Originally Posted by
Bojay1997
Everyone doesn't win and you are hurting the vast majority of the collecting community. Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but when I started collecting over 20 years ago, nobody was flipping games and nobody was trying to maximize their profit in the collecting community. Even five years ago, there was still a huge group of collectors who did it for the love of collecting and wanted to help other collectors find cool items at the lowest price possible. In fact, I would venture that this profiteering trend has been within the past couple of years, probably right around the time grading popped up and it seems to be driven by a small group of collectors who believe that only their personal wealth and collection matters and that the community is only here to provide them with information and tips and possibly a customer base. I don't buy into that.
On the occasions where I end up with extra copies of a game or consoles, I either sell them at cost or in many cases just charge exact postage or if they're local, give the items away. If people want to profiteer off of other collectors, that's their choice, but I'm not going to congratulate them for it or celebrate their ingenuity or even consider them to be collectors. It's not positive for other collectors because it results in higher prices and an inability of collectors to find items they may want at a reasonable price.
We can argue about this forever, but I am really tired of the now regular threads in the "What's It Worth" forum here and elsewhere with people saying things like "oh, I met this former programmer from X game company and I told him I was a collector and he gave me all these amazing games for almost nothing, so how much can I sell everthing for?". Do you really think the programmer gave you that stuff so you could immediately turn around and sell it or was he under the impression based on your conduct and claims that as a collector you cherished his items and intended to preserve them? To me that's a form of fraud and misrepresentation. It's one thing to go to thrifts or garage sales or swap meets where nobody cares if you're a collector or not and pricing has nothing to do with your status. It's a whole other thing to use your collector credentials to get access to items at minimal or no cost all the while knowing you are just going to use them for financial gain.