Gamestop rings in the New Year by no longer accepting trade-ins for original Xbox consoles, games or accessories. It is not official as yet, but an internal memo has been making its way around, informing employees that this new ruling will take place starting February 9, 2009. On the other hand, the memo does not make mention of the Playstation 2 or Game Cube - both consoles from the same generation as the original Xbox.
This may not come as a surprise to many, since the original Xbox will have been available for retails sale 8 years come November 2009. And while Microsoft seems to no longer care about original Xbox sales, once would think that retailers would still be interested due to the fairly large homebrew and modification scene that revolves around this console.
One would also imagine that the first console to be pulled from trade-in deals would have been the Game Cube - it has also bee out for 8 years come this November, the Wii has 100% compatibility with most (if not all) Game Cube games, there isn"t any type of "hacking" scene around the Game Cube and the Wii is fairly inexpensive and gives access to a larger game library. The Playstation 2 may still have quite a while before it"s pulled from trade-ins since it was by far the best selling console of its generation, not to mention that PS2 game sales are still relatively high when compared to the original Xbox or Game Cube. And with the current PS3"s lacking backward compatibility, the PS2 market has bee left virtually untouched by its predecessor.