MY RETRO LIFE
DOWNSIZING
PERSONAL STORIES ABOUT OUR SHARED PASSION
Darran sells off a chunk of his collection
Earlierin the year I mentioned I wanted to start whittling my collection down as I had close to 1,600 physical games. I don’t enjoy selling games online so I decided to head to the London Gaming Market to save some hassle. My wife Melanie and youngest daughter Alice decided to come with me, so it became a family day out.
The worst part was obviously working out what stuff I wanted to sell. I looked at the collections for each of my systems in turn and forced myself to lop at least 10% off its current size. The only things I didn’t touch were my NTSC N64 games. Everything else was fair game and I brutally stripped down my Wii U, Wii, 3DS, DS and Xbox libraries. Which to be honest, was actually quite cathartic.
Then it was the laborious task of pricing everything up. I’d been to the market pre-COVID in 2019 and had done quite well for myself. Most of my success then was because I seemed to have lower prices than everyone else there so I tried the same tactic. I priced all of my PAL games lower than what CEX sold them for, but higher than the trade value they offered, which felt like a good compromise.