How to evaluate my collection's worth using programming?

21stCentury

Hello, Help / Advice forum.

A recent conversation made me wonder what the current worth of my collection of video games is.

So I had an idea, but I'm not a very talented programmer, so i'm wondering...

What would be the easiest way to write a script that gets the average price of my video game collection?

Basically, the input would be a text file or spreadsheet with the following things

• Title
• Platform
• Condition (in box, etc.)

And what it would do is go on, say, eBay, search the keywords and report the average price for said games, then print out a report that includes individual average prices and total worth.

Would that be easy to make? How would you make that? Would that run into problems due to being essentially a searchbot?

Thanks in advance!

Malgaras

You may want to check out the programming thread.

Well here is a vague idea of how I would go about it.
Input
Input is easy enough to handle. Parsing something like a CSV file is pretty trivial. Just about any language you'd want to program in probably has a library for it.

Searching
Ebay has REST, SOAP, and some other APIs to do just about any time of search you could imagine. If you don't know about REST services and the like you'll have to do some reading here. Additionally, you may or may not have to get an ebay developer account to do this.

Their API documentation is here: http://developer.ebay.com/devzone/finding/concepts/FindingAPIGuide.html

The bigger problem though is the search itself. A keyword search is not going to be reliable enough for what you want to do. For example, doing a search for "Super Mario Brothers 3 NES" gives you people selling:

• The game in question
• Bundles including that and other games
• Some dude selling the sticker from the cartridge
• People selling the game from the Famicom
• People selling the game and the console together

In short, you can't just do a search for finished auctions, get the average of the first hundred listings, and call it a day. You need to do something to get only people selling the game. You can do certain types of statistical analysis and such to weed out the noise, but then it becomes a question of how much effort you are willing to put forward and it will never be 100%

Ebay also does UPC based searching through their API which may yield more useful results, but then you need to get the UPC for the game, which is non-trivial, and may or may not even be useful for old games and will limit you to auctions listed in a way that they will show up by UPC search.

So long story short, it's probably doable, but unless you have a truly massive collection or simply think it's an interesting project worth pursuing in it's own right, you may be better off either going about it manually or checking if some existing applications tools already exist for this (it wouldn't surprise me if they do)

SanderJK

http://videogames.pricecharting.com/ does some of the work for you I think, but yeah the hard part is creating 1:1 links between your database and the exact game in the price database. The easiest path may be if the barcode is properly logged on both sides, a unique identifier.