Have retail prices once again reached insane levels with GT5?

If you’ve even glanced inside a game store in the past few years then you know the score. The preowned market is big business and it’s all that keeps the vast empires of Game/Gamestation afloat. Why? Because when you buy a game first hand only a portion of your money goes to the retailer itself, the rest is shared out between publishers or distributors and in some very rare cases the developers might actually see some cash too. Preowned items on the other hand can be sold over and over with the retailer taking 100% of the revenue every time.

Essentially this means retailers will use any sort of “deal” they can to get a hot new game off the shelves as fast as possible even if it means selling it at a loss. The sooner they sell it, the sooner it gets traded in for store credit and the sooner it can be sold on as a “second hand” product for maximum profit. Hell if they can get you to trade in a popular game as part of the deal to begin with that’s even better, it starts an endless chain of deals and trade-ins that practicaly prints money.

Until now the best such “deal” I’d seen was Asda offering Call of Duty: Black Ops, the biggest game of…..well…..ever, for £4.97 if you traded in fellow chart toppers Fable III, Fallout New Vegas or Force Unleashed II.

Looks like that records about to be topped, several reputable sources are claming that in exchange for 2 preowned AAA games, Blockbuster are willing to sell Gran Turismo 5 for……………….

99p. That’s right, 99p. It would probably cost you more to buy a pair of chocolate bars than one of the biggest games of the year. If that wasn’t enticing enough already, looks like you can also score £10 store credit at the same time for no extra cost. A smart move on Blockbusters part for sure, the sort of car nuts who will buy GT5 aren’t the kind of people to trade it in a week later, so why not soften the blow by getting the patron to significantly expand your preowned range with a duo of quick-to-sell titles?

HMV are supposedly offering a similar but less crazy deal at £4.99 in exchange for a 2 month old copy of F1 2010. This might be a better way to go if you’ve got F1 on hand, yearly sports games tend to devalue at an astounding rate so best to get it rid of it as soon as possible if you plan on trading it in at some point. Bare in mind you can’t get these deals through the respective websites so your probably gonna have to turn up to the store in person if you really want to get GT5 for chump change.