VGPC Is Tracking New Game Prices

Some of you might have noticed that the game pages on the site changed late last night. We have been tracking and recording prices for new video games and are now displaying them alongside the used prices. Here is an example and explanations for what has changed:



The image above shows how the Chrono Trigger price section of the site now looks.

#1. New Price - The biggest change is the new price listed on each page. Like the current price we showed before, it is the most recent price for the game BUT it only includes items that people listed as new condition.

#2. Observation Date and Source Count - This information is still the same as before and tells you when the prices shown were last updated and how many sources we have for the price. A quick note about the sources, we might say 3 sources but there could be multiple actual sales from each source. For a popular game like Mario Kart Wii ebay might have 20+ sales in a day. All of those sales go into the price but ebay is only listed as 1 source.

#3. Used Price - Where we used to have the "current price" listed we have changed it to "used price". The price in this section only includes the used games that sold recently. This is a change from before because previously the price included used and new prices since it was an overall average.

Other Things to Note - We only have a couple weeks worth of new prices so some rarer games or older games that don't sell in new condition very often might show as "N/A". It just means we haven't seen a new sale for that game yet so we can't say what the price is.

Future Changes - The chart section only shows the used price for now because we don't have enough data to show the new price too. Once we have at least two months of data the charts will start showing the new prices along side the used prices so you can see how they both change historically.

We hope you find this new feature valuable. It is amazing to me to see how much more expensive new NES and SNES games are than the used versions. Go ahead and look at a few game pages to check out the new feature for yourself.

Please give us your feedback in the comments section below.

VGPC Site Running Slow

We wanted to let you know that the VGPC main site is running very slow this morning because of some malicious attacks on the data center where our site is hosted. There are some server overload attempts coming from many different IP addresses so it takes a while for the host to fix these kinds of issues. For the next few hours our main pricing site will probably be running very slow or not be accessible at all.

Sorry for any inconvenience. We hope this is resolved shortly.

UPDATE: As of 10:00 AM MST we are back to normal. The attackers have been defeated and justice restored to the Internet. Or at least our data center.

Price Guide: 7-day Price

After feedback from our customers and considering the benefits, we've made a slight adjustment to the way that daily prices are calculated for our Video Game Price Guide files. Instead of reporting a price based on data for only one day, the price is now based on data from the seven most recent days. This should eliminate some price volatility and make the data files, which are still updated every night, more useful for retail users.

This change is not reflected in the prices shown on the website. That's because our product pages show the most recent price and the percent change since the day before. Using a seven day price would send confusing signals.

These changes to the file will be in effect as of tomorrow morning.

Product ID in Price Guide Files

We've added an optional additional column to our daily data downloads (aka Price Guides) to help you better link our data with yours. The new column provides a unique identifier for each product in our database. Before this change, you had to link our data to yours by comparing the UPCs or product names. The programming for that technique was more complicated than it needed to be. Now, you can simply correlate our product identifiers with your own product IDs to easily and consistently update your database from the daily downloads.

If you already have your system configured to use the older file format, don't worry. The old format is still available at the same URL you've been using and you don't need to make any changes. If you do want the new column, replace today.csv in your Price Guide URL with today-v1.csv

We've updated the Basic and Premium sample files to reflect the new format. If you have any questions, please email us.

Search by UPC or ASIN

You can now search for products on VGPC by UPC or ASIN. Just type one or the other into the search box and hit Enter. A moment later, you'll be at the price chart page for that product. If you find any UPCs or ASINs that don't appear to be working correctly, please let us know.

Rare Games and 90-day Prices

Thanks to an astute visitor (hi Troy), we discovered that the console pages,
such as the one for NES, were displaying a blank space in the "90-day Price" column if we had no price points for a game during the previous 90 days. It was quite unclear what the blank space meant. For such low volume games, the 90-day Price column now shows "none" and hovering your mouse over that link explains that there are no price points
for the game during the last 90 days, but you can still click the link to see the historic prices.

We have some changes in the works which should prevent this kind of thing from happening, even for low volume games, but those changes aren't quite ready. Thanks for the feedback and keep it coming.

Handling One Search Result

We've recently updated the search results page on Video Game Price Charts
so that it automatically redirects you to the game page if your search only
returned one result. That saves you one entire click. If you
search for hundreds of games a day, that can be a significant savings.

If you're using a search shortcut in your browser, this change should be even more helpful.

Enjoy!

Slow Console Pages Yesterday. Fixed Now.

Yesterday morning we added a new service to the console pages on our site that let you see every game available for a particular console and the 90-day average price (for an example see these NES, PS2, SNES, or Wii pages). We gave you the ability to find the current prices on ebay, amazon, or half.com right from that page.

This change though slowed down these pages to an almost unbearable speed. It took us over two minutes to load some pages. We couldn't stand the wait when we were testing. I'm sure you were upset too.

The good news is we think the problem is fixed now. All the console pages load as fast as they did two days ago. The pages still take a little while to load (no more than 15 seconds) but then there is no waiting time for sorting or filtering the data.

