Why we're building GameBid

3 October 2026 · 8 min read

We're the GameBid team. We're UK collectors, and we're building GameBid: a marketplace and auction site for physical video games, from boxed retro classics to last year's releases. It isn't open yet. There's a waitlist at www.gamebid.co.uk, and a private beta is coming soon, opening in small waves.

This is the long version of why. Where something is already built, we'll say so. Where it's still coming, we'll say that too.

Games you can hold

There's something about a game on a shelf. The spine. The manual. The cartridge you can pick up and slot in. A physical game is a thing you own. You can lend it to a mate, sell it when you're done, or keep it for twenty years and pass it on.

A lot of digital games don't work like that. When you buy one, you're usually buying a licence to play it under the store's terms, and what a licence gives, a licence can take away.

The clearest example is Ubisoft's The Crew. Ubisoft pulled it from digital stores in December 2023 and switched its servers off on 31 March 2024. Because the game needed a connection even to play solo, it stopped working on every platform. Within a couple of weeks, players reported that the game had been removed from their Ubisoft Connect libraries and their licences revoked.

That story has an uncomfortable lesson for collectors like us, too: The Crew stopped working on disc as well. A physical copy is the best protection we've got, but a disc that needs a server dies with the server. Which brings us to a campaign we really admire.

Why we're fans of Stop Killing Games

Stop Killing Games is a consumer campaign started in 2024 by Ross Scott, the YouTuber behind Accursed Farms. Its argument is simple: if you've paid for a game, the publisher shouldn't be able to make it completely unplayable when support ends. It wants laws so that games sold to us stay playable in some form after the servers go dark.

It has gone a long way:

In the EU, its European Citizens' Initiative, "Stop Destroying Videogames", gathered 1,294,188 verified signatures and was submitted to the European Commission in January 2026. In June 2026, the Commission replied that, at this stage, it can't propose a law obliging publishers to keep games playable once they stop selling them. Instead, by the end of 2026 it plans to start talks with the games industry and consumer groups on an industry code of conduct for how games reach their "end of life", and to report on how existing EU law on digital content is working.
In the UK, a petition asking the government to stop publishers disabling games they've already sold got 189,888 signatures. The government replied that it had no plans to change consumer law, and MPs debated the petition in Westminster Hall on 3 November 2025.

So no new law yet, but the question is being asked out loud in Brussels and Westminster.

To be clear, GameBid isn't affiliated with Stop Killing Games, and the campaign hasn't endorsed us. We're just fans of what it stands for: if you bought it, it's yours. GameBid exists to keep physical games moving between people who love them, so they're played and looked after instead of binned.

A price guide built for UK collectors

The hardest question in the hobby: what's it actually worth? The honest answer is often "it depends where you look". A lot of the popular price guides are built around the US market, so the figures are in dollars and based on NTSC copies. That's no help when you're holding a PAL copy with a UK box and manual. Other places show asking prices: what someone hopes to get, not what anyone paid. And one daft sale can drag an average all over the place.

So here's our aim, and we're saying "aim" on purpose: to build the UK's most reliable second-hand game price database. Here's how it works:

Real completed sales only. Every sale completed on GameBid is recorded as a price.
Outliers filtered out. Odd sales are flagged and left out of the guide, and so are refunded sales, repeat trades between the same people and sales flagged for suspected shill bidding. They're kept on record, but they don't move the price.
PAL first. Prices are PAL by default, with NTSC-U and NTSC-J tracked separately, so imports never muddy UK prices.
Condition matters. Complete in box, boxed without the manual, disc or cart only, case only and sealed are priced separately. Job lots are kept out of single-game prices.
Price history over time, so you can see whether a game is rising, falling or holding steady.
Honest confidence. Where there's not much data yet, we say so.
Free to look up. Once we're open, the game price pages are public, and you won't need an account to check them.

We'll be straight with you: on day one, the database is empty. It's built from GameBid sales, so it grows with every game that changes hands. That's slower, but it means every price is a real sale, in pounds. Every collector who sells on GameBid helps build it.

Fairer selling, with fees you can see

We want selling on GameBid to feel fair, with the fees in plain sight.

