Better Off Sold

In a lot of video games, particularly RPGs, players encounter weak items and equipment that accumulate in their inventory as they progress through the game (especially by fighting Random Encounters). These are items that they inevitably sell off in bulk to the first shopkeeper they see once their bag starts becoming full.

Sometimes, the items in question are inferior to what players can be reasonably expected to have by that point in the game and thus are not worth using. Anything with a sell price that's deemed not worth keeping counts here, from the sword that's outclassed in every way by another sword, to those crafting items that are so numerous and easily obtained that they just get dumped at the store.

Some of the examples, particularly for massively multiplayer online role-playing games, are instituted as Anti Poop-Socking methods: if the player has limited inventory space, they must eventually return to a shop in order to sell off the goods, usually in a safer place that makes a good stopping point. That said, this phenomenon can also cause frustration if you're grinding for cash. Is that enough to get you the 2,000 gold you need for your next equipment upgrade? If you haven't been keeping track of resale rates, the only way to find out is to head back to the store and sell them, making it hard to know when to stop grinding, or force a lot of back and forth trips. This can also be done for immersion; Money Spiders are unrealistic, but having them drop something that they can reasonably carry yet can be sold for money would be a more reasonable way to have enemies still provide some kind of value.

Related to Shop Fodder, which refers to items that have no use other than being sold for money. Compare Complacent Gaming Syndrome, which refers to specific gameplay elements that players get attached to.

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Examples:

Action Adventure

• ANNO: Mutationem: Because of how low scarce credits are to come by, especially with the usual Shop Fodder being sold at low cost, selling main weapons alongside old items to pay for newer weapons and better variants of items that later comes in stock at shops.
• Castlevania:
  • Castlevania: Symphony of the Night: In the Saturn version, jewels can be equipped as rings to power up the Jewel Sword, but it's not worth it.
  • Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin and especially Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia have various items that mostly exist to be sold, though they also have a use in the form of (non-repeatable) quests.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks: Treasures are useful to trade for new train parts, but still perfectly good for selling if you didn't need more of that part.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword also has a whole slew of random treasures and bugs that can be used to upgrade your items (the treasures) and enhance potions (bugs) but they can also be sold off to the correct NPCs at certain times.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, selling Shop Fodder is about the only way to farm rupees, as you can no longer get rupees from slashing weeds or killing most enemies (the exception being the Yiga clan soldiers), and smashing pots for money has been nerfed dramatically. Most item drops do have non-monetary uses, but many of them are so common that you end up with far more of them than you could possibly use, or (in the case of gems) selling them is just more beneficial. Kilton's special "mon" currency can only be acquired by selling monster parts to him.

Collectible Card Game

• Foil versions of common but used cards (many players love their Bling of War). The Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game has special packs as participation prizes for local events, where the commons are reprints of hard-to-get cards... and the rares are foil versions of the commons people use.
• The Shadowrun Card Game included a gun whose specific purpose was to sell so you could buy a better gun.
• In the Shandalar Magic: the Gathering computer game, selling stuff is the only realistic source of early-game gold; always accept cards when winning a battle, then find the nearest town and sell the bad ones.

Edutainment Game

• In The Oregon Trail II and up, you can buy many useless items such as butter churns (useless even if you have milk cows), cast iron stoves, furniture, china, bags of beads, certain folk medicines and spices, sacks of sugar (you don't seem to use them), gun holsters (which don't protect you from accidental gunshots) etc, that serve no purpose other than to make your wagon heavier and increase the risk of tipping over. Then again, you can trade them for essentials later. They can also be seen as a Self-Imposed Challenge by making the game more historically accurate, and bringing things that would only be useful when you get there.

Fighting Game

• Pretty much all of the best items in Dissidia Final Fantasy require the trading of various sellable items, the majority of which can only be generated by battling specific characters or won in the game's Duel Coliseum. The best of the best items are often created from combining the items you've already generated along with even better shop fodder.

