I've decided - I will sell my collection

[Ziggy]

So just to update this a little...

I first posted this thread in May and it's now almost October, and I still haven't posted a single thing for sale. I'm not second guessing my decision at all though. I just haven't been able to put the time into actually doing this. The more I thought about selling off a chunk of my collection, the more I realized how involved the process will be. Forum and eBay sales in the past have relied on reusing shipping materials like bubble envelopes and small boxes. But I don't have nearly enough of those to sell a few hundred games! Not only that, but I'll have to set up a system that I can streamline everything the best I can. Otherwise I'd imagine it would get overwhelming very quickly.

But that's even putting the cart before the horse. I suppose listing every for sale would come before how to package and ship everything, but even that isn't step one. Just this past week I finally realized where to start, and it's by getting my entire collection in a spreadsheet. From there, I have started to rate every game with a system I've come up with. 1 means I'm definitely selling it, 3 means I'm definitely keeping it, and 2 means I'm undecided.

Using this rating system, I'm actually very surprised with the results. Take my SNES collection for example. 57% I've marked that I will definitely sell, 26% is undecided and just 17% I definitely want to keep. NES and N64 had similar percentages.

I've started adding pricing from pricecharting.com. I know these numbers aren't always bang on, but they're close enough for the next phase. It makes all the 2's easier to decide on. Not worth a lot? Then maybe I'll just hold on to it. Worth a good amount? Convert it to cash! Even some 3's, after I see the price I'm considering changing some to a 1 lol.

I still have some of my stuff packed up, and I really need to get to it before I can do everything proper. I have some misc games packed away, as well as duplicates. And for some reason boxes and manuals for SNES and N64 games were always stored separately than the carts. So I will have to get all that stuff unpacked and together to get the real worth of some of the items.

After that, I was thinking about adding short notes of the condition, if there's anything worth noting. This might take a lot of time up front, but might cut down on some PM's. Some disc based games might be a bit of a challenge. There's a LOT of games that I've picked up from Game Stop that have light scratches but I've never actually play tested. I'm not sure how to go about those yet.

After that, I was thinking of adding some more accurate pricing. I was thinking of anything over $15 on pricecharting.com, I'll research the price better on eBay. That could take... a long time.

So, I'm working on this, it's just been slow going! I might start with just some systems that'll be easy for me to clear out, instead of waiting to list everything all at once.

[prfsnl_gmr]

I think that step one in your selling process should be looking through my “want” list - it’s in my BST thread! - noting all the stuff that you have and that I want, and sending me a PM.

[samsonlonghair]

Hey Zig, if you’re taking the time to go through all your games, then go ahead and snap pictures while you’re in the process. You’re going to need them later. If you want to keep your pictures organized, then email the pictures to yourself with the name of the game in the subject line. That way, you can search your inbox for your game.

[Sarge]

I will be interested to see what you have for sure.

Depending on how much work you want to put in for the disc-based games, at least the ones that are PC-readable, you might want to use something like ISOBuster to do a surface scan. While it won't guarantee that it will work in a console (their lasers tend to be weaker or more finicky), it will tell you if there's a major problem with the disc. And even if there is, you can tell if it's something that will affect gameplay or not; I have a game or two that won't read a few sectors, but the affected files are just FMVs. I actually do this for games that I buy from retro stores and eBay. I've caught a few duds because of this.

Depending on how many you have, though, that might not be very feasible. You might just want to reserve it for the high-priced items.

[Ziggy]

So it took me a little over a year, but I'm finally starting to sell stuff! I decided to throw up just a couple of easy items last week, and the few PMs that I got were very encouraging. Now I have motivation to list everything. It will still take a lot of time and effort, so I'll only be listing chunks at a time. I think I'll go system by system. I just listed Gamecube games, being that it's one of my smallest collections. I guess I'll do the low hanging fruit first. I still have some tough decisions to make as far as games that I'm undecided if I'm selling or keeping.

[marurun]

So you’re not selling everything, you’re just weeding down to a “core collection” of sorts?

[Ziggy]

So you’re not selling everything, you’re just weeding down to a “core collection” of sorts?

That's right. I'm not writing off gaming or anything like that. I'll still game the same amount. Perhaps even more without that "choice overload" problem.

[Ziggy]

There's another thing that I thought of, but I don't believe I ever posted in this thread... Universal game cases.

We've all seen pictures of UGC with artwork printed from The Cover Project, and yeah, it looks amazing. I've always wanted to do that. But having a larger collection has always put me off from doing it for two reasons. One, more games means more cases. That means more money. Not just the total number of cases needed, but also ink for printing all the artwork. And two, for cartridge systems I have kept those games cart-only on shelves. If they go into UGC, they will take up more shelf space. Shelf space was already a big problem for me, so going to UGC would just make it worse.

But, if I'm only keeping around 25% of my collection, that makes doing the UGC thing a lot easier. Not only will I not need as many cases, but l should have more than enough shelf space to do it!