Free to list, and no buyer fee. When something sells, the seller pays a 5% GameBid fee on the item price (not on postage), plus card processing of 1.5% + 20p on the total. That's Stripe's standard UK card rate. There's also an optional paid Boost if you want more eyes on a listing, and it's only charged if the item sells.
Auctions and Buy Now. Sellers choose an auction, a fixed price, or both. Auctions have anti-sniping: a bid in the last two minutes pushes the end time back to two minutes after that bid. Sellers can set a hidden reserve, and turn on offers for Buy Now listings.
Payments held until the order is complete. You pay by card through GameBid's checkout, and the seller never sees your card details. Stripe, our payment provider, holds the payment until the order is complete. The seller is paid 2 days after you confirm the game arrived, or after the order confirms itself if you don't (see Buyer protection). If it never turns up, or isn't as described, you open a case and we look at it. The full details are on the buyer protection page.

Now, eBay, because it's where most of us trade, and we'd rather be accurate than loud. Since October 2024, selling on eBay UK has been free for private sellers: no final value fee. Instead, eBay now charges buyers on private sellers' listings a Buyer Protection fee of 10p plus a percentage of the item price (7% on the first £20). Business sellers are different. In Video Games & Consoles they pay a 9.9% final value fee on the total including postage, plus a per-order fee of 30p (40p on orders over £10) and a 0.35% regulatory operating fee.

Take a £20 game with free postage:

On eBay as a business seller: about £2.45 in fees, before any VAT on your account.
On GameBid: £1.00 GameBid fee (5%) plus 50p card processing, so £1.50. The buyer pays £20.
On eBay as a private seller: you pay nothing, and your buyer pays £1.50 in Buyer Protection on top.

So we're not going to tell you we're cheaper for everyone, because we're not. What we'll promise is this: one simple fee, shown upfront before you list, no listing fees and nothing added on for buyers.

Collectors first

GameBid isn't only a shop. We want it to be the place you show off your collection, a bit like Instagram or Depop, but for your shelf.

Here's what's built:

Your shelf. Add games by search or paste in a list, and they line up on a shelf by console, with your own photos instead of stock covers. Note the condition and what's included.
Profiles worth visiting. Follow other collectors, browse their shelves, and share a story-sized picture of yours to Instagram.
Wishlists. Set a target price and get an alert when a matching listing comes up at or below it.
Sets. Track official sets (the Game Boy Pokémon games, say) and earn a badge when you finish one, or make and share your own.
Your privacy, your call. Make your collection private or hide values. What you paid is always private, and your location only ever shows publicly as "UK".

Coming later: "Disc only" and "Delisted" tags on game pages and collections, and a page listing them all, because those are exactly the games worth hanging on to.

Built by collectors, in the open

GameBid is small for now: built by collectors, not a big company with a marketing department. We're building it in the open. You'll see what's done and what isn't on this blog and on our socials, and the beta exists so real buyers and sellers can tell us what's wrong before more people arrive.

We're building the site we'd want to use: one where a game goes to someone who'll love it, and where we can see what our games are worth without converting dollars in our heads.

Where this could go

These are ambitions, not promises, with no dates attached. One day we'd love GameBid to have a physical shop and warehouse: somewhere you can walk in, pick a game up off a shelf and talk about it with people who care as much as you do. And as the sales add up, we'd love the price database to grow into an archive of gaming history: what games sold for, year after year, and which quietly became rare. A record of the hobby, kept by the people in it.

Join the beta waitlist

The private beta is coming soon. We're letting a limited number of people in each day, so we can talk to the first buyers and sellers properly and fix things fast.

Join the waitlist at www.gamebid.co.uk. If you're approved for the beta, you become a founding member:

0% GameBid selling fee for your first 3 months from approval (card processing still applies, and so does Boost if you use it).
A Founding member badge on your profile.

We can't promise everyone a beta place straight away, and we won't give dates we can't keep. But if you still love owning games, we'd like you to be one of the first in.

Follow along on Instagram @gamebid_uk and X @GameBid_UK.

Games you can hold. That's the whole idea.