TrueAchievements Launches Price Comparison Service
For some time now I've wanted a way to find games online that are
1) cheap
2) decent enough to play
3) have a high TA score
So I've tended to look at a retailer's website, see what's on sale, then come back to TA, see how points a game has, then see if it has a decent rating. As well as being a pain, I often wonder if I could find the game cheaper anywhere else, so then have to check on Froogle or PriceRunner or similar.
It's basically a bit of a nightmare.
So I wondered if I might be able to write something for us to use
actually built in to TrueAchievements.com.
I contacted a few companies to get online retailer databases and have now built up an impressive 15 or so store database. This database is updated every 6 hours to ensure the prices are as correct as they can be.
Now if you go to the page for a game you don't own, you will see the cheapest price to buy that game online (of the retailers I'm currently scanning, but this is most of them). Click through and you'll see the prices from all the retailers that have it, along with a link to take you straight to their site to buy it.
As well as this, if you go to Useful Links - Game Price List, you will find a list of all the games you don't have along with their prices. This list is filterable by genre, but most awesomely, by both TA per pound and Game Rating per pound!
From the last sentence you'll see that this is currently a UK only database, but I have plans to do the same for other regions. I haven't hidden it from those regions yet as I want you to see the functionality, suggest improvements, and help me to build a list of retailers in those regions you want me to track.
Perhaps the coolest thing of all about all of this is that when you click through and buy a game from these retailers, they will be giving a small amount of commission back to TA - this means we get to buy better servers, more bandwidth etc which should benefit everyone! This really is the gift that keeps on giving
So, I urge you to check it out, have a play, treat yourself to some new (old?) games, save yourself some cash and at the same time help the site!
Cheers
TA
P.S. As with all brand new developments, there may be some teething troubles. The games are matched up using a Universal Identifier that
should mean they are all the same - some shops may have implemented this better than others. The matching those games to TA games process was a manual one and therefore is prone to TA error
. Please check that the item you click through to is the exact item you wanted to buy before actually purchasing it