'Um, as a favor, if you buy a new one, please sell your gaming PC to our company' says Tokyo-based computer store as it offers 'pretty high prices'

If you happen to live out in Tokyo and find yourself not using an ageing gaming rig, one company seems intent on buying it off you.

As spotted by Videocardz, Akihabara-based tech shop Sofmap recently took to X to share (machine translated) "Gaming PC, even used ones are really out of stock right now". What follows is a picture of just a handful of PCs sat on a few shelves.

"Um, as a favor, if you buy a new one, please sell your gaming PC to our company...We buy them back at pretty high prices...Whether it's a gaming desk or a laptop, or even a regular non-gaming one, we pretty much buy any PC…"

A few days after this original post, Sofmap said, "If anyone is considering selling their gaming PC, please feel free to send a DM to this account. We're working on setting up a system for preliminary estimates in a simple manner...!"

That system implies a lot of interest in selling off old wares, and I know if Sofmap were close to me, I'd certainly have a couple of old parts to drop off. Still, Sofmap must only be buying for 'pretty high prices' because it's getting them in return, and that's certainly a bit of an oddity.

When it comes to the supply of PC parts, we are currently in the middle of a major memory crisis that affects everything from RAM to storage to GPUs, and that naturally has a knock-on effect on one's ability to buy rigs. However, Japan is very unique in that there are 3 million fewer PC Gamers than 10 years ago. The PC gaming market is oddly small, and manufacturers have traditionally shipped to the nation in limited quantities.

However, the economic power of that market has grown significantly over the last decade in Japan, with it doubling between 2018 and 2021 alone. While a good chunk of that growth is down to Covid lockdowns, the market is still on the way up, even though the playerbase is smaller. Current stats suggest fewer Japanese PC gamers are spending more than in previous years, but the overall trend suggests that they're happy to go big on hardware purchases.

There were notable changes in attitudes towards PC gaming in the Japanese post-Dark Souls, but many factors were at play here. Valve staff even reported reaching out to the developer behind Recettear, a shopkeeping management/dungeon crawler, to get it added to the marketplace.

This is all to say that the unique challenges that come with both stock shortages worldwide and a growing market in Japan are some of the contributory factors for used gaming PCs to fetch potentially high prices. Don't expect to get the same offer if you lug your old clunker down to your local PC shop.