My $.02 on the retro game pricing insanity

[Dashopepper]

It seems that a lot of posters overly blame collectors and bargain hunters for driving up the cost of video games. But most of it is people like my friend. He is 30. He used to play Zelda lttp as a kid. He went on eBay, found the lowest price and did buy it now.

My 2 cents. (This is where I predict stuff)

1. NES prices will probably start to drop sometime in the next 5-10 years. SNES will drop sometime after.

2. Well known franchises and popular games will continue to hold their value longer and better then others.

3. After the initial price fall from not as many buyers in the market, the price will gradually rise and fall do to fads/pop culture references.

4. 8bit and 16bit will fare a little better then the Atari2600/PSOne-N64 crowd due to better "playability"(sharp sprites, modern controls, simple but engaging), could just be my bias though. I see sharper declines for other generations.

5. Earthbound drops to $80 six months after it hits the u.s. virtual console. Probably next year.

But beyond general economics, who knows?

[PreZZ]

Earthbound is definitely not worth the 800$ for CIB. Virtual console release will drop the value. I remember paying 165$ for a brand new sealed Castlevania SOTN black label on psone in 2001. You can get a mint copy for 35-40$ for the same black label today and the game is widely available on psn\xboxlive etc.

[Flam]

I just want to play Little Samson on my NES and not pay an arm and a leg.

Why is it frowned upon in the gaming community to make reproductions of games like this? I mean lable it reproduction all you want, I don't care; I just don't want to play it on my PC.

[recorderdude]

It's not frowned on at all, especially when sites like retrousb use completely new materials for them. We just don't consider it legitimately owning the real thing.

I just want to play Little Samson on my NES and not pay an arm and a leg.

Why is it frowned upon in the gaming community to make reproductions of games like this? I mean lable it reproduction all you want, I don't care; I just don't want to play it on my PC.

[Flam]

I thought it was frowned upon to make reproductions of certain games, I read some debate on this topic in Nintendo Age.

[Flam]

http://nintendoage.com/forum/message...threadid=28026

[scaleworm]

Buy for one reason: YOU.

Buy for profit?
Ha!
I buy for me because that is my vice. Music, comics, games, the stuff of me. I could piss it all away on a car, but for what I pay for what I get, I ain't losing much to anything.
life is short: have a vice that hurts no one, that you enjoy, and that you can afford. We all end up as the dirt we came from in the end; rich or poor, gamer or not.

Buy because YOU want to, not for some far off investment concept.

[spman]

I'll admit, I'm as guilty as any of scouring thrift stores, and such for underpriced games, and reselling them for a profit, but I've said it before and I will stick to it, I would gladly trade away any profits I make from selling games if in return I could have a steadier supply of classics available on the second market. There's a reason why the majority of games you see at the Goodwill are sports games and shovelware titles, those are the only ones that wouldn't sell at any price. If prices dropped drastically, I definitely think we'd see a greater supply of them available on the second hand market.

[Gameguy]

This is the truth, whenever you see people report their scores at Thrift Stores / Tag sales / Flea markets, all that ever gets reported is what was found, never the fact that they had to wake up a the crack of dawn on a saturday, spend $30 in gas, put 40 miles on their car, and spend 6 hours finding nothing until you find the one place where you bought a couple of commons for a buck a piece. The amount of time and effort it takes to find anything worth buying at tag sales absolutely negates whatever you might have found 99% of the time.

It's the same reason people still buy lottery tickets. You hope to find something so rare or valuable you'll have a hard time just finding it for sale anywhere else, even if it's unlikely to ever happen to you. Someone found plenty of rare NES carts at a garage sale, I think it included the Nintendo Campus Challenge cart and other rarities. You have to like going to these sales, just as Cornelius said.

