Console Dealer

Every price is a conversation.

Console Dealer is a first-person shop simulator set in 2003, in a secondhand games shop you run alone. Nothing in it has a fixed price. What you pay, what you charge and what you finally shake on are decided across the counter, one customer at a time.

Negotiate everything

Someone walks in with a bag of cartridges and wants money today. Someone else picks three games off your shelf and offers less than the ticket. Six kinds of customer, each with their own patience, pride and idea of what things are worth. Counter their offer, hold your line, or walk away and lose the sale. Read them right and the gap between what you pay and what you sell for is your whole living. Read them wrong and they leave, and the queue behind them is watching.

Buy smart, or don't buy

• Buy across the counter from walk-ins, at your price, not theirs.
  
• Bid on job lots and storage auctions from one photo and one line of description.
  
• Fill want-lists and answer the phone for the stock the street is asking for.
  
• Send cold stock to the bulk dealer before it eats a shelf.

Stock it, price it, shift it

• Price every item by hand. Over-price and it sits; under-price and the resellers clean you out.
  
• Read the weekly trade paper: a price cut or a new release moves your whole shelf.
  
• Repair dead hardware on the bench and sell it one step better.
  
• Watch your reputation on the street. It decides who walks in and how hard they push.

Rent is the pressure

Fifty-three cities, five hundred neighbourhoods, four kinds of premises. A gold-coast shopfront brings collectors with deep pockets and a rent to match; a lockup on an industrial estate is cheap and nobody comes. Where you sign is the biggest decision you make, and you make it on day one.

Five ways behind the counter

Car-boot trader, repair bench, shop-floor lifer, collector or liquidator. Who you were before decides how you buy, how you sell, and what walks through your door.

No microtransactions. No online. One shop, your name on it.