First-Person Shooter

• Borderlands
  • While everything you find in Borderlands is either money, equipment or ammo, the fact that most of the equipment is randomly generated and usually a few levels below you (if it's even a type of weapon you like to use or a class mod compatible with your class), most of it is worth only for selling. In fact, there is a unique gun in the game, Knoxx's Gold, which has the special power of being particularly good for selling (its sale value is very high), though it can appear with such a good set of parts complementing its base that it becomes a Punch-Packing Pistol that's not worth selling for a while.
  • Borderlands 2 kicks it down a notch: every single gun you find has at least acceptable accuracy, capacity and fire rate, with the only true deciding factors being damage, recoil, recoil reduction and reload speed. You can use the very first pistol you find in the game⁺the Basic Repeater, a unique gun with a predetermined set of parts that make it kinda crappy, such as a lack of decent iron sights until a good way into the Southern Shelf no problem, and that's only because the mooks will have outleveled its firepower. It's still played straight with most class/grenade mods, relics and shields, though.
  • Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! gets a chance to play with and lampoon the trope: one side quest has you collecting 50 common-rarity guns for donation, and at one point the quest giver even says that the common quality guns are cheap and worthless. At the same time, if you have common loot you don't want, you have the option to throw it into Springs' Grinder and randomly generate a higher-rarity piece of equipment instead of just selling it.
  • Tiny Tina's Wonderlands invokes this with the Antique Greatbow sniper rifle, which purports high damage and sell value. It also doubles as Schmuck Bait, as firing it even once will decrease its damage to almost nothing and value by less than half. Its flavor text even changes from "It'd be worth a hefty sum if it was never fired." to "What a pity.", and it also gets the unique "Used" prefix.
• Protective artifacts in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl absorb a deplorable amount of the damage they guard you against (5% at the very most), in exchange for a prohibitive rate of radiation per second^exceptionsBatteries and Springs reduce the damage of their respective elements by 30%, and the Kolobok and Mama's Beads increase resistances by 5%; all of these artifacts are radiation-free, the only drawback is their weight. The only conceivable use you'd have for them is if you have an anti-rad artifact and no other good ones to put on your belt. Fortunately, they fetch as much of a price as all other artifacts, including the good ones. Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat use different mechanics for artifacts^detailsartifacts are divided into ones with beneficial effects but a rate of radiation, and anti-radiation ones with no downsides other than weight, so a truly worthless one is much rarer.

MMORPGs

• Most of the in game economy of EVE Online is based on the production, selling, buying, and transportation of items in the form of commodities other than the ships and upgrades that players can actually use. Though very little is actually useless, as almost everything in the game is useful to someone (for example, player-run space stations require certain resources that individual players will find useless).
• EverQuest: In old world content, during the mid game, roughly between the late 20s and early 40s level-wise, one of the best ways to make money was to sell the various Fine Steel Weapons that trash mobs dropped. They sold (still do, actually) for about 5 plat a piece, give or take depending on the weapon type, and even in the old days it wasn't too hard to find a quest reward or class item that was better than the Fine Steel stuff.
• Guild Wars:
  • There's an entire class of NPCs who trade weapons, armor, or other useful items for otherwise useless items. Some collectors offer explanations, but not all of them. And then there are merchants who buy virtually anything. This idea was taken a bit further with the introduction of Nicholas the Traveler, an NPC who wants different items weekly (or daily in Pre-Searing) in exchange for consumables. He nearly always asks for unneeded items. He, at least, gives a detailed explanation as to what use he has for such a bizarre item.
• Kingdom of Loathing:
  • The game has an "autosell" function that lets you sell just about any item in your inventory for money. Two items in particular were almost entirely useful only for their autosell value: "Valuable trinkets"^note which became useful when Hobopolis was released and a merchant exchanged them for items. The joke before that was that they were almost useless, while another type of item, "Worthless trinkets", is actually useful for trading with The Hermit. and "fat stacks of cash"^note Which became useful during the Christmas 2008 event. (the latter are useless because the Global Currency is "meat").
• Ragnarok Online
  • Items are the main source of income. Although some of those items can be used in certain quests, their main utility is being sold or exchanged for other items. The game mechanic is actually based on an early scene in the original manhwa, when Chaos chops a horn off of a Face Worm so that he'd have proof that he'd killed it when he returned to Alberta to collect the 5,000 zeny bounty on its head. In RO, a soldier in Izlude provides the justification as to why characters sell items to merchants and not to a bounty hunter's office by explaining that the kingdom passed a law in which merchants can act as bounty hunting offices, and are compensated by the kingdom for paying out rewards.
  • Ragnarok lets you sink your unwanted items into millinery. Got a ton of rotten bandages from killing zombies? Why, 300 of those make a hat! Got trunks? Make Sakkats! It can become ridiculous when your Kafra inventory is full of unwanted items you just can't part with because only a few hundred more will make you another hat!
• RuneScape has a lot of sellable items, such as goblin armour (too small for you to wear) and unenchanted jewelry. However, there are also things that are useful if you're on a certain quest and never again, such as beads (technically, goblin armour is also used in a quest, although even then you have to paint it first). Those things are useful for selling to people who are working on the quest that requires that item, or just selling to the shopkeeper. Some minigames even reward the player with Vendor Trash. When you get to a high enough level a very large portion of item drops are better off sold. This is because by the time you are strong enough to easily fight a monster, nearly all of that monster's armor and weapon drops will be weaker than what you are capable of using at your current level, even the extremely rare ones, so you are better off selling most of the drops to lower leveled players. And in many cases the armor and weapons that are of a useful level will be dropped so rarely that trying to get them from that monster will take far too long, so it is better to just buy them first, and then sell any that you might get yourself later.
• Tabula Rasa gives characters enormous amounts of backpack space and making truly useless items almost nonexistent (but rather valuable to compensate). Virtually all non-mission-critical items can, at the absolute least, be decomposed into their modular "stat bonuses" as well as the secondary resource needed to modify and install those modules, giving a distinct use to even the crappiest low-level gear in the game. These two aspects together led to the very common and rather comical sight of your character harboring several dozen fully-functional and loaded weapons (ranging up to chainguns and RPGs), two whole characters' worth of body armor in addition to their own, hundreds of grenades in all 53 flavors, and tens of thousands of rounds of spare ammunition for weapons the player cannot even equip. Any given low-level character could probably level a small town if they detonated the sheer volume of unstable materials they regularly lug around.
• Warframe has Prime parts, which are obtained at random by opening Void Relics, and can be used to make Prime weapons and Warframes. They can also be exchanged for Orokin Ducats, which can then be used to purchase rare, limited-time items from the Void Trader, who shows up every other weekend. While Prime equipment is powerful, some is less desirable than others (especially if you already have the item the part is for), so their parts are likely to simply be sold for Ducats. This also means that nearly all Prime parts have some value in trade between players, so selling unwanted parts to others can be a good way to earn Platinum without paying for it yourself.
• World of Warcraft:
  • For a brief period, the Darkmoon Faire allowed players to turn in certain gray quality items in exchange for tickets. However, developers soon realized that this threw the system and raised said items to white quality.
  • The Shadowstrike/Thunderstrike polearm found in the then-high level raid Molten Core back in Classic, instead of stats, possess a Chance on Hit proc and the ability to transform from one form to the other. Of the classes that could use polearms at the time - Warriors, Paladins, Druids, and Hunters - the weapon was comparatively too weak to be of use to the former two, and avoided by the latter two since Chance on Hit procs on melee weapons don't work for their preferred methods of attack. Because of this, it was generally considered worthless and granted the Fan Nickname "Vendorstrike", since this was all it was usually good for.
  • In Mists of Pandaria there are the so-called "Treasures of Pandaria". A number of these are low-quality items that may spawn in certain places; they grant experience points upon picking them up and usually sell for around one hundred gold, but are useless otherwise.
  • In Classic, Cloth armor with Strength and/or Agility were useless because it did not benefit the primary classes that could wear it. Thankfully, this was alleviated starting in The Burning Crusade, where Cloth items always gave Intellect and/or Spirit.

