Methodology
How NerdyScore Prices Games
What the price measures
Every price on the site is our estimate of what a copy sells for today, not what it sold for a few years ago or what someone is hoping to get for it.
We work from two kinds of evidence: copies that actually sold, and copies sitting on the market right now. A confirmed sale tells us that a buyer was willing to complete a transaction on that listing, while an active listing tells us what a seller is currently asking. Plenty of listings sit for months at a number nobody is paying, so the two are not the same kind of evidence and we do not treat them as though they were.
Recent activity carries more weight than old activity, so a price tracks the market as it is now rather than averaging out the last several years or even months.
Clean data matters as much as the math. Listings are filtered and classified before they are used for pricing, and questionable ones can be reviewed and corrected by hand or excluded entirely. A box-only listing or graded copy mixed into the wrong pricing pool can skew the result, so identifying those listings is an important part of the process.
A worked example
Imagine we observed three listings for a game priced at $100, $105 and $110 that were later confirmed to have sold. On their own, those tell us buyers were willing to complete transactions on copies listed in that range.
Now suppose comparable copies are currently listed at $72, $75, $80, $85 and $90. None of them has sold, so none of them proves what the game is worth. What they do tell us is what a collector is being asked to pay today.
Taken together, that is a market that looks softer than the older listings suggest. A price guide working only from copies that sold would still be describing the earlier range; one working only from asking prices would be quoting numbers nobody has met yet. We use both, which is why our estimate can move before the next sale happens.
What isn't priced yet
While not every game has a price yet, 100% coverage is what we're working toward. Unfortunately, some games don't come up for sale often enough for us to price them, and that gets more common the further you get from a platform's popular titles.
When that happens, we leave the price blank. We don't fill it in from another condition or try to come up with a number when there isn't enough data. It just means we don't have enough information to price it yet.
Variants are priced on their own listings too. A variant never inherits the standard release's number just because the two share a name.
How to read a price
Our prices estimate the market for a game, not the specific copy you're looking to buy. Condition, completeness, and the seller all move what any one copy actually sells for. What we give you is a great starting point for judging whether a price is fair.
A graded copy is a different market. Those sales trade on the grade as much as on the game, so we leave them out of the number you see here.
Prices are recalculated as new sales and listings come in, so expect them to move as the market changes.
The three prices
We treat Loose, CIB, and New separately and price each one from its own listings.
Just the game itself. On most cartridge era platforms this is how games actually change hands, so it is the number we lead with there.
The game, its box, and the manual. We can't guarantee every insert is still with it, but those three have to be there. You will see this labeled both Complete and CIB around the site. Disc era and modern titles are usually collected this way, so it is the headline number on those platforms.
Sealed and unopened. These come up for sale far less often than the other two, and the seal itself carries a lot of the price, so the number tends to move more.