Questions
What this site reads, how often it reads it, and what a row on it does and does not claim.
Why is this game missing?
Usually it is not missing. Its page exists and has no stock on it, because no New Zealand shop we poll has a copy listed tonight.
The catalogue runs far deeper than the shelf: almost every title we hold a release for has its own page, and most have never been stocked by a shop we poll. That’s normal, not a fault. (Fan-made ROM hacks and translations are the one exception; we leave those off the site.) Search covers the whole catalogue, not just what’s in stock, so it’s the fastest way to tell "never heard of this" from "nobody has one right now". If a shop genuinely has a copy we haven’t matched, it’s usually a gap in our release catalogue for that platform, not a misread listing. We keep the listing rather than attach it to the wrong game.
How often does stock update?
Once a night, per shop.
Every shop we poll is read once a night. If we have not managed to read a shop for more than a day and a half, then on a game’s own page that shop’s copies say when we last checked them instead of "In stock", and are left out of the page’s in-stock count and price range. The home shelf and the browse pages still include those copies until the shop is read again.
Are you affiliated with these shops?
No. We read public product feeds and link back to the shop.
No commercial relationship, no payment either way. We just read what a shop publishes and link back to it.
Why is a game listed as sold?
A copy existed and no longer does, and that’s worth knowing.
Most listings on any given night are unavailable. A sold copy at a known shop is evidence that a title turns up in New Zealand at all, which for a scarce game is often the only signal there is. So it keeps its place on the game’s page, marked sold, rather than being dropped. A game a shop is taking orders for but does not have yet is marked pre-order instead, because it has not been sold. The shelf pages are different: they list what’s in stock tonight, so a sold copy is out of scope there, not hidden. A copy at a shop we’ve stopped reading is not shown at all: nobody’s looked since, so neither "in stock" nor "sold" would be honest.