Sony announced Sunday that it sold over 1 million PlayStation 4 consoles during the first 24 hours of its U.S. launch. Now it appears that one of the reasons behind its successful launch is due to people turning far more of their older games and consoles than they normally do to pay for their new hardware.
Polygon reports that retailer GameStop received four times the amount of trade-ins for games and consoles on the Sunday before the PS4 launch. GameStop"s senior vice president of merchandising Bob Puzon indicated that some customers are bringing in their entire game libraries in order to make full pre-order payments on next generation consoles. He stated that 43 percent of their customers who have pre-ordered the PS4 and Microsoft"s Xbox One have paid for them in full, and of that number 20 percent have used all or part of their trade-ins to complete their order.
In addition, GameStop is projecting that customers, on average, will buy four new games when they purchase each new PS4 or Xbox One this year, which is a very high attach rate compared to previous console launches. Puzon says the next few weeks, including the week of the Xbox One launch on Nov. 22, will be GameStop"s busiest of the year in terms of processing trade-ins of older product.
Source: Polygon | Shoppers walking by Gamestop via Shutterstock.com