The surge of retro stores selling old stuff at eBay prices and above is just a ludicrous concept to me, and a terrible business model. Outside of having a physical presence that provides you with more opportunities to make deals on old games, what advantage does having a physical store have over selling online? Yeah, the 80 copies of Blades of Steel you have for NES will never sell online for the $8 each you have them tagged for in your store, and yeah you might find a couple of suckers dumb enough to come in and pay that, but it's never going to be enough to cover overhead.

Anyways, prices will settle down eventually. It's just a fad, probably 70% of the demand right now is just from resellers looking to make a quick buck and hoarding inventory. eBay definitely does a lot to affect prices. There's a couple of issues with eBay that I hate, which causes prices to go up in an unnatural fashion. The first is that when an item sells on eBay, there is no clear indication of whether the item was actually sold and paid for at some ridiculously inflated price, or if the item was just bid up by a scammer, or by the seller themselves. So now when people search the completed listings on eBay, they see that one loose copy of Super Metroid that sold for $65, and the prices just slowly creep up from there.

The other issue is the automated bidding bots people use. People use sniper bots and set them to win a certain auction, regardless of the price. If three or four or more people are using bots on the same item, it turns into an unnatural bidding war that drives the price of the item well above what anyone should reasonably pay. So your bot wins the item for you, and you only expected to pay $30 for the item, but competition from other bots drove the price up to $75, so a new price point is now set.

What will eventually happen is that the bubble will burst, much like it did with Atari 2600 cartridges which are now largely worthless except for a handful of maybe 100 or so super rarities. The stuff that is common will drop like a rock, back to where it should be. The rare stuff however will stay where it is, maybe drop a little, but still stay high priced.