Puzzle Game

• Useless monsters in Puzzle & Dragons can be sold for a bit of Coins. In addition, there are Predras, which come in Baby, (100 Monster Points) Elemental, (500 Monster Points) and Grand (10,000 Monster Points) flavors. The Six Year TAMADRA could count, too, as while it looks flashy, it's just a regular TAMADRA otherwise, but it can be sold for fifty thousand Monster Points.

Racing Game

• In Gran Turismo 3, a relatively early race series for low power cars will give the winner an actually decent car, with respectable power that can be used in more difficult races. Or, it can be sold for 250,000 credits, far more than can be gained from any of the similar level race series available at the time. You can win the race series multiple times as well, and get the car again.
• In Gran Turismo 4, the first cup of the beginner mode grants the winner an old automobile that has very low power and front wheel drive, which can be sold for 8.000 credits, and it's easy to win the tournament when the player gets more experienced, and this can be done any number of times.

Real-Time Strategy

• Dead bodies of slain creatures can be sold in Pikmin 2. When above ground they don't really count, since they're used to grow more Pikmin, but in underground areas you get money for dragging them back to the ship instead. Not as much as collecting treasure, but one can still make a sizeable chunk of money off of just bringing back any creatures they kill.
• Warcraft III: As item drops are only randomized in skirmish games, items meant only to be sold are replaced by coins and lumber pickups. Some items with an actual use are better off sold, especially if they replicate a spell your faction already has or your hero can cast better. It's better to sell them and get money than leave them lying around where the enemy can take them.
• X: Most of the ships/weapons/items you sometimes obtain tend to fall under this. Examples include the Teladi Vulture, any abandoned ship whether or not it was piloted, the Fragmentation Bomb Launcher, any dumbfire missile that isn't the Tornado, and Nividium.

