Used or New - That is the Question....

[Kalisiin Kumaki]

Posts not topical have been deleted.

Many of them were my own posts, too, so this is not censorship. this topic was derailed by an argument, and this is now putting it back on track.

The topic here is whether to buy carts used or new.

Please continue.

[taryn]

Most of the games we got were used, because we never had the most current console. In the late '90s when all the video game stores were focusing entirely on the N64 and PS1 generation, we were going to flea markets and such for NES games. Then in 2000 we upgraded...to the SNES.

Used games almost never have an instruction manual, so I'd be annoyed when people, guides, and even some actual games said to look things up in there.

Nowadays you can get manuals and guides on the Internet pretty easily, so buying a used game today wouldn't have that problem.

[Kalisiin Kumaki]

This experience mirrors mine very much, taryn...not having the latest and greatest console...and thus, the only option for carts that work on your console are USED...the stores don't want to carry NEW carts for our console...or the company even stopped making them.

We live in such a throwaway society, we are expected to throw away our console every year or two to get a new one...but people like me, who are thrifty by nature, and who also prefer the older games anyway...we are more likely to keep our old console.

And in a way, we serve our place in this chain...many of the used things we buy...someone else sold in order to generate money to buy the NEW item. They might otherwise not have been able to buy the new item....and since they were done with the old, anyway, they had no further use for the old. so from their point of view...why not make a few bucks off what I'm not using anymore, this lowers my cost of getting the new thing I want.

And there's enough of us old-schoolers out there to buy up the old stuff as used, to make this a viable business. Game Stop et al would not buy the games, or market them to people...if people like taryn and I did not exist to buy them up.

[Warlock]

Eh, I was kind of tired of this conversation two years ago, but to briefly reiterate: my position is not "nobody should buy used games ever", it is "none of the money exchanged in used game sales gets back to the developer, and that's probably a good thing to keep in mind if you like obscure genres, a category which debatably includes grind-heavy, oldschool-style RPGs and definitely includes some specific ones we've talked about on this board before, EG The Dark Spire." Obviously, there are many cases to which this is not applicable, such as buying games for consoles that are a couple generations old or picking up games that aren't possible to find new anymore.

Gamestop, for the record, generally does not carry used games for consoles that are more than a generation old. You'd be hard-pressed to find a Gamestop with PS2 games for sale, let alone SNES ones.

- HC