This topic contains 4 replies, has 1 voice, and was last updated by 
Gnashvar 10 months, 1 week ago.
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Hello, Chocobo Knight here again.
In one of Roo’s recent videos, he shows viewers how to restore old video game cartridges. Now, hypothetically speaking, would it be profitable to buy old, battered video games and restore them to heighten their value and sell it to create a profit, and how much could you possibly hope to profit off of such an endeavor.
Unlikely. To turn a profit with retro games in general, you would need to be selling rare games, or at the least, complete good condition sets of more common games. The hard part would be obtaining games with the potential to earn some moola. If you watch shows such as the Game Chasers or Retrohunters, you can see that it’s rare they come across something that’s valuable. Sure, they generally pick up a few copies of games each episode they could turn a few dollars on – possibly a few more if they cleaned them up. However, things such as cost of fuel need to be factored in. Also, working the same hours at a job would probably turn more money then scavenging through flea markets/online adds/auctions.
If you owned your own game trade store you would most probably be able to make some more profit by scrubbing up your merchandise a bit – but I doubt many here can say they have their own store.
After all, the videos like Roo’s you see are people sharing their ideas and passions for their hobbies. It’s a shame that most hobbies aren’t all that profitable.
A game isn’t like a car, keep in mind, where ‘restoring’ is something you can really do to it, so yeah, I agree with Sly JD. I don’t think it’s something that can really work. It would be the same thing with old comics; you can’t ‘restore’ them to ‘new’ condition either to sell them. God, if people could do that, think of how many folks would and get so, so rich off funnybooks!
Certainly if you want to sell something, you should clean it up and make sure it looks nice, but that’s about all you can do, really. And yeah, like JD also said, you’d pretty much need a game that was rare/in huge demand already, too. :/
It would be a money pit. Most of the people who do this for the joy of it go under pretty quickly. The biggest problem is taking in more than they’re selling. And I’m not saying don’t do trade ins and you’ll be fine. I’m saying that this is not a sustainable small business.
Besides, you’d just lose out to Gamestop anyway.
I guess it would depend on what your consider profit. When buying online I rather buy from someone who shows many pictures of the actual product, if the battery is working, the contacts clean, cart is clean, stickers intact. I don’t mind paying a few bucks extra to know it’s in good condition. The key here is a few bucks 2-3. So it all depends on how much you want to make. Is your time and patience worth a few bucks? Some people go to garage sales and buy games in bulk then pick out what they like clean up the rest and sell them to buy more games. As a hobby it’s great as a business not so much.
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