Roguelike

• Diablo: The copious amounts of low-quality weapons and armor you come across are good for gold.
• The shopkeeper of Dungeons of Dredmor, Brax, will buy anything off you (even the sidequest-completion items, before it was fixed in a patch), but there is nothing in the game that is, by definition, better off sold: It's either equipment, a consumable, or a crafting ingredient. However, if you don't have the relevant craft (Blacksmithing, Alchemy, or Tinkering) or skill set (e.g., booze, etc. when you've got no mana-using abilities or food when you're a Vampire), many items are functionally useless to you, making them effectively Vendor Trash (or Horadric Lutefisk Cube Trash). The expansion pack Conquest of the Wizardlands adds a new item, Horse Armour, which is a Shout-Out to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It would grant the wearer 20 piercing resistance and 20 armour absorption, except it can't be equipped, since you do not have a horse or a slot for horse armour. Selling it to Brax does give the player a good amount of gold, at least.
• Dwarf Fortress: A patch made it so a lot of things which used to be only good for selling now serve a purpose, but in very small quantities relative to what your workshops will churn out.
• For the King: Carnival Tickets grant access to games of chance with payouts ranging from "Total Party Kill" to "Gain a Level". If the player hasn't buffed their Luck Stat and isn't desperate, the sale price of the ticket is a much more reliable benefit.
• FTL: Faster Than Light:
  • Defeating most enemy ships only gives you money and basic resources, but occasionally defeating an enemy or completing a quest can give you useful equipment like an extra weapon, remote drone or augment. Most of these are useful for expanding or slotting into your weapons loadout, but particularly resource-intensive or underpowered weapons (like the Burst Laser III and Breach Missile, which require 4 and 3 weapons bars respectively out of a potential maximum of 8, have very slow charge times, and only do moderate damage) will often be sold to stores instead of actually equipped. The same goes for drones if you don't have a drone system to actually use them with, or the Repair Arm augment which takes a percentage of your money to automatically heal you. Stores only pay half-sell-price for equipment, but you can still get quite a bit of money from selling 2 otherwise useless/impractical pieces of equipment.
  • One unlockable ship starts equipped with the Crystal Vengeance, which fires a single shot at the enemy ship every time yours is damaged... or can be sold to the first store you reach for a good early-game money boost.
• Moria had shopkeepers that would purchase unidentified items. In theory, you could stockpile 99 potions of Apple Juice, Slime Mold Juice and Water to get maximum profit (since their unidentified form is always the same from game to game.) However, trying to sell identified items will offend the shopkeeper. The follow-up Angband makes it impossible to sell identified items.

