Yahoo! Articles will ruin affordable collecting

[JimmyDean]

1900$ for a 2600? Lol. Anyway, I feel that the guys over at Yahoo think that they know what they are talking about when they really don't. I think they just make up this crap like gold-colored punchouts to get more hits on their site, therefore getting more ad revenue. Anyway, every time an article on yahoo comes out about vintage games, or an Angry Video Nerd video comes out, the prices on items mentioned in the article/video get driven up astronomically. I saw Swordquest Waterworld go for $250 briefly. I don't mind Yahoo publishing these articles, but when they drive the price up on games and blatantly lie about stuff like gold-colored punchouts it pisses me off.

[Coptur]

Yeah, I'm really sick of Yahoo and their articles. Gamers chances of getting these games now are basically impossible. All these big websites like Youtube, Google and Yahoo are nothing but GREED.

[Icarus Moonsight]

This stuff is pretty funny, but does anyone really think that Yahoo! columnists can tie their own shoes let alone ruin classic game collecting? It's a premise worthy of a Yahoo! Games article really.

[icarwngs55]

1900$ for a 2600? Lol. Anyway, I feel that the guys over at Yahoo think that they know what they are talking about when they really don't. I think they just make up this crap like gold-colored punchouts to get more hits on their site, therefore getting more ad revenue. Anyway, every time an article on yahoo comes out about vintage games, or an Angry Video Nerd video comes out, the prices on items mentioned in the article/video get driven up astronomically. I saw Swordquest Waterworld go for $250 briefly. I don't mind Yahoo publishing these articles, but when they drive the price up on games and blatantly lie about stuff like gold-colored punchouts it pisses me off.

There is a Gold Punch-Out cart my friend. It was given away as a prize in the Golf U.S. Course Famicom Tournament in Japan, just prior to the official release of Mike Tysons Punch-Out in the USA.

Just thought you should know

[JimmyDean]

Really? I surely feel stupid now! Anyway, I am into all that game tourney history stuff, so I guess that is a cool thing to know. I am always out seeking to expand my videogame knowledge!

Edit: Isn't that the Wii power glove some guy made in Japan? Lol. Yahoo is really stupid when it comes to this stuff. Anyway, I suppose he just wired up the buttons to the bend sensors, no?

[darkslime]

There is a Gold Punch-Out cart my friend. It was given away as a prize in the Golf U.S. Course Famicom Tournament in Japan, just prior to the official release of Mike Tysons Punch-Out in the USA.

Just thought you should know

I thought it was a Famicom cart, not a NES cart though? Yahoo was implying that there was a NTSC-U NES gold punch out cart.

[kupomogli]

I was just looking around Ebay. Check out these awesome prices. Affordable? I think not. Ebay usually isn't though.

http://stores.ebay.com/Level-99-Games

[Sonicwolf]

One thing that really pisses me off when im browsing eBay is the prevalence of the word "RARE!!!!1!" on every single fucking listing. God damnit.

I give game collecting until 2020 before it goes the way of the house at the end of Poltergeist.

*explodes, implodes, vortex to the other side*

[kupomogli]

I decided to just put rare and search in the video games. Most games not rare, including this one, but if you're missing FF7 PAL version, this person spelled it Final Fantacy so probably will get no other bids.

You can get it for $20 + shipping. Might be worth it considering searching Final Fantasy 7 PAL came up with copies of the game $50+ Sure it's not rare. But if you can either make some money off it or you can keep the game since it's a pretty good game.

http://cgi.ebay.com/FINAL-FANTACY-VI...item5d28deecf6

[Sonicwolf]

Super Mario World is so rare that I just pooped myself!

http://cgi.ebay.ca/Super-Mario-World...item23066868c0

.....Annnnndd how exactly is this rare?

http://cgi.ebay.ca/Sony-PSP-3000-Gra...item19b9e01288

[Icarus Moonsight]

[dnehthend]

I love the Power Glove. It's so bad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsJkbbUT9fM



craigslist is ridiculous

[ryborg]

I was just looking around Ebay. Check out these awesome prices. Affordable? I think not. Ebay usually isn't though.

http://stores.ebay.com/Level-99-Games

He's sold ~150 items over the last two weeks. Your definition of affordable is irrelevant.

