It seems like everyone is trying to get in on the buying and reselling of used games, as Decluttr is the latest to join Wal-Mart in their crusade to get some of those profit margins that Gamestop has been keeping all to themselves for years now.
The major difference between Decluttr and the aforementioned two (Gamestop and Wal-Mart) is that they’ll take any old game, functional or non-functional, and give you something for your trade in. They’ll also take any game from literally anyone, and while I’m sure there are some legal ramifications to this, the end goal of their program is a bit ingenious.
Decluttr brought in more than $150 million last year mostly due to their aggressive campaign to buy any games you own – they’ll take your entire collection, mostly in the hopes that they’ll find some rare oddity thrown in there that they can resell for exorbitant prices. That’s not all, as they will take in games as far back as the Playstation 2 and the original Xbox, two systems that have long since been abandoned by Gamestop.
“The first CD you scan in may be another ‘Jagged Little Pill [by Alannis Morissette].’ If we say we’re not going to buy it, you may give up,” Decluttr’s U.S. president, Brett Lauter, told Fast Company in an interview. “We just lost you. So we’re going to give you the minimum, 50 cents, because maybe your second one is Green Day’s ‘Insomniac,’ and oh my gosh, this will sell quickly.”
Decluttr will pay you an amount that is calculated by an algorithm made up of a few variances: how much of the title they have on hand, the current going price, and lastly how fast it sells through the reseller. They not only reimburse you for the trade in, but they’ll also pay for the postage to send your game into the company. Instead of reselling singular discs to a new customer, they’ll even clean them up and throw them into a new jewel case.
If you thought that Decluttr is not earning that much – think again, their U.S. expansion is already bringing in 10,000 items a day across cds, dvds, blurays, and video games. Whatever the percentage of that is made up of video games is unclear, but they are definitely growing in what has been considered by some a cornered market, via Gamestop.