Role-Playing Game

• One of the most basic ways of making money in Albion is to sell items. Some predators are hunted for parts that are used for various purposes (like decoration or as an ingredient for medicine). So whenever you're running low on cash, go hunting, pick up a few dozen of these and sell them. Valuables, like gems, also count, except for (non magical) jewelry, which can be equipped for extra protection.
• Most equipment that you found in Arcana were worth equipping your characters with, except for the Golden Sword and the Rococo Armor. The sword was made of gold and the armor was made of precious metals studded with gems, so they didn't raise your stats much, but they could be sold for a high price at the equipment shops.
• Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura has gems, weak enemy weapons, and a wide variety of items that are only useful for certain builds.
• Baldur's Gate: The player will inevitably encounter more leather armours, short swords, basic helmets, and short bows than they know what to do with. How many of them are actually kept long enough to sell typically depends on the character's STR (and resulting weight limit).
• Crash Fever has units from the Hatcher that are permanently stuck at a four or five star form (at least, in Global, such as Quetzalcoatl.) While these units will clog up your 10x rolls with worthless filler with no abilities and barely anything in the way of stats and techniques, they can be sold for a load of Ghosts, which is the only way to get them. There are also Golden Ducks, which have even worse stats than the hatcher units, but can be sold for a hefty amount of Bits (the game’s common currency).
• This is lampshaded in Dragon Age II where if you sell Aveline's starter shield (which belonged to her deceased husband) she'll actually reference how you sold it because it was inadequate.
• Divinity: Original Sin II: Players accumulate a Monty Haul of equipment with randomly generated bonuses and abilities from Random Drops, quest rewards, and searching containers. Most of it is best sold in bulk for gear that directly supports the character's skills.
• At the end of chapter 3 of Dragon Quest IV, Torneko opens his own shop, and can put up any item in his inventory for sale. At higher prices than what it would be sold for in other stores. Despite this, his wife (apparently a spectacularly good saleswoman) always manages to sell it all. Even the most worthless items dropped by monsters apply in this regard as well. Needless to say, you can rack up obscene amounts of money if you're willing to grind for a while in this chapter. Too bad money doesn't carry over from chapter to chapter (though if you use it to purchase expensive items, those do carry over).
• Elden Ring: The description of the Noble's Slender Sword notes that it's valuable due to its gold decoration and actually recommends the player sell it. That said, the sword itself isn't an example of this trope; it's a very good straight sword with excellent scaling and is a fairly rare drop, so a player with it probably farmed specifically for it and is planning on using it.
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: Almost every enemy you fight drops armor, weapons, and/or items, the vast majority of which will be underpowered compared to what you already have equipped. This is even more pronounced if you put perks into Smithing and Enchantment; even Daedric artifacts will pale in comparison to the things you can craft at high skill levels, so unless you want to keep them for sentimental reasons (or to display them in your house), you're better off selling them to buy ingots to craft/improve your own items.
• Fallout:
  • When you're fighting human (or humanoid, anyway) opponents, the series features a lot of items that are better off sold, since you can usually scavenge a weapon, a piece of armor, and a trinket or two from hostiles, and they're usually things you either don't need, or already have (or have something better,) leading to huge mounds of sellable items after a fight. An interesting part of the Fallout game economy is that actual cash is relatively limited. It is often easier to trade for items to make up for what the NPC merchants lack in money. It gives the game's barter system a more realistic feel (in a post-apocalyptic sort of way), as you'll end up with transactions that go along the lines of "four scavenged shot guns for all of your cash, several bottles of hooch, and some ammo".
  • Fallout 4 finally makes almost all of the the bottles and plates and sticks and toenail clippings scattered around the wasteland useful, for crafting things. It also turns actual useful items into this; in its predecessors, items could be literally worthless when you finally trekked to a vendor to unload, thus forcing you to learn which items were worth collecting (cigarettes, for example, had a good value-to-weight ratio). In 4, possibly as a consequence of the designated junk vendors who sell items to use for crafting, the game assigns a value of at least one bottlecap (the in-game currency) to every single item. .38 ammo is only used for pipe guns, and since you find a superior 10mm pistol before you've even left the vault, chances are you'll stack up thousands of .38 bullets without even realising from fighting lower level raiders who continually use pipe guns throughout the world, even after you've long since moved onto laser guns and missile launchers. Every one of those bullets is worth at least a cap, and unless you're playing on survival mode, ammo has no weight. Consequently, the "Fortune Finder" perk (which increases the amount of money you find in containers) isn't as useful as "Scrounger" (which increases the amount of ammo you find), because you can sell the rounds you don't need and keep the ones you do.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy the Power Staff, which, despite the name, is an utterly unremarkable weapon that's already obsolete for pretty much every class that can wield it by the time you gain access to it. There is only one in the game, but it inexplicably sells for a whopping 12,345 gil, which is nothing to sneeze at at all at the point in the game at which it's obtained. Remakes would lower the selling price to 6,172 gil and make it possible to obtain more as Random Drops from Rhyoses... which are only found late in the game, when the Power Staff has become even more obsolete and therefore still not good for much beyond selling.
  • Final Fantasy II is the first game in the series to introduce Random Drops. Imperial magicians and certain other enemies frequently drop spell tomes, with the ones that aren't available from shops often netting thousands of gil more than you'd receive from fighting monsters. However, some of these tomes correspond to highly useful spells one might prefer to teach to their party members.
  • Final Fantasy III has Golden Swords. They are the weakest swords in the entire game, and are found exclusively in a treasure stash in Goldor Manor. They sell for 2,500 gil a pop.
  • Final Fantasy XIII has loot you could either use for synthesis or selling. What's even more worth selling is items that are specifically described as having a high sale value, as they provide very little benefit for synthesis anyway.
  • Most of the equipment obtained in Dissidia Final Fantasy: Opera Omnia's. The gachapon system revolves around netting high-level custom equipment for the game's characters. Most pulls result in a large amount of low-level generic equipment that is useful only for selling off or consuming in upgrades to the high-level gear.
• Genshin Impact has a variation typical of mobile-game mechanics. 1★ and 2★ weapons and artifacts become largely dead weight once you have a supply of 3★ and above, which only takes a few hours of gameplay. But you'll continue getting prodigious quantities of them from chests, because they still have a purpose—as consumable material to power up the weapons and artifacts you're actually using. The item-leveling interface will helpfully fill its slots with these low-tier items automatically.
• Kingdom Hearts χ: While they can be used for EXP boosts to other Medals, Moogle Medals give some of the worst EXP in the entire game; they're better off sold for munny, and they provide a good amount.
• The Legend of Heroes - Trails: Most weapons and equipment tend to be best sold at shops for a decent price once new items are available in later chapters. Since late-game items cost double amount regardless of where you buy them, selling high value materials is a necessity for needed equipment.
