What's going on with retro prices lately? I tried to find an article on this but I'm not finding anything. What I'm seeing is everything jumped about 10-20% since December and has been holding steady. So what gives this time around?
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Covid had a lot to do with it but it had started a few years earlier. A combination of YouTube influencers like MetalJesusRocks and a bunch of those clickbait "Check Your Attic For These Games!" articles that started showing up on Facebook. It caused an influx of outside speculators from other hobbies like comics and baseball cards who saw video games as the next big money market. Then actual scams like WATA and Heritage Auctions didn't help any.
>lately
You're about a decade late. It's only accelerated since covid and the graded game scandal.
Happens every year while morons keep screaming the bubble is going to pop soon.
They've been saying it since 2012 and it continues to climb. This shit is never going down until the people that grew up playing this shit are in their 60s and it gets sold off in an estate.
I've noticed there's been SOME price drops here and there but it's game to game. Ebay becoming Joe Schmoe Amazon is also a serious issue. Now that everything is a Buy It Now people just stay firm on whatever the most recent sale price happened to be. Back in the day you had tons of actual auctions with "$1! No Reserve!" being a draw, which let you get a better idea of what shit was actually worth on the open market. Now that Ebay is full of people's personal stores they don't have a problem just letting shit sit there forever until somebody eventually hits that buy it now. It's ruined the casual collector market because you don't have that healthy supply of games constantly rotating. Everyone wants top dollar now.
Same thing happened with arcade pcbs. Games like Final Fight were $30-40 in 2010. Very common as well. Even the SHMUPS like Batrider were only $70 back then.
And it's like you said it's because people would play them and then sell them trade them for other things, but now people buy and hold on to them because they know if they sell them they'll probably never see it again and if they do it'll cost them a lot to have again.
So everyone just holds on and hoards everything now because there's no circulation. Add in speculators and collectards and it's over...
Yup, that's why I keep saying, the big money games aren't the real story. It doesn't really matter if Earthbound is $3000 or whatever. Okay it's one game that's very expensive. It happens. The real story is that Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt is $8. That Mega Man 2 is $30. That Super Metroid is $60. All those common as shit games, some of which you couldn't give away 15 years ago, are now pretty expensive. When $10 is the absolute floor people don't feel comfortable buying stuff just for shits and giggles and they don't want to trade them away for less than top dollar because they paid top dollar. Back when I used to frequent GameStop when they had a billion stores and had PS2 games pouring out of their ears I would often buy games I didn't know anything about because they were practically free.
$8 is fine for SMB/DH. A decade ago I remember seeing it at retro stores for $5, so when you factor in the Biden-era inflation $8 makes sense. The really goofy one for me (probably since I'm a 30 year-old zoom-zoom) is people on eBay charging over $30 for Pokemon Red/Blue, the Pokemon games that sold so many copies (over 31 million) that none of the other Pokemon games ever caught up to them.
At least the prices for /vr/ consoles are still reasonable, at least to me if you adjust for inflation. I guess the actual gamers buy the consoles and then get flash carts and whatnot for them since the experience is basically the same as having the real game, meanwhile all the overpriced games are being hoarded multiple copies at a time by collector morons who never play them.
$8 for a game that was literal pocket change not that long ago? I don't even have to post a FuncoLand pricing guide (I mean, I AM because it's funny and sad) but even in recent memory SMB/Duck Hunt was a $0.99 game at most and many others were below $20. Now $10 is the floor and $20 is considered a bargain.
>arcade PCBs
That's the most surprising to me, because for the longest time I figured that arcade-gaming-at-home (outside of a dedicated cab or two) was simply too alien for the average normalgay/newbie collector to frick with. But I guess with YouTube guidance and everybody trying to monetize every gaming related concept (to the point that some company is going to put out faux-candy cabs with LCD monitors) all the barriers simply melted away.
That is, until enough people drop $700 on their premium PCB only to realize that no matter how much you spend on an arcade game, it can shit itself for no reason, leaving you with an expensive project board. If you started buying up arcade stuff over a decade ago, then it might be worth buying up whatever small number of boards you still want, but starting from scratch in 2024? Complete waste unless you're filthy rich, or are legitimately satisfied with going through all the headache just to have a small handful of games. Even as a diehard original hardware fan, I'd say getting a decent cab and tossing a MAME PC or a Mister setup in it is definitely the way to go.
