Retro game prices on Ebay

[Tanooki]

Wow woke the dead didn't ya? Been 13 months and it was my post. I'll say this much in that time frame. Other than 1 game in Sept 2013, I gave up buying old 8/16bit games actively July of that year. Since that time I've kept up on prices, but I've just grabbed famicom stuff, and gb/gbc/gba stuff (gb/c recently in the last month alone.) I went towards lego, manga, and straight up avoided 8/16bit Nintendo carts because of things and I'm happier for it. There are a few I've picked up since then but they've been local deals if I find them and there was the CIB Civilzation on SNES last year on this board and that's really it. Once you realize how bad it is, and you decide to stop playing into other peoples petty scalping games it gets a lot less stressful and more fun. You'll find there's plenty on the shelf to screw around with, and you'll find enough of it just sucks or isn't worth the time on a matter of taste, and that can be sold for better things, like my high end gaming laptop I got last December.

ebay isn't the problem, it's just a symptom of a bigger issue of non-gamers seeing dollar signs and hosing others over who don't know better or just don't care because they have something the buyer wants and they'll fight other like minded people into blowing money. Same reason with the retail shops, if there weren't enough suckers, they'd be forced to lower prices or go out of business too. Just accept it, grab anything that rarely pops up on a deal, give up, or take the beating, as there's no real other options.

[WelcomeToTheNextLevel]

I don't know, but it's a bunch of rancid bullshit. It seems like every time an original SG-1000 is on eBay it's more and more expensive. I've seen them for over $1,000 recently. I remember not getting one in the mid-late 2000s because they were $200 or so back then if you could find one. Now their prices are out of control. The SG-1000 II models are still available under $300, they seem to be slightly more expensive usually than the one I got at $233 in November 2011 but nothing ludicrous. An SG-1000 shouldn't cost as much as a working 15 year old car. I'm glad I collected a lot in the mid-late 2000s. Fuck this price bubble. Wasn't the 2000s the best time to collect.

[sfchakan]

No, the 90s were the golden time. No one gave a fuck and the majority of gamers "traded up" every generation causing a huge supply of retro stuff to flood second-hand stores, yard sales, gas stations, residences, warehouses, farmhouses, henhouses, outhouses and doghouses.

Now every Joe Blow thinks they're going to build a museum, shrine, or bitchin man cave and has to have every single game possible. So they're throwing money (or credit) at gobbling everything up.

It's fairly retarded since the majority of things are emulated well enough now to give you your nostalgia fix on everything from cellphones to tablets to laptops to desktops. One decked out computer with some good harddrives would save shitloads of money and space... but, hey, whatever.

I just can't wait for the day the johnny come latelies lose their interest and flood the market again. Only the truly rare or sought after games will be worth anything at all then.

[Tanooki]

Hell no the 90s and the 00s were, but more so the 90s. If you're getting into anything Nintendo cart based from the 20th century (gameboy aside), Sega oddball out of country stuff, other obscure systems (adventurevision for one), you're stone cold screwed if you want to do it now. All the scalpers trash are gobbling up stuff like it's their job to sell anything out there to you for an ever increasing higher price trying to outdo the next twit on ebay and amazon. The stuff I got in the 90s and early 00s and for the prices I paid would give a 201X's collector a woody just thinking of the stuff I had and how little it cost. Sure you had a few rare items throughout the 2000-2009 range that may have hit 3 digits, but it was few and far between, and so many of these so called faux rares and the few that really are weren't up there, definitely not in the $300-1000+ range you'll find in 2011-present. The problem is there's a still ever increasing pile of impatient fools and dolts with deep pockets (or no financial priorities in their lives) who just keep paying the piper and scooping up the stuff so they can make dumb online videos, blogs, and camera shots of their mighty wall of games and related merchandise. I mean it's nice to see when people find something truly obscure or cool, but the proliferation of it is giving way too much recognition and making stuff spiral out of control.

As he said just above, can't wait for the johnny come lately types to just get bored, sell off and wander off to the next thing to wreck. He's right, the only honestly rare stuff that has thousands, hundreds, or even dozens or less copies need to be priced how they are, but the stuff into the tens of thousands up into the hundreds of thousands that go for so much not only need but will crash. It happened with comics, sports cards, and other stuff. When the interest from the foolish and crooks vanishes, things change dramatically but some will never be the same again since the true rares are not unknowns now and they'll stay bloated, but at the least no one will be getting $30 for a Super Mario game cart at that rate. I've said it before, I quit, 2 years ago now buying stuff on ebay and the rest. I trade, find it cheap locally, or I don't bother as I'd rather keep up to date but not have my wallet raped. I found recently gameboy never got whacked with the ugly stick so I got back into that and it's fun.