• Mass Effect sees fit to dump upon the player piles of assault rifles, shotguns, pistols, and sniper rifles, not to mention armor and upgrades for all the above. Most of it is actually sub-par equipment, and a quick check of the weapon or armor's manufacturer by a reasonably experienced player can tell you off the bat which ones are worth keeping before you even check the stats.
• Monster Hunter: Eggs that are given as quest rewards, especially Silver and Gold Eggs, often sell for four- or five-digits zenny. However, silver and gold ones are also necessary to craft Fate jewels.
• In Mount & Blade, enemy drops are useful early on for equipping your character and NPCs; however once you have everybody decked out in the nicest armor drops, enemy drops essentially become a source of money, as do the enemies themselves if you manage to take any prisoners. Prisoners can be recruited to your army, but the chances of that happening are low; the point is moot if your army is at capacity anyway, and even if it's not your people won't like working with them too. To sell them, you have to go from town to town until you can find a ransom broker, meanwhile with the prisoners dipping into your food supply. Captured lords and kings can be the most annoying to have to drag around, since the usual ransom brokers won't purchase them from you; you just have to wait until someone makes you an offer for them, and it's possible for them to escape before you even get an offer (though if you have land you can keep them there, where they don't touch your food and are less likely to escape on their own). There are also items that you can purchase from vendors for the sole purpose of reselling them elsewhere for a profit, some of which have absolutely no function apart from their inherent money-making value. This was all retained in its sequel as well, though prisoners can now be sold anywhere there's a town instead of having to find a ransom broker at random.
• The Gold Bars and Dried Bouquets in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door come close to being Shop Fodder, although they do have very marginal other uses. Both can be cooked, which is necessary for 100% Completion, although it wouldn't really make anything worthwhile. Also, the Dried Bouquet restored 1 FP and the Gold Bars were a way to "get around" the 999 coin limit.
• Pillars of Eternity: Traps are woefully underpowered when placed by the player, only doing a pitiful 1/6th to 1/12th of the damage of their pregenerated counterparts. Since traps are automatically placed in your inventory when you disarm them, once you have the achievement for placing five of them there's not much point in holding on to them, so you'll sell them without much hesitation.
• Pokémon:
  • Once you get to the Department Store in each game, you can purchase "Lemonade" from the rooftop vending machines, which are equally effective as Super Potions, but cost only a fraction of the price, effectively making Super Potions into this. The only disadvantage is that you have to purchase Lemonades one at a time.
  • Ethers are outclassed by Leppa Berries, which have the effect but activate automatically when held by a Pokémon; the player can get a sustainable supply of them with careful gardening. Neither of these two can be purchased from shops, but Ethers fetch a surprisingly high price in resale.
  • Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers: Most bands provide useful passive buffs for the Pokémon who wears it. However, every Pokémon can only wear one at a time. Given that you find these bands everywhere, you're better off selling them and they pay nicely, compared to most other items
  • Pokémon Sword and Shield's Isle of Armor expansion introduces the Cram-o-Matic, an Item Crafting device which converts any 4 items into another, including otherwise inaccessible and sought-after items such as PP Ups. If you know the right recipes, you can convert your unwanted items into hundreds of these items.
  • When playing a Nuzlocke, Revives and Max Revives cannot be used, since a fainted Pokémon is well and truly dead by the rules of the challenge. Thankfully they're worth a pretty penny when sold off. They are equally useless in a Solo-Character Run, since you have only one party member and as such will automatically black out if your one battler faints.^note By the most common ruleset of this challenge, you have to reset immediately if it faints, since HM users are not permitted to fight but would be sent out automatically.
• In Robopon, there's Crysty, a Robopon found within the Shielder Tower in Apollo Fortress. It's only found during the evenings, but when it's out, it's surprisingly easy to come by. Its body is made of solid crystal, and while most Robopon sell for about 50-100 G per level, Crysty sells for 250 G a level. The ones you find are between levels 23-27, meaning they go for around 6000 G a pop.
• In Shin Megami Tensei IV, demon meat healing items restore so little HP that using them to recover is nearly worthless. However, they fetch for a lot of Macca when sold. Additionally, a wandering Hunter found across Tokyo's rooftops will buy some off you for several times its original market value if you're willing to track him down and give him exactly what he wants.
• In Sinjid, you can find gold rings in the Dai'jin Mines. These offer negligible stat boosts compared to other trinkets, and can be sold for a good sum of money. The Flavor Text even lampshades this feature.
• Star Ocean: The Second Story: Half the stuff you make using Item Crafting is better off sold. Many items have little or no use and there are over a thousand of them.
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic: Plenty of items are better of sold. Stims, for instance. The bonuses they give don't stack, and they are only mildly useful once you've have access to the more powerful Force abilities. Ditto with medpacks, standard blasters, vibroblades, and such. The second game does this too, and can also give you 5-6 copies of an allegedly "one of a kind" blaster.
• The Suikoden series has urns and statues, which in theory have a purpose (to decorate your castle). However, most players just opt to sell them instead, since they have no practical benefits when displayed and most of the uncommon variants will earn a good bit of cash when sold.
  Suikoden V has a useful way to mill them, though it requires some setup. Once you have Subala at your castle you can play the fishing mini-game, where you try to have the highest score at the end of a 3-minute time limit. In the course of catching fish, however, you'll also pull up plenty of Fish-themed equipment (Fish Fins, Head and Body - crap armor, but it sells for a decent price) and Urns, which you can identify and sell easily if you have Bastan at your castle. Most of the time you just get Failure urns worth a measly 30 Potch - less than the cost of an appraisal - but you'll also pretty consistently find at least one Karaya urn (worth 8000) and/or Celadon Urn (which sell for 20,000), so you'll make a tidy profit each time you go. Better yet, it costs nothing to enter and winning the contest will earn you 3,000 Potch or so - more than enough to identify any Urns you find. A great way to earn money for most of the midgame, and much less tedious than farming enemies with the game's annoying encounter rate.
• Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
  • The Goodie Bag is an item that gives you one coin when used, and never runs out. This can be used to create unlimited wealth (very, very slowly), but there are faster ways to make unlimited money (like using the combat turns you would be using for the Goodie Bag to, y'know, fight enemies that drop money), so it's often better to sell it for a quick influx of 555 coins instead.
  • The Pure Water item, which is frequently won from beating undead enemies. The Pure Water item only has one purpose, which is to instantly defeat undead monsters. They also have a hefty resale value of 75 coins apiece, making Pure Water a good way to rack up some coins.
• Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption has a lot of jewelry items, whose sole in-game function is to increase your Appearance stat when worn, which is of dubious utility. Their true purpose is to be sold for money. In the single-player game, any items not usable by vampires (such as Holy Statuettes and Holy Crosses) also qualify.
• In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, You'll find loads and loads of armor and swords in hidden caches or looted from enemies, and the vast majority of it will be sub-par compared to what you're already using. Especially once you get access to the Master blacksmith and armorer (and in the Blood and Wine DLC, the Grandmaster), and can start crafting the game's best gear. Selling loot is where you'll end up making most of your money, as it's far more lucrative than taking monster contracts.