I think a decent number of PCB collectors quite literally do not have them hooked up to anything. Like I’ve seen their forum posts, they don’t even have a cab, they just collect for whatever reason.
I bought Twin Snakes from a coworker years ago for like $20 and now it’s well above $100, I’m tempted to sell but I know it’ll just go to some homosexual scalper who’s trying to flip it. If I knew any younger gamer who liked Metal Gear and wanted to play it I’d gladly give it away.
I already have Twin Snakes as well and I don't know anyone. In regards to that its crazy how these seemingly random games skyrocket
I have copies of Chulip and Miser Mosquito and I didn't realize they were so expensive now
>Even as a diehard original hardware fan, I'd say getting a decent cab and tossing a MAME PC or a Mister setup in it is definitely the way to go.
OK then get rid of all your arcade hardware and please stop trying to discourage the rest of us please. Many of us don't want emulation. We want the cabinet tied to our memories.
I'm just being realistic. I have three dedicated cabs and three candy cabs, along with many PCBs, MVS carts, etc, but I got the majority of it when it was cheap. It's sad that people have been reduced to paying $500 or whatever even for common boards like The Simpsons, to the point that yes, you might as well just emulate.
Not that anon, but new arcade popularity resurgence has lead to companies re-manufacturing their old games. For example, "Ice Cold Beer" has been in such high demand by arcades and barcades that Taito remade the huge arcade machine and re-released it in the USA.
Emulation plays a role like you said but it's usually in service to the gaming experience. Not the other way around. Emulation by itself can't sell products. Emulation *supports* products being sold. For example the Nintendo NES mini, SNES mini, SNK MVS Mini, etc. Ultimately... People still place value in physical objects.
>SNK MVS Mini
choosing an arcade look instead of a basic or even a NeoGeo CD case is their meanest move
>choosing an arcade look instead of a basic or even a NeoGeo CD case is their meanest move
Snk also chose to use the white Japanese candy cab which actually sold much less compared to the Neo Geo MVS Big Red - which sold almost one million arcade cabinets worldwide outside of Japan. Then SnK cheaped out and painted the same white candy cab a red color, and re-released it worldwide as the "SnK MVS mini - international edition". Like wtf? International edition? This looks nothing like what was released internationally in the 90s. If they were going to release a mini console then it should have been the console case. And if they were going to release an arcade mini then it should have been the MVS Big Red.
Of course, and that's why I amassed a sizable stash of cabs and boards, I prefer the real deal to emulation. Again, that said, and maybe I'm just too cheap minded, but I can't fathom dropping like $4k to get nothing more than an Astro City and like 5 PCBs. I see people paying over $600 now for shit like Primal Rage, which I think I got for like $60.
The one thing you need to understand is those prices you paid were from a different depression era. From 1999 to 2010-ish is when the arcade market crashed. It was about 12 years of expremely low prices. I'm talking finding arcade cabinets on The side of the road. And landromats practically selling their arcade machines for like $50 to $100 bucks for people to haul it away. That's how I got my Neo Geo MVS. But those were prices from a extremely depressed market. It's not the norm. Those prices will never come again for most people who aren't bargain hunting or willing to dive into old barns or dusty warehouses in the middle of nowhere.
I'm other words, it's like saying you bought your stuff from a grocery store that was having a clearance sale at 90% off normal prices. So you should just consider yourself lucky you got to take advantage of those prices. But never expect them again.
>$50 MVS
jelly anon
That's the price I paid for my MVS 2 months ago from Choina
I want to experience the games the same way my ancestors did. Using systems and controllers they used. Please stop recommending emulation as a solution for everyone.
That's exactly my situation. Its counterintuitive but the prices being so high is what keeps me from selling stuff I might otherwise would. Sure, I can make a few hundred right now off of a game I paid $20 for 15 years ago but it also means if I do sell it then I'll never own it again because frick paying that kind of money. So I pretty much hold onto everything with the understanding that I'll sell it only if I end up in dire need of fast cash.