The amount of hate here for good sellers who have high prices is pathetic. Some people need to get a life.

[Ed Oscuro]

The amount of hate here for good sellers who have high prices is pathetic. Some people need to get a life.

this is basically it in a nutshell - it's the market

And now, if anybody cares, I will attempt to explain with the power of INTRODUCTION TO ECONOMICS!11 101 how this shit works; if anybody cares I encourage them to see if I've got anything wrong.

As Shadow Kisuragi said, there's the possibility that Yahoo! and some other outlets aren't vetting their material and are letting people with a financial incentive write the content. I kind of doubt it with Air Raid and even Stadium Events, but a person with a stack of Game X I could theoretically worm their way into the Yahoo! community and write: "If you don't have Game X you are nobody! in collecting!!!" in preparation for a glorious dumping.

Some people have been able to achieve this with some veneer of legitimacy: I have mentioned here at DP before about the guys who went around the nation buying up pieces of antique furniture from a specific little-known maker, and then the buyers promoted the artistic values of the chairs with interviews, essays, and the like (I mean they were serious into the history of this furniture), and at that time people started to go "hey we missed those" but to get the pieces you more or less had to go to those guys. It was a brilliant movement and they increased critical appreciation for a historic product at the same time.

What we have here seems to be slightly different, though, because few chances exist for somebody to realistically corner the market on released games, especially the sort of well-known games Yahoo! articles seem to be plugging. If the PAL Kizuna Encounter cartridges were just showing up I'd be suspicious (almost all of the known ones were sourced through one person, last I heard). This I would put down just to poor standards of journalism. It will help the people with inventory, but a lot of people will be able to ride that wave - unfortunately it's quite bad for buyers but there's always been a war between buyers and sellers - before collecting of anything, too. Otherwise, what's happening on Yahoo! is just like the guys with the furniture, except the guys with the furniture did more for their hobby than mindless Yahoo! cheerleading will - but that's just my view.
_______________

The worst problem with video game collecting is the overabundance of "Buy It Now" sellers on E-bay who post sales at super inflated prices.

Wrong. Smart buyers know to avoid them. Items that loiter on eBay, without being sold due to too-optimistic prices, are old hat; it's been a part of eBay forever, like OMG R@RE LQQK!!

The problem is an abundance of idiots that don't know to check Completed Listings, and who buy things for ridiculous amounts: There's a difference. Price inflation has to happen with the content of the buyers. If a few people don't do their due diligence and pay something ridiculous, market price won't move much or at all as smarter buyers laugh at their wastefulness on Internet Forums.

For anything with a decent supply, it takes many other people to follow suit to do it, at which time it really is what the market thinks acceptable, at least until they hit a wall with supply and demand (kind of like what I heard happened with Zero Wing MD / PAL).

For anything without a decent supply, like boxed Air Raids or sealed Stadium Events, you're kind of stuck with the whims of the biggest bidders, unless more supply can be found.

Aside from super-rare items (where supply and demand rules), I don't think that the market is swayed all that much in the long term by ridiculous prices, and if you can't be patient you're screwing yourself over - it's a choice to buy anything at a given time. What I'd be worried about are sort-of-high prices that push "acceptable" prices higher and higher (beyond inflation I mean).
________________

The worst problem may also be too much press given to ridiculous pricing, but at some point supply and demand has to come into it. Only so many items are sold at any given time on eBay, so for many people that seems to be the extent of the supply, pressure which may feel especially acute after a certain item gets press (for instance, the recent Stadium Events business). And many people are poor gumshoes / flea market buyers with limited time, so $40K might seem like a bargain for their time and money.

