NOTE: The whole point of the Development Updates forum is to bring potential site enhancements to the community to collect feedback. I can't guarantee every feature will be implemented or everyone's request will make it in, but I'll strive to include as much feedback as possible. If a feature makes it beyond the "idea" phase and I start working on it, I'll provide updates here, as necessary.

I've been interested for a while now in pulling in price / value data for video games. When I used to use IGN for tracking my collection waaaaaay back in the day, they had something like this and I thought it was neat. The primary benefit of doing this would be to provide an estimated value of your collection.

The only API I've found so far is http://videogames.pricecharting.com/, but it looks pretty easy to use and has a ton of data. In addition to mapping games again (oh yay!!), I'll have to tackle the way VGPC handles collector's / limited edition games, which is important for collection and valuation purposes.

Not only am I interested in figuring out how much my own collection is worth, but I think this would be a nice feature that I just haven't seen anywhere else (let me know if you have).

Obviously, this would only apply to physical games, though I could eventually scrape prices from Steam (and GOG?) to help cover digital games. Not sure how important that is to people, but it's an option, I suppose.

So anyone out there interested in this feature? If so, is there anything you'd be looking for? Any issues you foresee?

Getting physical value data would be awesome, I know I just recently looked up some of my older SNES games and was a bit shocked as how much they were worth, haha. I think the site you linked is the one I actually used to get a rough idea when I did it, in fact.

As for digital games, I don't think it would work out very well in the end. Prices vary so much from retailer to retailer and fluctuate from week to week that you'd hardly get a real sense for any kind of value in your collection. I used a steam price calculator in the past and the total felt so incredibly inflated compared to what I had actually spent that it seemed pointless.

I mean, can anyone honestly say that Assassin's Creed III Deluxe is actually a $50 game at this point in time? Ubisoft seems to think so despite it going on sale for $12.50 every other week.

I went ahead and purchased a set of pricing data so I can start playing around with it. The data looks pretty straightforward and like I suspected, I think the most time-consuming aspect is going to be mapping games....again, haha! I think for now I'll focus solely on what's in the data I have (i.e. physical games) and in fact will only display pricing data for games in your collection marked as physical.

I'll probably tinker with getting the data loaded and figuring out where the gaps are between the two databases this weekend. I think this would be a great feature to add and from what I can tell, it's not available on any other, similar sites. So this would be a nice unique feature for us :) And hopefully it will encourage everyone to enter their physical collections :P

Neat! I look forward to seeing what kind of results I get from my physical collection on here :)

Alright, so I just deployed the pricing stuff! This is the absolute bare minimum functionality. Basically, the only thing that's changed is the Collection Search page. If you're using the shelf view, the price shows next to the progress status. If you're using the list view, you should have a new column for it. You can sort of the price as well.

That's pretty much it haha! There are a number of things I plan to add soon, such as:

• Filter for finding games in your collection with or without prices
• Add the price column to the Excel export
• Show a total price across all users on the home page with the other stats
• Incorporate an autocomplete when entering an Edition for a game (more on this later)
• Somewhere display your overall collection value (maybe on the Overview page?)
• Add some help / tooltip to explain how the pricing works

Something else to keep in mind that as of right now, pricing data is 100% private, regardless of your setting. The value only shows up when you're viewing your own collection. I might make this a separate option, not sure yet.

As I mentioned above, I plan to add some text to explain how the pricing works, but here's the high-level summary:

• The pricing is only an ESTIMATE!! It's pulled from VGPC and while that site is fantastic, I've noticed some oddities in the data (i.e. a "complete" game being more valuable than a "new" one)
• Only physical games can attempt to be priced, digital will never show a value
• Prices vary by console, so make sure you enter the correct one
• The "edition" matters! If you enter the exact edition that I received from VGPC, it will use that when trying to find the price for your game. Since you don't know what I received, it will soon be an autocomplete feature :D
• As far as I know, only NTSC games are in the VGPC database, so only games marked with the NTSC region will look up prices (I'm open to feedback here, I can lift this restriction if others deem it unnecessary)
• Games INSIDE of a compilation are NOT priced, but the parent game is (i.e. Super Mario All-Stars will have a price, but the underlying games will not)

