The usual sequence goes like this. The console dies. You look up a repair. The repair quote is uncomfortably close to what a working second-hand one costs. You decide to deal with it later. It is now two years later and the console has become part of the furniture.
The step that gets skipped in that sequence is finding out what the dead console is worth as it is.
Why a repair quote makes it look worthless
A repair shop has to fix the whole console. That means diagnosis time, a technician, a part, a warranty on the work and the risk that it turns out to be the board after all. Of course that is expensive.
A buyer who deals in volume has an entirely different maths problem. They are not repairing your console back to retail condition, they are recovering the parts that are provably fine and putting them into other consoles that need exactly those parts. That is a much cheaper operation, which is why we can pay you for a console that a repair shop would tell you to throw away.
What a dead one is actually worth
We do not publish the figures here, and that is deliberate rather than coy: a printed price list is a catalogue our competitors can lift in one go, and a number attached to your actual console beats a number attached to a page. What we will say is the shape of it.
A faulty current-generation console (a Series X, a PS5 Pro, a Switch 2) is worth well over a thousand rand even when it will not power on. A faulty last-generation one is worth a few hundred. Both are a great deal more than the shelf is currently paying you. The calculator gives you the exact figure in about a minute, and it asks you nothing you would not be happy to answer.
How to describe a fault so you get the better number
This is the part that is genuinely worth five minutes. "It is broken" gets a cautious offer, because a cautious offer is the only responsible answer to an unknown. A specific description gets a better one, because it narrows down what is actually wrong.
Compare: "it does not work" versus "it powers on, the fan spins for about ten seconds, then it shuts off and the light goes orange". The second one tells us it is very likely a thermal or power issue rather than a dead board, and that is worth real money to you.
Things that make it worth less, and things that do not
Liquid damage genuinely reduces the value, because corrosion spreads and it makes the whole board unreliable rather than just one part. Worth mentioning up front, because it is visible the moment anyone opens the console.
A failed DIY repair reduces it a bit, mostly because of missing screws and damaged connectors, but far less than people fear. We see a lot of these and nobody here is going to be smug about it.
Cosmetic damage barely matters on a faulty console, since it is being broken down anyway.
A ban from PlayStation Network or Xbox Live is the one genuine dealbreaker, because it cannot be resold as a working online console by anyone.
The short version
A console that will not turn on is worth a good deal more than zero, and for a current-generation machine it is worth more than most people guess. The live figures are in the list above. Describe the fault specifically rather than generally, declare liquid damage, and the courier is free either way.