Kind of like how my copies of Dracula (Castlevania) for X68000 kept getting cheaper as I went along: Being unknowledgeable, I paid WAY too much early on. I feel that's been the case with 90% of my import computer games collecting and a significant amount of my other games collecting too.

On the other hand, I've mentioned before how I tried to benefit from some people paying $1000 for that same game (they forgot to bid on mine and so it went for $150; in the end, I lost money but I got what I needed at that immediate moment to pick up Nemesis '90, so it was an alright trade).

I sometimes tend to wonder if Satellablog has this sort of thing done as an unintentional side-effect of me trying to document the Satellaview, but then again, I tend to cover more "Newly discovered" material than "collecting" things...

Your goal is to make the best and most complete site possible before you worry about affecting prices. If you're worried that prices are going up too fast, then you have a conflict of interest as a buyer - but that comes naturally when dealing with something a bit rare. The Satellaview has been one of those "ZOMG!!11" items for as long as I can remember (circa ~2003, I guess). The only people who are likely to care are, perhaps, sellers who want you to mindlessly cheerlead without correcting pricing for them: so long as the people they buy old Satellaview items off of don't know of the potential value for some collector who also doesn't know the price the seller is getting - as long as those two wires don't cross and short their own system, they will be happy. If an item gets so popular that everybody knows about the add-on, however, what you'll see is not people being more aware of the actual distribution of these items, but instead even further increased interest in collecting, and higher prices. The only way to avoid this is to allow something to stay in the shadows.

Which I suppose is why we don't see many "The Next Big Thing in Collecting" articles from old hands at this ^_~

For what it's worth I thought at a time that perhaps the Atari home computer games could be it (others as well I suppose, there certainly are a lot of classic 8-bit home computer games I love), but right now I think it's arcade games.

[Icarus Moonsight]

The good ol' pump and dump. Thanks suckers!

I can understand pumping if you have a motive, despicable sure, but at least it has a purpose. Yahoo! on the other hand...

Inclining price without offering more value is an age old merchant skill. On the good side it's offered on persuasion, on the bad, it's inflicted. If you stick to your own internal value judgments, you're pretty well insulated from both sides of the game.

[jordandavid]

I should have offered the NES with hook ups to him for the bargain basement price of 1000.00. Now we have non-collectors thinking that NES is worth 12 thousand dollars. The impact I see is that people at garage sales are going to start raising their prices, and it may be more difficult to find good deals.

nearly made me lol. i have a small collection, probably ~75 nes games, nothing valuable, the rarest probably being empire strikes back or trolls on treasure island. The second article is the only one that kinda bothers me because the headline leads people to believe ALL games are a "hidden goldmine" or whatever. I only collect games I really want to play or had when i was a kid and lost since.

i don't think the same kind of people who put a box of NES games with a $5 price tag on them at a garage sale are the same people who read yahoo's game section articles, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

as for the guy was offering $1 for those game. he's not a threat whatsoever. he looks like a fool offering $1 for those games.

[Enigmus]

I just saw an article there where they apparenly asked "gamers" what their favorite game series was by now, and guess what? Halo in 1st, Call of Duty in 2nd, and- get this- Mario in 6th.

Guess what kind of gamers they asked. *cough*tweenswithxboxes*cough*.

[Famidrive-16]

you mean younger gamers are less likely to have played games before their time!?!? well i never

[Enigmus]

you mean younger gamers are less likely to have played games before their time!?!? well i never

I'm entering high school, and I hate Call of Duty, and play N64 and NES more than my Xbox 360.

Trust me, I'm a sackful of contradictions.

[Nature Boy]

you mean younger gamers are less likely to have played games before their time!?!? well i never

Not necessarily the case. I've been around since the 2600 days and I'm totally burned out on the Nintendo series at this point. I'm not sure where I'd put what, but I will say that once I would have put Zelda above all else and now I couldn't be less interested in it (I've never finished Twilight Princess nor come close to even considering picking up Spirit Tracks)

Just because a poll doesn't echo your sentiments doesn't make it invalid (and yes, I recognize that with respect to my own opinions).