Goodbye Outliers

After fruitful discussions with a consulting economist, we've made a minor adjustment to the way we calculate prices. The goal was to reduce the influence that outlying price points could have on our determination of market prices. For instance, let's say that someone lists a copy of
Playboy: The Mansion for $1,223.73 or Battletanx Global Assault for $999.99 (which has since been removed). Both of those prices are far above the market price for those games. In certain circumstances, under our old algorithm, those outliers could have caused us to list the Current Price as higher than it should have been. With the new algorithm, such outliers no longer cause a problem.

This seems like a good time to mention a couple caveats about market pricing in the video game industry. Because of low sales volumes for many used games, the market is much less efficient than a typical commodities market. That means that the charts and prices can be highly volatile. For popular games, this isn't much of a problem. Rare games, however, are particularly vulnerable.

Video Game Pricing Hack with Firefox

The "Price My Game" search feature on VideoGamePriceCharts.com is a great way to find the price for any video game I want. But It's kind of a pain going to the home page, then clicking the search box, and finally entering the game I want to look up (I know its not that many steps but when you do 8-9 searches per day, it gets to be annoying). I have a little hack for all our Firefox users to do these searches in one step.

You will be creating your own custom search using Firefox. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Right Click on the "Price My Game" search box. It's in the upper left corner of every page and looks like this.

2. A prompt will come up. Choose the "Add a keyword for this Search" option.

3. Name the bookmark and keyword. I used Name = "VideoGamePriceCharts.com Search" and Keyword = "vgpc". Do whatever will help you remember this, but keep the keyword short. You will be typing that a lot.

4. You have officially created your own custom search. Congratulations! To use it, hit "Ctrl-L" or just click on the address bar at the top of Firefox. Now type "vgpc" followed by a space and what you want to search for. I did "vgpc final fantasy" which brings up every final fantasy game in our pricing database.

Now you can search for any video game prices you want with one simple step. Thanks to our great programming/technical staff for the heads up on this ability in FireFox.