In price-sensitive India, a pre-owned games store gets increasing play

Indians are not able to play most of the popular games in the digital world, like F1 2015, Call of Duty, and Battlefield: Hardline, because they are expensive. The grey markets are also a rip-off. This prompted two engineering grads from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi – Kabeer Jain and Abhishek Jain – to launch a pre-owned games store GameXS in 2012.

“By offering fair prices, convenient checkout, and quick deliveries, we want to help gamers get a bang for their buck,” says Kabeer.

Today, the startup announced that it secured seed funding from Lead Angels, an alumni-focused angel network started by a team of engineering grads from IIT. The deal size remains undisclosed.

“GameXS’s unique selling point is an extensive collection of pre-owned games and consoles as well as the quality assurance. These make buying used games fast and hassle-free,” says Lead Angels founder Sushanto Mitra. “The startup allows gamers to sell any game at any time in just a few clicks.”

God of War III for $30, anyone?

GameXS claims that by combining re-commerce and crowdsourcing, it helps gamers reduce their gaming costs up to two-thirds. For instance, God of War III’s 2014 version on PS4, which originally costs INR 2,750 (US$42), was sold for INR 1,999 (US$30) on GameXS.

The site says it processed 10,000 transactions with a repeat customer rate of 50 percent.

Right now, it offers free doorstep pickup within a day in 5,000 locations in India. The pickup time has been brought down to three hours in Gurgaon, a suburb in Delhi.

With fresh funding, the startup will scale up operations, broaden product portfolio, and build a larger team.

Going forward, GameXS aims to grow the pre-owned games market and make gaming more accessible in India.