Amazon.com and Games
A couple of months ago, I finally finished the first Phoenix Wright game. (I have a bad habit of getting close to the end of a game and then waiting a long time to finish because I don't want it to end. ~_~; ) I figured I'd add the next game to my long list of things to buy, which is usually made up of links to Amazon.com pages, even though I don't always buy them from there. And my mouth fell open. It was listed for $70.
Now, for anyone not familiar with the Phoenix Wright games, they are primarily on the Nintendo DS. I'd say the average price for a new DS game when first released is maybe $35. And this game is already a few years old. So, this was kind of crazy. Then I saw the first game's price. $90. $90 for a DS game! (Just checking now has shown me that it's now over $100...)
Since then, I've been noticing more and more games listed for insane prices. Now, this is not being sold by Amazon.com directly, but it's not just some random person either. Over where you add something to your shopping cart it says "In stock. processing takes an additional 4 to 5 days. Ships from and sold by Hitgaming Video Games." Well, I'd certainly like to hit them.
While it's not directly Amazon's fault for the price that's being set, they are officially selling through this company, and it's really getting annoying. I'm totally fine with continuing to pay the original price for games even if they've been out for awhile, but paying OVER the original price?? Not so much. Yet a lot of games are hard to find in the stores unless they've just been released or are huge hits. Game retail is kind of just broken in general.
Anyways, I'm now building a list of games I need to search store for used whenever possible, since I can't rely on Amazon.com to be my backup in case I can't find them at the store. I searched through the mall's GameStop on Monday for about 40 minutes and only found two of them. It's really quite depressing.