GameStop Says It’s Shut Down a Nintendo Switch 2 Trade-in Exploit That Worked as an ‘Infinite Money Glitch’

https://www.ign.com/articles/gamestop-says-its-shut-down-a-nintendo-switch-2-trade-in-exploit-that-worked-as-an-infinite-money-glitch

21 Comments

  1. In case people don’t bother reading the article:

    > By purchasing a Nintendo Switch 2 for $414.99 and then immediately trading it back in along with the purchase of a pre-owned game, a promotional bonus was triggered that increased the Switch 2 trade credit to $472.50

    So essentially, you’d usually “profit” 10 or 20 bucks at most, entirely in GameStop store credit, as long as the cashier would let you do this over and over again…which I’m sure they wouldn’t.

  2. Blockbuster had something like this back in the day. Trade in any used game, get money back. People would go to Gamestop and buy stuff from their $1 bin, go over to blockbuster with enough games to buy something then look at the “leaderboard” to see what games had the highest resale value. Buy that, then immediately trade it back. You’d invest about $5-10 initially to get the game with the high value, and walk away with about $30-$40 of cash.

    One of my friends figured this out and had the regional manager get called in, basically as everything was written they weren’t breaking any rules so they ultimately just lowered the value of the high value games to not make it worth it.

  3. A long time ago the bookstore chain Hastings had a promotion where they would give you $20 in store credit for trading in at least three used games. This was around the time you could buy used garbage Xbox konnect games at GameStop for something like a dollar a piece.

  4. RedditLurker24601 on

    Sears once sold a calendar for $10 that had $20 store coupons inside. Friend of my brother use the coupons to buy more calendars …

  5. From the article:

    >
    “Effective immediately, the glitch has been patched. Trade promotions have been updated to ensure customers can no longer convert basic arithmetic into an endless revenue stream, and balance has been restored.”

    “convert basic arithmetic into an endless revenue stream”…. sounds like belittling people that took advantage of their stupid mistake.

  6. BrutalisExMachina on

    Go to gas stations and take pennies from those little trays at checkout = infinite money glitch.

  7. I did this for a bit on and off for a good while. Bought everything on my steam wishlist and got my baby some toys off Amazon. Gave my wife a switch 2 with pokemon legends ZA. Not a bad haul personally but kind of wish I saved some money on the side for the steam machine, whenever that comes out.

    This was extremely time consuming though and required driving a bit. The profit wasn’t really worth that much work towards the end.

  8. Haven’t been to a GS in forever but I remember growing up and you were able to return a used game within a week for full credit back. Essentially became a one time purchase game rental system 😂

  9. Happened at Shoppers Drugmart when you’d get 20x in points. Had scalpers mass purchase consoles. Stores encouraged it, as it inflated your sales. Even though profit margin on console is next to nothing.

    In the end it messed up your sales target for the next year.

  10. Who would even do that? Buying a 400$ console and trading it back in for in store credits? I don’t see that as a worthy transaction

  11. When I worked at a sports store we had an infinite money glitch that nobody tried to exploit. We had all used hockey skates for $30. You could do a no receipt return on some of them for like $50. For sure a manager would refuse if you tried to exploit it, but it was something I noticed while working there.

  12. RetardedPussy69 on

    This last black Friday, I traded in my fat PS5 for the newer slim version and it only cost me $12. Gamestop had some really good promotions this black friday and lots of people were doing this, they ended up stopping the promotion just before black Friday lol