My issue is that the expensive stuff I own now, most of it are games I don't even like playing and that makes me want to sell it
Like I have a complete boxed Persona 2 which is like 340 ight now. My loose copy of emerald is 180. I can emulate both these games effortlessly and the PS1 Persona 2 isn't even the best way to play that game
Despite this I simply cannot let them go, same with my boxed copy of Demon's Crest. A game I think is meh
What I probably should do is inventory the games that I don't care about and are worth something, do the math, and figure out if I can convert them into games I don't have but really do have a soft spot for without spending any extra money. But I can't be arsed to do any of it.
It's never going to go down, period. These games will continue to get harder and harder to find, and then they will continue be harder and harder to get working as cartridges in circulation dwindle and corrupted or broken games continues to climb.
It may drop off at some point, but the drop off will be so tiny it won't matter, and will be nowhere near the original price.
>These games will continue to get harder and harder to find, and then they will continue be harder and harder to get working as cartridges in circulation dwindle and corrupted or broken games continues to climb.
Yes, but the demand will also drop when the people that want these also frick off.
i imagine over the next 20 years retro prices will go like this (using ps1 games as a sample case):
1. typical sports games, board games, and shovelware titles go from being under $3 to still being under $3, despite inflation going up 200%
2. relatively unknown uncommon games with no rereleases (like intelligent cube, parasite eve, vagrant story) will drop from $75 to $30 as they get more forgotten about and irrelevant
3. common well known games (crash, tomb raider, ff7, re2) will settle around $15-20
3. common "good" games (silent hill, castlevania sotn, xenogears) will drop from obscene current highs of $100-$200 to around $40 when youtubers get tired of making the same videos
4. rare games (tomba, klonoa, koudelka) will hold values over $200, possibly even up to $500 level as they become the only items missing from people's collections
Then suddenly in about 40 years, all of the millennials who horded this crap will begin dying off rapidly, and their iPad kids will begin selling en masse, or perhaps throwing a lot of it out. Prices will plummet
Thankfully I bought up almost everything I wanted already. Most of the stuff I buy now is multiboard arcade stuff from China which is usually a mixture of original hardware and reprogrammed rooms.
Gen X hoarded all of this stuff. Millennials didn't have an income when it was being sold off cheap. Whenever I buy something arcade-related, the seller is always some guy around the age of 50.
>in about 40 years, all of the millennials who horded this crap will begin dying off rapidly
Considering the life of the average millennial, I feel like we'll all be roping much sooner than that
Based on what? You think demand will really go down that much? You have alpha kids buying and playing NES games for fricks same. Those haven’t gone down in price. Why would the next gen’s go down especially when the games are even better? The more people that get into video game end up going back to the originals and classics because they are timeless a part of history and have clout. Nintendo is highly collectible and has no signs of slowing down. It probably will still be popular 40 years from now and SMB3 will still be a good game and still a good game for kids to start gaming on. Most will emulate yes but as long as people like the games they will want to collect the real thing.
>thinking the masses won't just be perpetually hooked up to immersive generative slopmachines in 40 years
I don't know. Kids are buying vinyl records nowadays for crying out loud. It's hard to predict these things. Though my guess is that's mostly zoomers. Physical media as a concept will be so alien to Gen Alpha that once they're of working age it seems unlikely they'd have much interest in game collecting. We've already crossed the threshold where more than 50% of all console game sales are digital and have maybe two more console generations before they don't even support physical media at all.
The issue with retro gaming at the moment it's mostly fueled by nostalgia. Nintendo shit will always have value, but it'll be interesting to see how prices will fare for things like the Genesis/pc-engine when gen x starts to die. Maybe retro gaming is so popular even when the gen that grew up with these systems passes they'll still keep most of their value.
>Kids are buying vinyl records
I think it's still a niche. My younger sister is very-early gen-z and all the records she is buying is mostly modern prints from new artists not really any of the old stuff.