Sorry for this annoyance. And Thank You for using our video game pricing site.

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.

It Sorts, It Filters, It Dices

We've updated the console pages on Video Game Price Charts to show the most recent prices right in the table. For instance, to easily answer the question, "What is the most expensive Saturn game" visit the Sega Saturn console page and after the game list loads, click the "Price" column header a couple times.

We've added the same sorting and filtering ability to the search results page. What's the cheapest dance game for PS2 (yeah, you guessed it): search for "dance" games, select "Playstation 2" from the filter box below the "Console" column header and then click the "Price" column header to sort by price. It's that easy (the searching I mean, not the resulting celebrity).

New Lower Prices for Video Game Price List

We have added more price points for our downloadable video game price guide service so it is cheaper for retailers and collectors to access all our pricing data. We now offer a 1 month subscription for $55 and 3 months for $150. We still offer the 6 month and 12 month plans too. See our price chart to compare the prices and choose the best plan for you.

These shorter subscription periods allow you to try the service with less risk, if you don't like it after a month you don't have to continue. But we're confident you will save time and make more money using the file.

We are also offering free consultations on the best ways your organization can use the pricing file. We can offer customized advice and get you ready to start using the file on day one.

Prices from All eBay Auctions

Our daily price updates now reflect the price of every successful eBay video game auction (for auctions that included a UPC). That's around 10,000 sales per day for more than 6,400 games. This new price source means more accurate prices and lower volatility. So go ahead and visit the page for your favorite game and see how the market is treating it.

10,000 Video Games in Pricing Database

VideoGamePriceCharts.com has added its 10,000 video game to the database!!! Yesterday we added over 100 snes games to our list so there are now a total of 10,029 video games with daily updated prices in our database.

We thought about giving our customers something to celebrate the 10,000 game (Redline F-1 Racer for Super Nintendo) but we already give all our users free access to the best video game pricing data available. What more could you want? Timely, accurate video game prices is the gift that keeps on giving.

Thank you for continuing to use our video game pricing site. Maybe when we reach 15,000 games we really can give something away to our valued users.

I'll close off this post by including a small collection of "10,000" images to honor this event. If you find any other images with 10,000 in them feel free to post them in the comments.

More Than 1,100 Playstation Games in Database

Yesterday we added a little more than 400 Playstation games and prices to our database. That brings our total number to: 1,133 PS1 Games. You should be able to find daily updated prices on almost every Playstation 1 game released in the US (I'm sure there are a few that slipped through the cracks, let me know if you find any we are missing).

This new round of of updates brings our video game total to 9,893 games. We are now working to add any missing SNES games so you will get updates on all Super Nintendo game prices too.

After adding the Super NES games, our database will most likely exceed 10,000 games!! And thanks to a suggestion from TanookiTravis over at GameGym, I think we will have some sort of party.

Over 450 Nintendo NES Games Added

We recently added more than 450 NES games to our pricing database. We now have 692 original Nintendo games with daily price updates. Which brings our total to.......drum roll please: 9,138 video games, accessories, and consoles

That's right, Video Game Price Charts now has 9,138 video games that you can find prices on for free.

VideoGamePriceCharts.com Live Again!

The server is back up and running again for the video game pricing side of things. We are looking into what caused the problem to help ensure it doesn't happen again. Sorry for any inconvenience. I hope nobody needed to price their video game to defend their sister's honor or something else really important. If so, you can do it now. I hope its not too late!

VideoGamePriceCharts.com Server Down

The VideoGamePriceCharts.com server has been down since yesterday. Luckily this blog is hosted on a different server so at least part of the site is still up and running. We are working to get the site back up and will hopefully have it running this morning. We apologize for this outage. In the last couple of days our site has gotten a lot more traffic because of a few articles about it and this might have contributed to the problems.

We will let you know when it is back online.

More Video Games Added to Pricing Database

Over the weekend VideoGamePriceCharts.com added more than 900 titles to our database. There are now 8,788 video games in our database all with daily updated prices.

Most of the titles added were for the Playstation 2, Nintendo DS, Xbox, and Gamecube with some titles for Wii, Xbox 360, and Playstation 3.

We continue to work to add video games to our database so you can find up-to-date prices for any video game on any console at any time.

Faster, Better Prices

We've recently migrated our price collecting bots to a new server and made some programming optimizations. As a result, daily prices are available by 5 am (MST) each day. That's five hours earlier than before and should be before the typical work day starts for most of the U.S.

The new bots also implement some different algorithms to increase the number of prices we are able to collect. That means that more games should have at least "2 sources" for their prices.

Browse by System

The most commonly requested feature so far has been people asking for a way to browse games by console. And now we've implemented it. The most popular systems (DS, PS2, PS3, Wii and Xbox 360) all have dedicated links in the left-hand navigation menu. To view the other systems, just click All Consoles in the menu and select from the resulting list.

On the All Consoles and system pages, you can click on the table headers to sort and filter. That should help you find the game you're interested in. As always, let us know how we've done.