Shoot 'em Up

• While no item in The Void Rains Upon Her Heart is truly useless, some are more prone to being donated to Blot's gallery (in exchange for karma and her Blot Token currency) than others:
  • There is a category of gifts that give you a bonus after each battle. These make good donation fodder if you're near the end of the run anyway, as it won't undo the effects you've already received.
  • The "Paint" gifts heal you upon being collected, and then boost your defenses. The healing isn't undone if you sell the gift, and while you do lose the defense boost, it isn't that high and doesn't matter anyway if you're rarely or never getting hit. These gifts also happen to be art-related, which means Blot gives you a higher-than-usual reward for donating them. The "Art" gifts are similar, but replace the heal with a max health boost. Donating these does make you lose all of their effects, but like for the Paints, they don't really matter if you're rarely or never getting hit.
  • Many gifts have effects that trigger if you get hit, or provide repeated healing if you've taken damage. These are obviously useless if you're attempting a No-Damage Run, and not that great if you're playing well in general.
  • Bloody Nails has the effect of automatically using a panic and saving you from getting hit if you would get hit. This has several benefits, but it also has anti-synergies with all of the gifts that "reward" getting hit, so it can be a good choice to dump it if you'd rather take advantage of those.
  • Phobia is a unique case: it's powerful, but after you receive it and gain its 10 panics, it does nothing for you and might as well be donated to Blot for a hefty sum of Blot Tokens and karma, which does not force you to give back any of the panics. The only reason not to do it is that you could otherwise put it into the Link Synapse to recycle it, and that won't be an option in every run (and you may have better stuff to put in there anyway).
  • Random items that don't synergize with your build, or you have no use for. Are you out of panics and have no way to gain more? Might as well dump those gifts that buff your panics. You have very powerful heart shots and a single helper that does basically nothing for you? Just donate it.
  • Stardust is a Quick Gift that lasts for 5 battles and converts 8% of the motes you gain into radiant motes, which becomes useless after you reach the point where you're swimming in tetrids anyway. So just equip it before the Blot battle and immediately sell it. ^note There's a series of similar gifts with higher conversion rates, but they can't be donated because they only last one battle.

Survival Horror

• Resident Evil 4: It is practical — and profitable — to sell off bullets for any guns you don't plan to use. Don't like the TMP? Its bullets are worth 20 pesetas each and come in boxes of 50. Don't like magnums or the Mine Thrower? Grab those boxes anyway because those bullets are worth 500 Ptas each. If the Handcannon's not your thing or you upgraded it to have Bottomless Magazines, keep it around just to get the ammo boxes to spawn, then sell the bullets for 600 each. Even Handgun ammo works - it's very common and worth 50 Ptas a pop. It all adds up quicker than you'd think.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons: This can often occur due to random loot tables or clunky adventure design. For instance, take a suit of magically-enhanced +2 leather armor versus a nonmagical mithral chain shirt: they're identical statistically, but the chain shirt costs only 1100 gold while the leather armor costs 4160
• Munchkin: Items that don't give you any benefit (barred by race/class/gender/etc, lower bonus than the item already taking up that armor/footgear/etc slot) can be sold for levels.

Third-Person Shooter

• Warframe:
  • Of a sort. All equipment is leveled up by "mastery rating," which is the only way to increase the player's overall mastery rank. Less useful weapons are often dismissed as "mastery fodder," best mastered as fast as possible and then promptly sold.
  • Blueprints, oddly. While they are immensely valuable and people will grind for hours to find the right blueprints, after you build the item the first time, there is absolutely no need to build it again, so any duplicate blueprints found are quickly sold. Special mention goes to parts for the Oberon warframe (which drop from Eximus units you can find on any map) and the Gorgon gun (which drops from a mid-tier Grineer enemy).
  • Duplicate common and uncommon mods are typically sold en-masse. Duplicate rares can usually be sold to other players for much better prices.

Tower Defense

• The Battle Cats:
  • You have the option to sell duplicate cats rolled from the gacha for XP or NP (used to level up cats and unlock new abilities, respectively), or use them for an extra + level on the unit. While stat-based gacha units like Rocker Cat and Hip Hop Cat are worth using, support units tend to end up sold for NP — why would you care if your Sanzo Cat has 1 extra level's worth of HP and attack when you're only using it to slow floating and angel enemies?
  • Talent orbs provide such an imperceptible boost to a unit's stats that most players will cash them in for NP. Players will typically sell D-rank orbs straight away because they lose value upon being merged, and merge the rest up to S-rank orbs before selling them if they don't want the small boost.

