2239: Now’s a Great Time to Buy PS3, 360 and Wii Games

It’s a new generation of console hardware, and has been for a while! Woohoo!

However, more than ever with this generational changeover in particular, the previous generation of consoles are far from irrelevant, and in fact if you’re a thrifty gamer now is a very good time to start building out your PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii libraries.

Why? Because it’s damn cheap to do so… for the most part, anyway. Thanks to stores that specialise in preowned games and the dropping prices of new, factory-sealed games due to perceived “irrelevance”, you can now pick up formerly £40 games for considerably less than their launch price — often even single-digit prices, which I find enormously entertaining as someone who remembers buying budget, cassette-only releases for 8-bit computers in the ’80s and ’90s.

I say this having bought a few games at CEX earlier today: I managed to score copies of Lollipop Chainsaw, Bayonetta 2, Xenosaga Episode II, Kingdom Hearts II HD and Enchanted Arms for considerably less than their original asking price. All of them are in good condition — I think all of them even have their manuals, which is reasonably rare when it comes to preowned games.

Right now, then, is the ideal time to invest in games that you’ve always meant to add to your 360, PS3 and Wii collections, but never got around to. We’re at that time when the games are declining in value because the hardware is still readily available and people are still trading them in, but we’re not yet at the point where the games are no longer being made and certain titles are becoming more and more rare. In other words, this means it’s pretty rare to find games retailing for more than their original asking price, though as the new generation of hardware continues and the old guard fall more and more out of favour, this situation will start to arise more and more, particularly for niche-interest, limited run titles such as Japanese role-playing games.

So if you still have a 360, PS3 or Wii knocking around — and if not, why not? They’re all still great systems! — do be sure to take a trip down to your local used game store and see what they have to offer. And if you see something you’ve always meant to have a go at, but have never gotten around to, it’s well worth taking that chance now, because with each passing year, that game you never got around to playing will be getting rarer and rarer, until eventually your only choice if you want to play it will be to pay overinflated eBay and Amazon seller prices. And you don’t want to do that, do you? (Although I must admit paying well over the odds for a rare game does make for a good collector’s “war story”; some of my most treasured games include Space Channel 5 Part 2 on PS2, which had a ridiculously limited run here in Europe, and Fire Emblem Whatever The One on the Gamecube Was Called, which is likewise apparently rather hard to find these days.)

I anticipate, having recently realised all this myself, that my 360 and PS3 collections are going to grow quite considerably in the next few months…