Quote Originally Posted by Buyatari View Post
I'm not saying the mass produced items of today will go up and up. What I am saying is that because there are mass produced items a market will exist for the rarest most desirable items of the past. Few people want Action Comics #1 because they remember reading it as a child. They want it because Superman has become an icon and the character lives on in movies and popular culture. I would argue that videogames today have a bigger impact on children and society than combic books ever had. They have a huge share of the marketplace and you will meet few people young or old who will have no idea who Mario or Sonic are.

Many 2600 items have fallen in price and I'd expect to continue to see some of this except for the rarest and most desirable items in top condition. I wouldn't ever worry about losing value on a complete Eli's Ladder.
I agree, but if you look at what is commanding the highest prices on the NES right now, it's not necessarily the "rarest" games, it's common stuff in the mintiest sealed condition. I find it hard to believe that games of that type are going to continue to go beyond the thousands of dollars they are currently commanding. There are just too many copies out there and not enough collectors with those kinds of funds long term. Indeed, unlike comics and baseball cards, the combination of acidic plastics, metals and paper will likely result in even properly stored video games not having the longevity of comics or baseball cards simply because there is no real means of preserving a sealed game long term. I would suspect that people will be much more interested in mint complete copies over time simply because the components can be separated and individually preserved.

I would also note that video games started to be collected much earlier in relative terms than baseball cards or comics. Most of the research I have read indicates that serious comic book collecting didn't really start until the early 1970s, some 40 years after the "modern" comic books of the 1930s were released. It took another decade or so for comic collecting to go truly mainstream and by the 90s, it had largely slowed back down again to a fraction of the 1980s levels. In video games, it took maybe half as long meaning that for at least half of the history of video games, people have been collecting them and keeping them pretty well preserved. That means there is a lot out there in really nice shape even if there are fewer video game collectors than comic collectors overall.

I have no doubt that video games have had a significant societal impact, but that doesn't necessarily mean all or even most of those kids will grow up to be collectors. With digital versions of older games widely available and lots of other entertainment options out there, fewer people owning their own homes resulting in less space for collectibles and frankly, most gamers just not caring much about older games, the pump is primed for a pricing correction once this current bubble bursts.