You may be hoping to find very specific items, but since you're already going to these places you might as well get anything worth the asking price. Otherwise it's like you're just completely wasting your time. You see a $40 game for $5 but you don't buy it because you already have it? If you've already spent time and effort to traveling to these places you'll get anything that's a good deal. Don't even stick to just video games, there might be a ton of other stuff worth buying if only you knew something about it. It's the same with thrift stores, I hardly find any games worth buying anymore but I keep going anyway in case something great shows up.

I just want to play Little Samson on my NES and not pay an arm and a leg.

Why is it frowned upon in the gaming community to make reproductions of games like this? I mean lable it reproduction all you want, I don't care; I just don't want to play it on my PC.

Why not just buy a flash cart to play it on the NES? You can literally use it to play every game that exists on the system, and plenty of fan translations too for titles that never came to North America. To me it's better than paying someone to make a bootleg of a single game that actually already exists on a cartridge.

[Gunstar Hero]

I doubt that there are many in their 20’s who are serious retro collectors and would want to shell out big cash for the rarer games. I just don’t see a youth driven market for retro games.

As a 15 year old, I know that there are some younger collectors emerging and I can tell you a few reasons why:

1. People who had retro systems as young children (this would apply to people in their 20's now) want to play their games again or people who inherited older systems from their siblings want to explore more retro games.

2. They have parents who are reliving their past and as a part they live it too by playing the games as well and get into the retro scene.

3. They read about old ganes on the internet and become interested.

4. (This one is me) They realize the games of today are more about flashy graphics than about good mindless old school video game fun. They found out about a system from a sibling or neighbor and go on the internet to do more research and find out how cool retro games are. Then nearly 3 years later they're posting about how their generation still gets into these awesome games

[recorderdude]

There's also the ever-present age group that got retro systems because they were much cheaper than modern ones. I would've been an N64 kid when the GC was new (mostly for pokemon stadium because I had the pokerus like every other late 90s/early 00s kid) but I ended up getting a SNES instead since it was older and the games cost less. I got a GC a few years later but most of my library was Platformer compilations (Sonic Collections, Megaman Collections, etc) since I'd grown to love 2D platformers on my SNES.

Nowadays it's no longer just nostalgia for the lost anymore but also appreciation of the newfound old; I'm more of a #3/4 than anything.

[bb_hood]

Why not just buy a flash cart to play it on the NES? You can literally use it to play every game that exists on the system, and plenty of fan translations too for titles that never came to North America. To me it's better than paying someone to make a bootleg of a single game that actually already exists on a cartridge.

Exactly correct. Flash carts are awesome, I cant praise the powerpak enough. It plays everything except for about 9 games, and those are not hard to find games. Basically Kirby and Startropics. Besides that they play all the rare games (mr gimmick will play but without sound).
Why pay someone to flash a copy of a rom on a cart for 50-60$ when you can just drop 150$ and play anything. Might sound like alot but its really worth it.

[Solo_Skywalker]

This is an interesting take on the topic hood. But here is another perspective on it.

I've been serious about collecting retro games for about 10 years now. I'm not rich by any stretch of the imagination but I value my time immensely. What it means is that I prefer to pay the going ebay BIN price for most of the games I buy, simply because I don't want to spend the time to try to hunt it in the wild.

I've been a member on DP for a little over 6 years now, and I'm part of other similar communities of game collector. A lot of what I hear is about the great finds and the deal hunting and how every games sold on ebay has inflated prices. I've tried that. I made a map of all possible place I might find used video games at non-ebay (or worse) pricing in my city. I've tried them all, I've tried going garage sales hunting. I also tried craigslist, kijiji and the local ads. Sure I've made a few not-so-bad deals but in the end my conclusion is that it was not worth it. The deals are very rare and the amount of time I spend hunting for them means I have less time to play my games, spend time with the GF, working or learning new things.

