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Hobie-wan wrote:With some retail items, the MSRP is indeed suggested. However if you're a store that breaks some secret agreed max discount threshold, then a manufacturer may choose to stop supplying you with said product. Sometimes this only applies to the 'advertised' price on something. This is why you'll see paper ads that say "price too low to print, come on down to the store" or online places like Amazon where it says "see price in shopping cart" and won't tell you the price until you're at least pretending to head to checkout.

This is called MAP, or Minimum Advertised Price. In most cases, MAP is an agreement between supplier and retailer that states a store cannot advertise in any way, shape or form below the set MAP laid out by the supplier. It's a rule set in place to avoid driving down the value of high profile items in the marketplace. Basically, it protects the supplier by maintaining a polished market presence, and the retailer, by maintaining a set margin of profit on said items.

Like Hobie said, once the customer is physically in the store, or in the online checkout area, anything is game as it is assumed that the customer has already made the decision to buy at said store. This is how retailers get around the MAP agreement.

In other industries, this practice would be called "price fixing" but in the video game industry, this is just business as usual.

samsonlonghair wrote:In other industries, this practice would be called "price fixing" but in the video game industry, this is just business as usual.

I specifically didn't mention video games in my post. It happens with many retail products.

Price fixing would normally be seen in the buying and selling of commodities and raw material. I don't think that would be applied to retail products let alone just video games. Market demand has too much control of the product price.

That's completely different when a small handful of companies who supply 90 plus percent of the steel used worldwide who can price fix.

All part of Econcomics Game Theory and more specifically Nash Equilibrium and Prisoner's Dilemma.

Sorry for the tangent.

$13.50AUD posted from eBay, very happy with this! complete with the 1MB SNK Ram Cart.


I now own all 3 of the KoF games on the Saturn, the first two complete in box and the third is the retail release of 97', so it has the artwork inserts.


$2.50 posted via eBay


$3 via a Thrift store, sitting with like 5 Tiger Woods games for the Wii.

Was considering picking up an Xbox One or PS4 this weekend but decided to hold off till their prices drop a bit more and their libraries expand. Instead i picked up a TV and some games.

Nabbed a used 26" Sony Bravia for $100 at the pawns. It has some cosmetic dings but works great. Planning on Mounting it to the wall above my monitor but until the mount comes in it's going to be hanging out on my desk.



Also hit gamestop the other night and picked up Anarchy Reigns, Beyond Two Souls, Tornado Outbreak, and Destroy All Humans Big Willy Unleashed for $28 total. Been wanting Beyond Two Souls for a while now so I hoped on the $20 sale they had this weekend luckily they still had a pretty good supply of the special edition tin case versions as well . Also they re tagged all their Anarchy Reign games to used so I got a sealed copy for $4.



The pawns while a bit dry at first had a few games after I dug a little bit. They were only $5 each .



Been wanting Dragons Dogma Dark Arisen for a while now so I was happy to find it so cheap. Plus I didn't realize it had the original game on disc as well. Already had DD on the PS3 but it was still a nice surprise.

Mainly picked Dragon Ball Z Ultimate Tenkaichi because I knew it was still somewhat pricey and I have been hearing pretty good things about it.

Front Mission Evolved is a pretty cheap game which I already own on Steam. However I really enjoyed it and have been meaning to pick up a physical copy for a while now.

So story time for me today since I picked up something I'm really happy about, I don't have any pictures today, but I figure what I got will help out.

So I went over to my cousins' storage locker today. Back in 2010 her parents divorced and everything from her house was put into storage. Since she has gone off and got married, she wanted my help to grab a few things from her storage locker for her apartment with her husband. All three of us get to the storage locker and open it up. We start pulling stuff out. On the side as I was stepping on stuff I wanted to try and get a better footing so I pull out the bin but then something caught my eye and I opened it. It was collection of NES, Genesis and SNES games and systems. However, when I noticed it I almost fell down on the ground so happy that I found it.

The systems and games that I found are my ORIGINAL ones. Since her family didn't have much money growing up, I gave her most of my older games and systems back years ago after I finished playing them (with the exception of a few such as Chrono Trigger or Super Mario All Stars for example). I didn't start really keeping my stuff until around 95. She thought that she had thrown them out but it seems she kept them in storage all these years. She just gave them too me since they were mine originally and she has no use for them (she and her husband only play newer stuff) and were taking up space. For good measure I gave her my Kingdom Hearts 3DS game and Master Exam Box set that she was borrowing anyway since I have extremely disliked Kingdom Hearts now a days.

So while I have doubles for a few things since I re-brought them years later, I really need to dig into the large bin and see how damaged a few things are, what I need to replace/keep. It seems the NES doesn't read games well (but back then it didn't) so I'll have to fix that. I haven't really had time to dig deep into the bin.

Konacha wrote:So while I have doubles for a few things since I re-brought them years later, I really need to dig into the large bin and see how damaged a few things are, what I need to replace/keep. It seems the NES doesn't read games well (but back then it didn't) so I'll have to fix that. I haven't really had time to dig deep into the bin.

Well if you've got a few doubles you need a new home for I'll take them off your hands....Seriously though that is amazing to find that after all these years, if only I had the same luck with all my gba games that I don't have cataloged into my binder right now

I was perusing my local facebook buy/sell groups and noticed a lady selling a bunch of really good 3DS stuff. The ad had no prices posted; usually a bad sign. I messaged her anyway and inquired. To my surprise, she was only asking $15 for each game.

I quickly made an offer and nabbed Super Smash Bros. and Ocarina of Time 3D for a total of $25! Yeah, she even went lower for the two together.

I don't even have a 3DS yet but stumbling across this bargain will go a long way in convincing me to get one soon. It'll be a huge bonus if the Smash game still has the points intact. I already have the Wii U version and I've been hungrily eyeing that free CD offer from Club Nintendo.

$2 PS3 games at the pawn shop today! I picked up:

Blitz: The League II (PS3; CIB)
Dead Rising 2 (PS3; CIB)
Motorstorm Apocalypse (PS3; CIB)
Star Wars The Force Unleashed: Ultimate Sith Edition (PS3; CIB)(!)
Venetica (Ps3: CIB)

The find-of-the-day is the complete copy of Star Wars The Force Unleashed: Ultimate Sith Edition since complete copies of that game sell for amounts between $30 and $60. (I also know that Venetica is not supposed to be very good, but I am a sucker for games with female leads.)