It's possible that what's going to pop the bubble is the evolving trends on YouTube. Right now a major driving factor are these guys like MetalJesusRocks doing videos on games. MVG just recently did one on Alien Resurrection having a previously unknown exploit that is today quite useless but it still caused a dramatic spike on Ebay. At some point the demographics are going to change. I can't imagine a current 6 year old will be watching MJR when he's 15 or 20. AVGN's popularity isn't what it used to be now that he and his main audience are all in their 40s. For increasingly younger people to get into physical retro games there'd have to be some impetus driving it and I can't imagine an eventual 50 year old Pat Contri or whoever being the darling of Gen Alpha. Maybe some younger star will come up and do the same stuff but it seems way less likely to make the same splash.
I don't think old vidya is just a trend on YouTube, especially when you consider how long the aforementioned AVGN has been making videos (longer than YouTube has existed AFAIK).
The problem is that Gen Z grew up with some of these people as surrogate big brothers. Look at Scott the Poz, RetroFuture, and whoever else the frick are the current Gen Z gaming media ecelebs, not to mention literally 13 year old streamers who play games three time their age. While their idols might not appeal to future Gen Alpha fanbase or encourage them to buy old games, they themselves have a much better chance of doing so. Might not be as widespread, but frick, just look at that DKOldies YouTube channel. It's a promotional channel for some shady old used game store, and they have fans who are literal children.
You would expect, in 10 years perhaps, that a lot of the focus of youtube would shift towards newer media to cater to younger people and their respective nostalgia waves, but I can't help but think that newer media is just less "digestible" and less easy to compartmentalize and talk about, since it is so fragmented with updates and revisions and patches, and reliant on multiplayer such that two people's experience with the same game growing up can be wildly different.
I also wonder if, for kids today, watching or playing the (now retro) games that millennials played as kids is like how a lot of millennials revered 70s classic rock music over current pop music despite it being way before their time. That could explain why nerdy kids connect to retro games - it's literally "born in le wrong console generation"
I suspect that, going forward, old handheld games will surge in popularity with the younger generations. They grew up relying heavily on phones and tablets for gaming, and will see DS, GBA, GB, GG, etc as the ancestors of these. In the past, handheld games were often the also-ran of the collecting world, which I predict will, and perhaps already is, changing, as younger people enter the market. I already see this happening on /vr as its userbase skews more toward Gen Z, where now we have regular Handheld Generals, which seem to have as much activity as the old CRT generals used to have, while the CRT generals themselves seem to be slowing down.
One thing that makes old games potentially radioactive to gen Alpha is their hands aren't trained to play them right. You think I'm kidding but if you hand a kid who grew up on modern games an SNES controller, their thumbs keep searching for the thumbsticks and they instinctively want to use the shoulder buttons as the main action buttons. They haven't developed the muscle memory to use the face buttons with the kind of frequency that old games do. Watching them try to play Mega Man X is painful. It's the equivalent of an old person trying to use a computer mouse and not using the scroll wheel.
That's a good point. I also read an article recently that said kids today want in-game currency way more than they want new games. They'd rather spend five years playing nothing but Fortnite and buying all the bullshit within than jumping to a new game every few months. As a millennial this completely baffles me because growing up you were ALWAYS looking for new shit. The 90s was a nonstop whirlwind of a new technology or better graphics every six months. And like you said, that means "nostalgia" is going to mean something very different to these people. They won't even really be able to capitalize on it in the same way. You can't just go on Ebay and buy the "original" Fortnite that you played way back when. I'm trying to think of an analogous media from pre-Millennial days that went totally out of fashion. Maybe something like drive-in theaters? I can't imagine Millennials suddenly getting the itch to patronize that kind of business. Maybe once or twice for the novelty.
the analogue for millennials would be 90s party places that are now completely gone like laser tag, roller rinks, even non-redemption game arcades are largely gone. These have really just been replaced by other fads like topgolf, axe throwing, barcades, etc.
the bubble's gonna pop.... anytime now... any.... time.........
Prices are down since COVID from what I've seen.
Engage phase two of the mini craze
let's goooooo
I'm glad software emulation, flashcarts, and misterFPGA exist because I can still enjoy all this stuff. But there's a lot of arcade shit that's emulated poorly and it really fricking sucks some games are in the $2000+ range.
None of these re-releases, repros, or mini consoles have ever lowered the price of any retro games, infact they usually have the opposite effect if you look at their release dates and price charts.
