Sell your PlayStation 3 games for cash.

Sony’s third home console launched in Japan on November 11, 2006, and North America on November 17, priced at a steep $499 for the 20GB model and $599 for the 60GB. The PS3’s Cell processor had already been hyped for years by the time Killzone 2’s E3 2005 reveal trailer showed it off: confidence so high that Sony’s Kaz Hirai told the E3 2006 crowd the next generation "wouldn’t begin until Sony said so." Then the actual E3 2006 presentation undercut its own pitch: a Gran Turismo demo IGN called "very much like Gran Turismo 4 but in HD," an AR card game, a SingStar demo, and the price tag landing the real headline instead of the games.

Early cross-platform comparisons didn’t help either: the first Madden for both systems ran at 30fps on PS3 versus 60 on Xbox 360, a direct result of the Cell’s complexity and the 360’s head-start install base. Sony spent the next several years correcting course: price cuts, five first-party studio acquisitions between 2006 and 2011, and a deliberate focus on exclusives over annualized sequels. That bet produced God of War III, The Last of Us, Uncharted 2, Metal Gear Solid 4, and Demon’s Souls, the games that flipped the PS3’s reputation from "overpriced misstep" to one of the strongest exclusive libraries of its generation. Lifetime sales landed around 87.4 million units, narrowly ahead of the Xbox 360.

Blu-ray discs hold up well physically compared to the optical formats before them, so disc rot isn’t really the risk here the way it is on some older systems. What separates a strong PS3 sale from an average one is completeness: case, manual, and any insert that shipped with the late-cycle exclusives that built the system’s comeback, since those are the titles collectors are actually hunting for today.