Quote Originally Posted by stardust4ever View Post
It makes me wonder if video game collecting is at a similar state as baseball cards were in 1990. People used to pay huge amounts of money for trading cards, but now the hobby is mostly bust, and all but the rarest and oldest of cards have deflated in value the past ten years.
Card collecting got into what it is because they grossly, grossly overproduced most of the cards in the 90s, and then sold them to "collectors" as an investment that they were meant to sell in ten or so years for tons of money. Card companies started producing too many sets, and people caught on that they weren't rare, and everyone started dumping inventory.

When that died out, card companies started producing cards that had to be extremely rare to get people interested again -- like "hey, this contains part of a base, and we're only making 100 of them!!" or something. It has sort of worked, enough that now Panini and Topps have both reintroduced really cheap sets of cards to try to get kids interested in collecting them again.

It was when card collecting when from hobby to investment that the trouble began, and it cost a ton of card companies their business.

Game collecting definitely doesn't follow the same trend. I don't know anyone who was buying tons of NES games back in the day because Nintendo was promising that in 10 years they could get hundreds of bucks for them. They produced what there was demand for.