Step 6: We need to do a little more math here to get our end result, so create a new column, and enter the formula ” = (Composite Score – Average) / Standard Deviation “.  In statistics, this will get you what is called a Z-Value.
• Step 7: In this final step, ww are going to place the Z-Values on a bell curve.  Create one last column, and perform the Excel function NORMSDIST to the Z-Value column’s data.

What you end up with is a percentile ranking of all the video games you are interested in playing.  Re-order the chart by sorting this column’s data from high to low, and you will see areas where the percentiles group together.  You can make your own cutoff point, but I like to say that anything above an 80 in this column is definitely worth your money, so take your pick from the games in that percentile, and have some fun on the cheap!  As games drop in price, they will rise to higher percentiles, eventually becoming a good enough deal to warrant a purchase.

Feel free to download an example copy of my spreasheet by clicking this text. As an example, I have populated the spreadsheet with data for the top games from the years 2007-2010, using average review scores from GameRankings.com, and an average of the three lowest prices (for games in good condition with cases and manuals) listed on Half.com.  I hope you’ve enjoyed this article, and good luck getting more bang for your buck in the future.