Have SoC chips advanced to where they can do good Saturn and N64 emulation for very cheap yet? Cus sega literally said they're not doing a Saturn mini until that's possible. They need to make a profit so they're not putting a $70+ chip in a $99 product
they have 0 excuses for not releasing the master system mini
they don't have 10 games good enough
>sega literally said they're not doing a Saturn mini until that's possible
People made RPi boards specifically to fit in the sega saturn plamo, so Sega is now forced to make a Saturn mini, it was already shown at TGS 2023.
And they can just license SSF, it was already used in commercial games (the Cotton collection), and Sega has a long history of licensing emulators.
take my money
Are RPi's fast enough for proper emulation these days? I remember considering getting one years ago back when everyone was building emulation shitboxes with them, but someone told me they have really bad input lag that makes it a chore to play anything that isn't a jarpig.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as the Master System, is in fact, the Sega System.
It's actually called the Sega Core Deck System Esquire
>NES kids growing up and (re)buying the games they had or wanted as children
>repeat for SNES, N64, Gamecube, and even Wii kids
>youtubers made retro gaming popular and their fans buy whatever games they talk about
>people getting bored during covid and getting into indoor hobbies
>money laundering schemes
I consider myself a hopeless mark and I scoff at the prices people are willing to pay for some of this shit
>the absolute state of retro collecting in 2024
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dear oh dear
Go shill your shitty channel somewhere else zoomer.
>So what gives this time around?
The death throes of scalpers trying to scrape a profit as emulation becomes ever more popular thanks to chinkware and the youtubers that shill them.
Normalgays don't even need to know where to get roms or how to set up emulators anymore when tons of devices exist now that just comes bundled with a bunch of roms and preconfigured settings.
The entire retro market is driven by nostalgia, regret and greed, not by people who actually want to play.
People who just want to play games will get an emulator and have fun.
Here is an explanation:
Dude A: start chasing for his childhood stuff. He will pay top prices from Dude C for his precious childhood games and consoles
Dude B: start chasing for a complete collection of his favorite console, buying everything in sight.
Dude C: wants to buy low and sell high
Dudes A and B will eventually get bored or regret. They will both start selling their stuff. This will give the opportunity for dude C to buy at lower prices and for other A and B dudes to enter or feed the loop.
What we're seeing today is this: dude C refuses to not make profits
Fewer A and B dudes are entering the loop.
Since not every dude A and B sells their stuff, the supply of games decreases every year, elevating the prices
Conclusion: emulate and buy just the console and the games (a maximum of 5 games fall into this category if you're not moronic) that defined your childhood and your life in video games... just in honor of your past and the developers.
You're moronic.
Market prices are exaggerated by the elite, so they can launder money more effectively in different areas of commerce.
It's honestly just a tiny uptick. I've got a pretty good barometer on things readymade, since I have like ~750 games tracked on pricecharting across gens 4-8 but haven't bought anything new in the last five years.
The biggest part of the bubble popped, some of the high-profile rereleases killed the momentum of quite a few gen 4-6 titles, and now we're just seeing a fairly normal rate of growth again. Newsflash, that crisp $20 doesn't buy as much used plastic as it did back on 2006 ebay.
The fact that you have these tools compared to 2006 shows that the market is highly saturated and isn't the niche hobby it used to be 15 years ago.
Just buy a mister
The fact that consoles are mostly holding steady even as games continue to increase, despite the fact that consoles should (at least in theory) be slowly succumbing to hardware failure, shows this is all being driven by subhuman speculators and scalpers, not gamers who want to play. Just get a flashcart/ODE/HDD loader and play whatever you want.
>consoles should (at least in theory) be slowly succumbing to hardware failure
I've seen everything from people just figuring out how to fix them or putting Chinesium in them (and then ruining their discs), to some consoles just getting cloned like the NES.
Oh. Those Systems are definitely failing. Bare minimum the capacitors should be leaking or failing now. Those capacitors are only rated to have a 20 to 25 year life span. When they fail badly, they leak onto the motherboard and wreck things. I've seen Sega CDs, Sega 32x, and other consoles failing badly.