Turn-Based Tactics

• Fire Emblem:
  • Axes are treated this way in the earlier games. Playable axe users were rare, and good playable axe users even rarer. Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem even gives you Silver Axes with the intent of being sold for cash.
  • The Devil Axe, with its chance of backfiring and harming the user, is often treated this way, but most games give it a low sell price in anticipation of this.
  • The Goddess Icon is a stat booster that raises the Luck Stat. While all other stat boosters are highly sought-after, Luck is a Dump Stat and the Icon's bonus is rarely enough to make a difference, so the decent amount of gold it sells for is often more valuable than its intended use. Later games made Goddess Icons give double the boost to its stat that the other stat boosters gave to theirs to counteract this, but even then they still often end up sold.
  • A Rank magic tomes in the GBA games are often Awesome, but Impractical. Enemies have such low Resistance that basic tomes are likely to one-round kill the majority of them, and high-rank tomes are often heavy enough to prevent double attacking, causing them to ironically do less damage. They typically sell for a lot though.
  • Promotion items the player doesn't plan on using. Especially in games that split promotion items by class, where the player might not have anyone decent to use some of them on. Orion's Bolts in the GBA games get this especially bad due to the general weakness of Archers. Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones in particular has only one non-promoted Archer, rendering Orion's Bolts Shop Fodder to anyone not planning on using Neimi.
  • Dark magic in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn is only usable by two characters, both of whom are 2nd playthrough-exclusive. On a first playthrough, they serve no purpose except to be sold. On a second, one of said Dark Mages joins late and isn't particularly strong, while the other joins in the final battle, meaning they're probably still Better Off Sold even then.
  • Averted in Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade in a ranked playthrough, as the Funds rank is based on the total worth of all items you own, and items are worth double their selling price. This means even items designed to be sold (the Gems) are better off not sold in a ranked run, as selling them will cut their value in half. And as the Ocean Seal and Heaven Seals are worth a huge amount of gold, actually using them to promote characters (Dart or the Lords, respectively) will hurt your Funds rank severely.
• X-COM: UFO Defense has several items that exist only to be sold, but plasma weapons and especially plasma grenades are worth a lot of money and plentiful. Even the smallest UFO guarantees at least one plasma weapon and one plasma grenade, and larger UFO raids will give you more weapons than you can ever conceivably use. Becoming an illegal alien weapons dealer isn't just profitable, it's also smart, as you'll need that space in your stores for other stuff.
  • Oddly enough, in the sequel, XCOM Terror From The Deep, Zrbite falls into this category. Alien Submarine ion engines are much more durable than the Power Sources of the previous game, which means you'll get 50 Zrbite from even the smallest USO. Medium and up will give you 50 Zrbite per engine, and Supply Ships have three engines and are weakly defended at best. You'll be swimming in Zrbite by the time you can actually use it for anything, and you'll always have far more than you actually need. It doesn't sell for very much ($5,000 per unit), but when you're selling 50 units at a time, it will add up very quickly. Even once you have the Leviathan submarine and have to use that Zrbite for fuel, you'll be conducting USO raids on Medium and Large submarines and raking in the Zrbite.
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown has plasma weapons for an interesting example. Such armaments are endgame-tier weapons for your soldiers, and require plenty of research before you're able to build your own or refurbish captured alien guns. But since plasma weapons are standard for the alien forces, by the time you've reached the late game, you'll probably have accumulated a decent stockpile of plasma weapons from captured aliens, meaning when a Council request pops up, you can afford to sell some extras for a huge lump of cash and still have enough to comfortably outfit your squad.
  • XCOM: Enemy Unknown: The expansion Enemy Within introduces EXALT, an Evil Counterpart to XCOM that eventually opposes you in the field. You can recover fancy-looking ballistic and later laser weapons from EXALT's operatives, guns your soldiers can use, except you have an infinite supply of your own ballistic weapons, and by the late game you'll have developed your own laser weapons on your way to researching plasma. So EXALT loot largely exists to be sold on the gray market.

Wide-Open Sandbox

• Minecraft: The rotten flesh dropped by zombies does have some uses — it can be eaten by the player, although it only restores a small amount of health and causes nausea, and can be fed to dogs without ill effects — but for most players, its primary use is to be sold in bulk to cleric villagers as a cheap source of currency.

Non-Gaming Examples

Live-Action TV

• This is the basis for shows like Auction Hunters and American Pickers. Both shows feature people who make their living buying things that would typically be dismissed as not worth very much and then reselling them for large sums of money to the right buyers. Sometimes even the literal trash itself can be valuable - at least one of the storage trailers purchased by the Auction Hunters was full of scrap metal that they were able to sell to the scrap dealer for a few hundred bucks, on top of all the other valuable contents.

Other

• Sweepstakes contests that have a valuable prize like a new car or house often have the option of a cash payout instead, because you usually have to pay taxes on your prize, and who wants to win a $4M house if you can't afford the property tax?

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