Wednesday 11 June 2008

The £25 game challenge

This was something that was posted over at rllmukforum in November last year. The basic premise is that you should not pay over £25 for any game you buy. It's something I agreed heartily with then and have done my very best to stick by since.

Now I buy a lot of my games pre-owned so you could argue that I am bending the rules there, but I don't agree. There really is NO reason to spend more than £25 on a game.

Take GTA4 as an example. It was released 29th April this year, so barely six weeks ago as I type this. Already I've seen several copies of this on offer at various forums for the sub £25 mark. On release I think the cheapest price on the shelf for this was £37, with many people happy to pay more just to have it on the day. Madness, I say!

I do make the odd exception. Just days after pledging to stick to the £25 limit I caved and bought Super Mario Galaxy (Wii) but that was on offer at Toys R Us for a shade over £26. As it was only just over the limit and a brand new game (not to mention one of the highest rated titles released so far for the Wii) I felt justified.

More recently I paid £28.49 for Lego Indiana Jones (Wii) to get it on launch day, mainly because the kids were desperate to play it! But a quick scan through my 360 games reveals that the only one I've paid more than £25 for is Halo 3 (£30) and I bought that in November last year. (Although this is also an excellent example of the point I am trying to make - Halo 3 is still sealed over six months later as I've not played through Halo and Halo 2 yet. I could now pick it up pre-owned at half that price and probably could have sourced a brand new copy for around £20 at some point in the last six months!)

Since then I've added Virtua Fighter 5 (£18 - 2 months after release), The Club (£20 - on release day) and Devil May Cry 4 (£25 - around six weeks after release) all of which were brand new 360 titles.

On the Wii I've recently picked up brand new copies of Geometry Wars Galaxies for £10, Speed Racer for £18 and Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games for £24.

Pay £40 or £50 for a new game on release day? I don't think so...

In other news, another game has sold on Amazon. Two down, two to go!

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