Selling stuff on eBay

Recently I have been buying and selling old video games on eBay. I have done fairly well from a profit standpoint. I couldn’t make a living off it without having 1000s of games in my inventory, and who’s got the space? My eBay venture started when I saw 150 DVDs for sale on Facebook Marketplace for 30 quid. I bought them all and listed them on eBay immediately. What I learned is, to be competitive, you have to price items incredibly low. With the costs of postage, packaging and fees, slowly the allure wears off. After some time I actually sat down and figured how much I was making and I was somehow losing money with most of my sales.

Lets sell games instead

I didn’t give up, and instead decided to diversify into a real passion of mine. old school video games. Receiving a batch of PS1 games and going through them, carefully opening them so not to crack the case and look at the colourful booklets has become a favourite past time. One of my recent finds was a near-mint Gran Turismo 2. I never owned Gran Turismo 2 when I was a kid so I was really surprised to learn that the marketing guys had decided to create a scratch-n-sniff disc for the simulation mode disc.

Scratch and sniff – Gran Turismo 2

With a caress of your fingernail, the strong smell of gasoline emanates from the disc some 20 years later and I couldn’t have been happier discovering it. They had marketed it as a “racing pit smell” which I don’t doubt a racing pit smelling like fuel.

As it turns out, this is only one of two PS2 discs to ever ship with a scratch-and-sniff ploy, the other was a PS1 FIFA game that smells like a football pitch when you give it a whiff.

Unfortunately, you’re unlikely to ever smell a game again now that physical games are disappearing in favour of the more convenient, instant download.

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