Supply, Demand, NES games, and crazy prices

[kainemaxwell]

http://www.gamingrebellion.com/2015/01/nes-collecting-the-law-of-supply-demand/

[Gentlegamer]

Good article that spoils itself by recommending Price Charting at the end.

Retro game collecting (not playing) has become trendy, which has attracted professional resellers and yuppy instant collectors with more money than sense. This causes the collector price inflation as professional resellers scour all sources of cheap games (flea markets or use bots to buy cheap lots on ebay the instant they are listed) to flip to the yuppies with money burning holes in their pockets.

[Greg2600]

Happy to say I have every NES and SNES game I want to own, and they're pretty much all loose. Got them all by a few years ago before the price explosion.

[Tanooki]

I wish I could say that, I have one and only one SNES game I'd love to have back I had before my collection was mostly sold off a decade ago due to un and underemployment issues -- Aerofighters. There's no f'ng way I'm going to pay $400 for a loose cart that back in the late 90s I bought for $5 or $10(at most) that was entirely complete other than the box (game, sleeve, manual, poster) all immaculate. I'd love an Earthbound box too but I won't piss $200 on cardboard either so I'll be just fine with the cart and guide.

Paper is just a no fly zone with me anymore these days unless it doesn't add more than $5-10 or so to the price. If I could get a cart for $5 and pay $15 or $20 to complete it fine, but I won't buy a $30 game and $100 worth of manual and box as all that could go to something actually usable. :P


The article is right, at least in the opening -- there are asshole abusers, scalpers, flippers, stockers who lower supply to resell, and other human garbage out there, but they wouldn't get their hard on screwing people if idiots wouldn't keep lining up and paying their crappy prices whether it's just being rich and not caring to being uninformed and just pissing cash to regret it later. *US* who pay the prices are the problem as much as the suppliers.

I think he's wrong about the retrogame market being the most informed. For years I've been bumped into, even in this last 3~ years of real awareness period, plenty of rubes and dolts who just see or remember a mascot to rush and pay too much for something to either find out and eat it later and get smarter, or keep buying stupid. Sure there is market equilibrium and often people who sell high end up being punished, but not always with games. There are notable ebay game resellers (hillbilly, playeva, dkoldies) who mark stuff over what a non-large store level seller/reseller of old games will do and they flip the stuff with good consistency like 10-20% over actual and those do help force the price average higher over time too as then people will try and match their paid prices too. It gets all shark tank people chomping at the next price bump. Old game buyers isn't a closed market, people keep coming back or they're coming to an age where they learn of such things and jump at it being fresh meat, so the over paying idiocy train can be sustained for however long that'll take to implode, if it does.

[zonkynib]

What would make the prices go down though? No one buying these games at these prices for a few years? Seems like many sellers are happy sitting on games at a ridiculous price rather than sell it.

[celerystalker]

I think the only thing that will drive prices down is a huge dip in interest that is prolonged. It'll happen eventually, or at least level off. Atari stuff really leveled off awhile back as that generation of collector thinned out. That said, the NES market base is a larger one than the Atari market, so it will take a little longer, but it will plateau. There are too many copies of the games out there for most titles, so as the trendy crowd goes away, things will settle for a good while. We're not talking (outside of World Championship carts) about games with only a handful or even a few hundred copies. There are thousands of just about everything on NES and SNES out there, so the settling will come. Those Neo Geo games with 4 copies, the Atari Video Lifes of the world... who can say, since no one's selling usually.

[Tanooki]

That probably is the sad reality of it. This has been debated to death elsewhere and it always comes back down to teaching the garbage a lesson and that lesson is not buying, and sustained not buying for a good while. In various other markets people who shove stuff up will get undercut by others and their item will move more often than with games. Games seem to have a good supply of newbies who pop into it and as others have said, deep walleted yuppies/hipster types or those who are taken advantage of who click before they think. As long as there's enough of those, even if we did just say F U and stop buying it won't have an effect. You really can't educate people without them learning a hard lesson and that lesson you can't teach if you don't know who the newbie is before someone rips them off. It's clear it happens using ebay as a barometer as you can watch grossly overcharging jerks like PlayEva, Hillbilly and the others with their 10-20% inflated over normal paid prices still being paid. Fools will trust what ebay says and 'stores' on there are worth the added because you're supposedly protected more with that and it's less of a gamble (which really isn't true.)

In the end it's not just not buying for awhile, it's hoping the trend following/making sheep tire of it and decide to go destroy something else. When enough of those get bored and find something else that's cool to get into go that way then you'll find a lot of these speculators and high priced sharks losing their asses having to dump junk no one wants and those who do want it, those who were here before the stupidity, will still remember the realistic values and hold out until the desperate fools firesale their shit to be done with it. The damage though I think is fairly permanent, at least on honest to god rares and quirky things because the collectors who have been around will want that, but the abused stuff that was like $10 a year or two ago and now is like $30 or $60, that'll retreat closer to where it started but I just don't see it ever tanking until well into the future where enough of the things legitimately die of old age and people not wanting the risk of just a shelf sitting broken game with a pretty label.