I am probably contributing to what you guys consider inflated prices. But what are my alternatives? A good example is I bought a loose copy of Chrono Trigger for 80$ last month. This is a game I've purposely held off purchasing for a few years simply because I was trying to find it for cheaper in the wild. It never happened. And during this time I was "suffering" because I wanted to play it, but I couldn't. If 80$ is what it takes and there is no alternative, yeah I'll shell the cash and contribute to the inflation. Same deal with Suikoden II, I want it, I can't find it. I'll probably pay the 165$ required soon.

I completely agree with everything you said, although I really do enjoy going to thrift shops, flea markets, pawn shops etc. Even though I really enjoy the "hunt" and the rare time you do find something special, in the long run after spending gas money, time and energy I could have easily just bought it on ebay. The only thing I don't like about buying on ebay is that fact that you never get surprised with finding something unexpected like you do when you come across a hidden gem at the bottom of a box in a thrift shop.

To respond to the initial poster, I don't really think that paying $30 for mario kart or zelda or whatever is too far off base, considering that it costs me $67 for a new game of which I usually purchase at least one AAA title a week......especially this month. Man March is like the new Oct/Nov. But I really hope your right and that prices of retro stuff dips in the coming years.

[Ed Oscuro]

This is silly. It's almost entirely supply and demand.

Of course sometimes the components of supply and demand don't combine in the way you'd expect - take a game which used to be highly obscure, like Cyvern: The Dragon Weapons for arcade. Then MAME came around, and everybody wanted one (except me, I got Sengeki Striker instead). Then some guy started "repro"ing the hell out of them and now many people are confused about which games are legit and which are conversions from other games. Yet because of the high interest in the game to begin with, the conversions tend to target people who already are willing to pay out the nose for the game, rather than depressing sales (at least by some appreciable amount) by flooding the market (of course bootleggers aren't going out of their way to make games they don't profit from).

With regard to the big name franchises - especially most things Nintendo - I don't see any reason to suspect that demand (based on popularity) is going to decrease so that people stop buying Mario games or whatever just because they have some attachment to the brand. And of course from this group comes that very select and very Special group who buy anything and everything just because it is for a certain console or some other nonsensical criteria like that. I don't consider myself much better; I've bought many games just on somebody else's say-so and not gotten around to seriously playing many of them. But with the way I've tried to buy, if the time comes to sell I shouldn't be too badly off for many games. Well, aside from many of those Goodwill "finds" which were just my form of public charity.

[recorderdude]

you never get surprised with finding something unexpected like you do when you come across a hidden gem at the bottom of a box in a thrift shop.

I strongly disagree with this. If you know how to hunt either by newly listed buy it nows or soon-ending lots/games you can find some pretty unexpected shit there. I found a working SEGA CD model 2 for $22 and a CiB SEGA NOMAD for $20 plus shipping ...both of which someone else bought because the guy who I share an ebay account with was in the hole from his own comic collecting hobby and couldn't spend any more. I'm still a few months off from being able to have my own ebay, and since dad thinks every cartridge game is going to simultaneously stop working in a year because some guy at his job told him so, I can't buy ANYTHING there until then. I did manage to get a copy of Phantasy Star II for $1.25 there with a few other games I wanted for my collection a few months back, though. That was pretty sweet.

Personal bullshit nonwithstanding, you can find some INSANE deals on ebay if you really try.

[Ed Oscuro]

Tell your dad the Extraordinary Guy On The Internet, Ed Oscuro, informs him that cartridge games are more durable than most forms of media. Many of them use mask ROM for the data, which is about as close to permanent as you can get in digital technology. The only things to watch out for are keeping cartridge contacts clean (cotton swab + 99% isopropyl), watching out for leaky batteries in the few games that have them (I don't know if it's really common for game cart batteries to leak though), and making sure things don't get rusty (bagged and boxed is good) or fried by static (in some rare cases you have to watch out for this; plastic game cartridges are pretty safe most of the time though).

Maybe there are better things to invest in, but games do seem to be enduring. One trick of the trade, if there is one, is knowing that if you're looking to invest, you'll turn down many "good deals" because they're just what everybody else would pay. You have to buy substantially below the "common" price to get ahead of the crowd.