[celerystalker]

The '90s up until about 2008 were pretty great, but the late '90s were incredible. FuncoLands were all over the place, and about a third of the NES library was under $2. I still have a couple of the old price lists. Bandit Kings of Ancient China? $0.29. Super Mario Duck Hunt? $0.09. I bought a boxed Gun Nac for $2.99, and SCAT for $1.49. The most expensive NES game on the list was Dragon Warrior IV at $40. Those rare and expensive Saturn games were $40 or less. I remember feeling like $20 was a lot for a perfect copy of Burning Rangers, and passing by tons of copies of Guardian Heroes new at Toys R Us for $5.

Games went on clearance at major retailers a lot faster then, and at better prices. I bought my Jaguar new at Kaybee Toys for $30. My Saturn and Virtual Boy systems for $25 at Wal-Mart. Copies of Earthbound could be found in stacks at Wal-Mart for $15, and Super Mario RPG at Toys R Us for $15, because nobody gave a shit.

Back then, I used to see copies of games like Bonk and Fire and Ice weekly, and I'd pass, because $7 seemed like a lot for a loose cart. Garage sales were even more awesome then. I got stuff like a Jaguar and Jaguar CD with about 30 games for $30 (my brother got all the duplicates for free), and a kid wanting to buy a PS1 sold me his Master System with more than 30 boxed games (including the likes of Ys, Phantasy Star, Wonder Boy III, and other hard to find games) for $30.

Now, while none of this was on ebay, what it does is illustrate how little most people cared about games at the time, which helped normalize prices in other outlets. Even better, though, was that so comparatively fewer people had decent internet access that competition at auction was absurdly low. Honestly, I never had to resort to ebay until about 2013, as the last truly awesome store around me closed, and I'd snapped up at least 1500 games for ridiculously cheap by 2004 when they were so plentiful and available in the wild. I wish I'dve had more money to spend on Neo Geo AES games at the time. I felt absurd paying $120 for Sengoku 3 in 2003, or $30 for Cyber Lip, but I bought up about 30 games, and the most I had to pay was $165... that thing bubbled up quickly.

[Tanooki]

Hah yeah you know it and I remember it. The local retail guy where I lived his most expensive game was Dragon Warrior IV at $50, but it was complete in the box, below that $10 less was Dragon Warrior III. I have an odd memory when it comes to what I pay on stuff when I cherish it enough when I get it. I can tell you in the upper-mid to late 90s I got a lot of gems people pay hundreds for now for nothing compared. Earthbound like new in the box for $20, $10 for Bubble Bobble 2 w/book, Aerofighers w/book+poster for $10, and the list goes along. The only game that never was for sale was Tengen Tetris, he wouldn't even take a $100 on it as one only ever came in and kept it. Shop sadly still exists today, but he's got mentally ill with greed and paranoia thinking people are out to get him and he charges by the piece (game, dust sleeve, poster, manual, other papers, box) and 2x or more over ebay too living off screwing marine corps boot camp people stuck on base and moms with screaming kids wanting something like real filth. If you're from northern san diego county you know the place and likely know the monster, not going to name the place but it is a dusty museum to many awesome games sane people won't pay anywhere near that amount for.

I never had much access to funco, the fools never opened up one until like 2000 in the area and it was getting later in their dumping the NES and having just SNES stuff around, but I still got some goodies there between them and the other clown. I found though the deal death of value in that area was in earlier 2012 at the flea markets out there. Suddenly people caught wise to collectors, started getting free data plan phones, and pricing crap on the highest asking(not paid) ebay value as a point to ask for, or as a good starting point. Before that point I could use a $20 and come back with a stack of NES, SNES and GB games, then it was maybe a game or two and not every week. I moved back here, half price books started to scam hard, so hard it cleared out the local shops shelves so they had to circle the toilet to compete, so this place went tits up mid 2013 too, and flea markets here don't have games much at all. I always kept up with ebay, saw where it was going to hell too, and I gave up buying nes/snes/n64 stuff completely because it was scalper battles. That's why you've seen me always selling off stuff. I'd rather have the money than the stress, it got me a huge high end laptop I custom built, a pinball machine too, tablet and various other useful things, even Legos as well, and I don't regret it a bit. Going forward I won't shy from a deal locally or the accidental online one, but I'm just going to keep up on prices, laugh at scum when they lose their asses on it when the bottom drops out, and I'll be there wiggling dollar bills instead of $20s and $100s at them to get the goods with a smile.