Quote Originally Posted by TonyTheTiger View Post
What's the smallest print run that any publisher would bother with? Even these super budget titles like Octomania (which launched at a whopping $10) has to have a decent number of copies out there. And most of these titles that would have print runs on the lower end are either uninteresting or shit so you know nobody is going to be after them hence there probably won't be many "money" games in this category.
I agree strongly. Although Octomania actually launched at $20 and dropped to half of that a month or two later. I suspect that there will be very few if any "rare" games in this generation simply because retailers in this economy are looking to avoid risks, so distributors are carrying less risky product which means in turn that publishers are canning projects long before they even get too far into development. According to one distributor I spoke to recently, even the crap Wii titles have minimum print runs of 25,000 or more units not because Nintendo is demanding it, but because selling crap titles requires getting them into lots of retailers in the hopes that they will sell at least half the print run at full price and then they just keep crediting retailers until the price drops to a level where the other half sells. I also like your use of the word "money" to describe what people are hoping for in this thread since as the last few generations have shown, rarity seems to have little to do with resale value as it seems like really good games that might not have had the full distribution that other titles in the same generation had or really common, but great games are what maintain value. There are of course exceptions, but the fact that a black label copy of FFVII sells for the same or more than a copy of the original release of Dragonball Z for the Playstation is good evidence that just being numerically "rare" is no indication that something is worth picking up.