Phew, now that I got all that out there, it's time to tell you guys that none of the prices are actually loaded onto the site right now. That's right, 0% of the prices are loaded, so you will NOT see any pricing info until I actually run the query to populate them :P I'm going to be mapping more games this evening (roughly 10-15% of the way through) and I'll run the script later tonight or tomorrow morning. As I continue to map things and iron out the kinks, you might see pricing disappear or fluctuate, so I hope you don't start auctioning off your collection just yet haha. This will only be temporary and I don't anticipate you guys even noticing this, but I figured I'd throw out the disclaimer.

Umm..let's see, what else. Oh yeah, obviously, if you run into any errors with the new stuff I added, let me know. I tested it a bunch, but had to kinda rush towards the end. Also, if you have time, it would super awesome if you could spot-check some prices (when they're available, of course) on http://videogames.pricecharting.com/ to make sure everything looks good. I'll be doing this as well, but it never hurts to have more eyes on it.

Something I forgot to mention in my last post is the logic for how the price is selected for a game. VGPC provides up to three prices for each game / platform / edition combination. Once I've identified which VGPC "row" to use, I then have to select which of the three prices should apply to the game in your collection. These prices are: 1) Loose; 2) Complete; 3) New.

In an effort to make Completionator communicate with these three prices, here's the logic I'm using:

• If your game is marked as New, it uses the New price (this is the easy one)
• If your game is not New, but is Used and has both the Manual and Box checkboxes checked, it uses the Complete price
• Everything else uses the Loose price

As I mentioned in my previous post, there's some oddities in the data. Right now, if your game should use the New price, but VGPC doesn't provide one, then no price is displayed. I could potentially "fallback" to the next condition, which from New would be Complete. This would seemingly work, but there's another issue in the data. I've noticed quite a few games where the New price is actually LOWER than the Complete price. Or some where the Loose is higher than the Complete, weird stuff like that. I'm considering grabbing the highest price of the available ones, based on your game. So if your game is treated as New, then I'd grab the highest of the three. If it's Complete, then I'd grab the highest of Loose and Complete (obviously New would need to be ignored in this scenario). Any thoughts on this?

Okay everyone, pricing data has FINALLY been added! I ran into a snag with Azure (grumble, grumble), but that's now resolved. I've only mapped about 25% of the games on Completionator, so keep that in mind if you see a lot of your games without prices on them yet. Rest assured, I'm mapping like crazy over here and will try to update as soon as I have another decent chunk :)

As always, let me know if you run into any issues or see anything weird with the data. I plan to work on phase 2 of this feature next weekend, which is when I'd say it's "officially" a feature. For now, just consider all of this a sneak preview ;) So that being said, let me know if you have any functionality requests related to pricing, because it's my top priority right now!

I'll have to go through and update my physical info because these prices I'm getting are hilariously high for a collection of mostly loose cartridges, haha.

I put most in as "new" and didn't check/uncheck various included items. That'll teach me to be lazy. :/

Haha don't feel bad, most of my games are all "Unassigned", so I'm having the opposite problem :P

So I finally got around to doing some updating (I blame pc game sales and e3 for monopolizing my time!) and came across something that might be a good change/fix.

If you have a game listed as "previously owned/rented" it still gives you a dollar value for that physical copy. While it's neat to see what an old game I no longer have might have been worth, it doesn't seem right to factor it into a collection's value.

Ah, great catch! I'll definitely modify the logic so only games that are "Owned" have prices set for them.

I've loaded in pricing data for about 98% of the applicable games currently on the site. During this initial rollout, I always reset the prices on everyone's games with a script, which I've modified to only include "Owned" games. I'll update the website code to handle this in the next release, but for now, as long as you don't modify a "previously owned" game, the prices should be suppressed :)

I will say that this site's estimated $271 value for my entire collection makes me feel better about myself than Steam Calculator's nearly $8,400 value of my Steam account alone.