But the more important trick of the trade is arranging all your finances so that you can actually afford to keep what you've bought longer than other people. Over the years, too many people bought tons of "awesome" games and carefully put together complete collections of (mostly shit) and it backfired spectacularly because nobody was remotely interested in buying the full deal. If you're genuinely interested in buying a game, because you like it, that's fine but it's not a financial incentive. If you're just buying something because it's "likely to make tons of money" you should have some kind of idea where you would stand if you had to sell it off, and you would also keep in mind if what you've already got has tied up enough of your money that you might end up needing to sell.

About the Sega CD and Nomad for $20, I question whether those really are things people would need to pay money for...if you put those on the shelves of your local store most people would pass them up because they don't have a use. I just like the Nomad because it's convenient, and sure, a nice complete one would be worth more than $20 to me. The Sega CD? Not so much.

[recorderdude]

I personally know that I can't make my collection purely for business/reselling and do personally enjoy some of the titles, so I've set ground rules to keep my fundage from dwindling, and a trick as well:

1. I rarely pay more than $10 for a single game I want (unless it's a special case where I KNOW it's a worthwhile investment that I can immediately flip) and never specifically seek out common/unwanted titles IRL. An example of such is Socket for the genesis, which is pretty damn hard to come by IRL, but, unlike me, most people don't want to collect sonic clones without some sort of following or significance (sparkster/RKA would be such an exception) so I just bought a copy online for $4 instead of wasting my time looking for a game I knew I'd enjoy enough.

2. If I DO pay more for a game, I make sure to review it to get my money back and then some. I work for a local newspaper and my editor is completely fine with me writing retro game reviews for the teenager section. We get refunded the price of any game we buy plus $15, so it's a great chance to build a collection while keeping my wallet steady by doing the same thing I do online anyway; giving my opinion on retro games.

3. I make sure anything that I resell is something I definitely don't want/enjoy and won't regret, or a double. I know that if I sell something that's got value that I REALLY loved and replay a lot, I'll end up rebuying it eventually, probably for more than I spent initially. Due to that, my CiB treasureland adventure, CiB Rolling Thunders 2 and 3 and cart of ristar aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

4. (most important) I NEVER spend more than a total of $50 on video games each month. I figure it's the average price of one new game, so it's something I can afford. I also never drive out to thrift shops/fleas just to go to them; only when I'm going somewhere more important and a thrift/flea is near. It happens more often than you'd think, and keeps me from wasting gas.

As for the SCD and nomad, they've definitely got enough demand to go for more than they did. The CiB nomad was an absolute steal and the working model 2 SEGA CD, while really only a modest deal, would have worked out really well for me specifically because I could have sold my malfunctioning Model 1 for about the same amount and broke even with a working system and a whole new library to explore. I'm stuck with what I've got, though, so I guess I'll keep trying to fix it :P

[bb_hood]

the working model 2 SEGA CD, while really only a modest deal,

If it was 20$ shipped id say thats a pretty good deal, shipping would have cost like 10-15 alone for the seller.

I would have bought that, but passed on the nomad. Just because I dont like nomads but thats a good deal also..

[recorderdude]

If it was 20$ shipped id say thats a pretty good deal, shipping would have cost like 10-15 alone for the seller.

I would have bought that, but passed on the nomad. Just because I dont like nomads but thats a good deal also..

SCD was actually $12 with $10 shipping, but $22 overall yeah.

[Loganm187]

One thing I am surprised that NO ONE mentioned on this thread yet that really bothered me... BATTLETOADS and DOUBLE DRAGON are not worth that and why would you buy them at those prices? Double dragon is all over amazon and ebay for 10 bucks or less and Battletoads sells for around $18-$20... Where and why are paying such prices for games? I was about to run to my local game shop and buy every copy of 7.99 and 16.99 double Dragon and Battletoad they had until I actually checked prices.