What I'm seeing is people Frankensteining their systems by replacing the caps, removing the disc drives, and attaching SD card readers. I respect what they are doing by trying to keep the system alive, but at some point the system just becomes this weird Frankenstein beast of random parts bolted on. It's lost the spirit of the original. Losing a disc drive is a big loss to me personally. Part of the experience is swapping discs and understanding what older generations went through.
>about to move
>thought about selling off some of my collection
Not going to offload everything but I have some higher ticket stuff that's quite literally collecting dust and I've already played and I got for a steal over 10 years ago before prices jumped up
I work in a retro game shop and I asked the guy who actually does the pricing how things are done.
>1. Covid. Lot of people in doors, lot of people want to feel better, that means playing nostalgia, that means demand has skyrocketed.
>2. YoutubeTwitch streaming. So many people are being exposed to games that they never heard of because a youtuber they like or a twitch streamer they watch picked it up and began playing it, spiking demand more.
>3. Gamestop consuming the market. In the past there used to be a hearty amount of game shops out there, which meant prices were low since you could always go somewhere else. With Gamestop having eaten up everyone around them for a good chunk of time, there are not many places to go anymore to get an older game, thus the owners dont necessarily have to keep prices at a low value.
>4. Time. A lot of these older games that were not taken care of have either fallen into disrepair or simply do not work anymore, the same is true of the old consoles. Couple that with them having been out of production for 10-30+ years depending on the game, and stock is low.
There are other factors involved in it, popularity of the game, its condition, whether it has all it has(CIB, Sealed, if the gamemachine has damage to it that can be overlooked to play instead), people who are nostalgic for their childhood and wish to introduce it to their own children have caused demand to overwhelm supply in recent years. I would say the cut off for when things began to trail up was about 2013 or so, and since 2019 jumped the shark. I have my own theory as well as to why retro games have been more sought after.
>5. Newer Games kinda suck. A lot of these games come saddled with microtransactions, loot boxes, fremium bullshit, poorly launched, poorly designed, glitchy messes. Older games are, by and large, 100% at launch.
>>5. Newer Games kinda suck. A lot of these games come saddled with microtransactions, loot boxes, fremium bullshit, poorly launched, poorly designed, glitchy messes. Older games are, by and large, 100% at launch.
This is a big factor. You can't even play some games anymore because the online servers are gone. You can't plug in an OG Xbox and play Halo 1 in Xbox Live like the old days.
Older games were designed to work from scratch. No patches. No DLC. Developers had to get it right. You can't download a patch to fix FF7 on your old PS1. It had to work.
Halo 1 didn't have Xbox Live support, only Halo 2. and Halo 2's playable over XLink now. Many xbox games have Live support again through insignia. I sit down every saturday night and play games over xbox live.
Many computer games got expansions post launch. Patches and DLC isnt the problem with modern gaming. AAA games have just gotten too big.
Major games used to be made by smaller dev teams or even solo, you didn't need as many people working on a game for it to be big and impressive. Now major games are developed by committee by hundreds of people. A game of that scale is too expensive to take any risks.
There's plenty of good modern games, indies made by smaller teams or solo developers.
Massive budgets and dev teams just pump out boring slop.
At this point I just emulate everything, using retro styled controllers and CRT shaders helps with that accurate feeling, it's enough for me and I barely have to spend anything, the current market just isn't worth it for most people I think.
I'm currently using a laptop, which I plug into the TV, and a smartphone with a controller for my handheld action, I'm thinking of moving it all to a tablet, since I can stream to the TV, or use a telescopic controller to have it as a big handheld, kind of like a cheap emulation Switch, though I'm still looking into it, though this year for sure.
Should I just go ahead and buy a Sega 32X now or wait for a hopeful price drop? Can't believe this shit is $200 now.
The best games on it are still pretty affordable and few in number so the overall expenditure after you're "done" won't be insane.
Just buy it. Rare hardware like that will never see a significant drop.
Wow. That's more than what it cost when it was first released.
If you are concerned about price, then it's a terrible deal.
If you aren't concerned about money and just want to play it, then go ahead and buy it. The hardware isn't getting any younger. Some units will eventually with time.
