GameGirl

This is nothing new but now that summer is here and we are growing closer to more and more big title launches, we will see a shift in the trade-in market. There are other stores that offer trade-ins and pre-orders but Amazon has been a top competitor of the pre-order market for quite some time now. They not only offer awesome Amazon exclusives with their pre-orders but you can find a lot of new games at a cheaper and reasonable price. Now that they are tackling the trade-in market, maybe we can hope for more competitive pricing?

If you haven't checked out what all Amazon has to offer now, their website launched a whole new section of their Video Game store that includes Game Downloads, Trade-Ins, and Xbox Live. They offer easy to find, trade-in values for all games. Thats right all games... Well most anyway. Surprisingly, they take games for the Sega Genesis, Sega Dreamcast, NES, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, GameCube and of course Xbox, Xbox 360, Wii, Playstation, Playstation 2, Playstation 3, GameBoy Advance, Nintendo DS, and PSP.

Amazon's Trade-In process seems easy and worth it. You browse through their selection of game's and their values and find the ones you want to trade in. They then give you a printable label for your shipping but your total game trades must equal ten dollars or more in your box. After they receive your games you get an Amazon gift card for them. Most of their values are pretty good but are comparable with GameStop's but Amazon does offer a Trade-In of the Day, where one title will be "at a special, high, one-day-only trade-in value". Not to mention you are getting an Amazon gift card which you can spend on anything from Amazon. This is an awesome solution for people who wish to trade in games for something other than more games. It will also be interesting to see how competitive this market becomes although Blockbuster tried this and it didn't seem to go far. This is Amazon though and they have been giving us great pre-order deals and prices on our games. The video game market is becoming as competitive as ever now that many stores offer pre-order deals and now game trade-ins.

During the summer months we all have a lot more free time at hand. Which means we are playing games quicker and wanting something new to play. Not everyone trades their games but some often have little to no replay value. Sometimes you want to turn around and get some money out of a game you know you will never play again. A lot of times though, potential traders are discouraged by low trade-in values when you are virtually getting another game. Now that Amazon's trade-ins are running smoother than ever, will we see values go up as store's compete for our games? Perhaps we will see if the summer months stir up some competitive deals from our favorite video game retailers or maybe the market will be left unchanged.