If you buy it, then buy it without (reasonable) concern for spending money on it.
>emulate with shaders, run ahead, OLED with HDR
wala
I hadn't sold games since 2014 and for the past christmas decided to cut on all the doubles I got in different lots, games for nes, snes and N64: if anything the rarest games are more expensive, but classics are stable or cheaper than they were before
TL;DR: common games are cheaper, the rarest are pricier
>What I'm seeing is everything jumped about 10-20% since December
Holiday shopping. The trend generally seems stable if not slightly downward from the heights of the COVID years.
paypigs get what they deserve
All this shit is emulatable on an off-brand android these days. Paying for scratched plastic and blown capacitors is fricking moronic and you idiots deserve to be price gouged.
People got cash for christmas and went out and bought retro vidya.
sock puppets start making mass sales to each other around xmass to trick morons. It happens every year reminder like 5% of these sellers are part of a ~~*kabal*~~ and make up 80% of retro game sales. They work with ecelebs to create videos buy a stockpile of games that are cheap slowly up the price over 6 month eceleb drops hidden gem video makes bank off youtube sells is own 2-5 dozen copies of said game with his sock puppets too. morons pay moronic amounts for games morons think they will resell them at a high price morons dont realize most sales are fake between sellers for tax/wire fraud and money laundering with "graded" games.
These parasites have really suck with retro games because its the only field they have yet to kill normally they take over something and drain it dead within 3-5 years. They've been at it for like 10-13 years now since multiply systems&generations mean then can fleece more than one generation of people.
I hope the government goes after these fraudsters soon I imagine ever since covid feds have been building cases with all the fraud&money laundering and tax evasion plus banks&insurance are also pissed off from all the fake BS and once again even more fraud.
Whats really fricked up is now ecelebs are traveling to japan enmasse and buying up games telling people to buy JP games because they are cheap but the worst of the worst part is they are telling people all the smaller stores so Amerilards are buying like 10-50 copies of a jp game since it costs 1 US copy and like all those games will never be in japan or even played ever again. They're using straw buyers too since most places refuse to sell to foreigners unless its big stores. They know if they sell a game its going to leave the country and the fat frick is going to hoard over 9000 copies then sell them for over 9000 X.
Like its 2023 why are you still not using flash cards/mod chips/emulation frick even buying roms of the nintendo eshop is better at this point.
From what I've it's mostly the early nes/snes/sega stuff that is extremely high prices
And Ive already played majority of that stuff so meh
>born in 88
>with each new console that came out my older brother would pretty much monopolize that and I'd be free to use the previous console
>spend my childhood not really concerned with new games and just getting used carts for the older machines
>buying up games from friends in the early 00s as they aren't interested in older stuff
>paying like 50 bucks for their old consoles + a box of games
>Genesis, SNES, NES, TurboGrafx, Saturn and whatever else I can get my hands on
>pretty much my entire adolescence just focused on older stuff and not concerned with whatever was new outside of GBA
>didn't notice a dramatic shift in prices until around 2010-2011
>suddenly everything is priced individually, no more finding "$3 each" boxes of old carts
>things have only gotten pricier as each year goes on
It's been a steady climb with no signs of slowing down, unfortunately. Things started to level off around 2016 and then in 2020 there was a very noticeable spike. Looks like things are leveling off a bit again but overall the trend is still climbing. It bothers me how much of a premium is put on nostalgia specifically, I've always just enjoyed older game design more and been on the lookout for stuff on old machines that I missed when they were new. I hung onto everything I had as a kid and have always just been trying to acquire the games that I want to play, it's pretty wild to see just how crazy it's gotten. Playing old games used to be cheaper than getting new stuff but that's very much not the case anymore.
Inflation, declining birthrates, unsustainable rising housing costs, climate change, geopolitical turmoil, disruptive AI technology, systemic racism, and the coronavirus all contribute.
Yeah, only inflation is applicable, and declining birth rate doesn't contribute to increase in retro game prices, and the other points should get you hanged.
who cares. if you're serious about playing the damn games, just download them and emulate them instead of moaning about the prices of the "retro market" or whatever dumb meme phrase everybody is eating up