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Is the retro game market overpriced?

  • Thread starter Thread starter BlazeHeatnix
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Welcome to the aftermath of the great boredom of 2020-0 - collecting became mainstream for brokies who'd rather waste heaps of time trying to scalp $1 Hot Wheels to then resell for $5+shipping+handling-market place fees and feel amazing for doing all that. Every possible niche got affected by that.

Purely in terms of out-of-print gaming though, to this day not everyone has a proper PC and thus a way to either use emus or be able to soft mod their own consoles, so having physical copies makes it easier to play whenever they will never feel like it, so it just comes down to proverbial convenience.

If you ask me though, getting even $100 modern flashcart will forever beat dumping $200+ on a single game, since the main goal in gaming is to just play the damn game and not stare at the box.
 
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I mean I think there was a grading company exposed for insider inflation of prices for graded Nes/snens (wata games I believe) games but in terms of GameCube games I'd say the original disks are pretty rare due to low sales
 
It feels like a downward spiral. People nowadays tend to exclusively play re-releases of retro games or emulate them, and knowing how these games are being acquired much of the time, I'd imagine there are very few who actually buy second-hand copies. And then there are those who actually play from original copies, but see the massive prices and resort to acquiring games some other way to expand their library. Thus, the interest shrinks.

There's always the factor of how scarce a game is to own, but while GameCube was definitely a lesser sold console than its competitors, surely those games didn't sell so badly? Furthermore, surely there were a decent amount of Wii players who actually took advantage of GameCube support? I suspect it has more to do with how many people modded their Wiis and emulated GameCube/Wii games on their devices, given that they're fairly light systems to emulate nowadays.
 
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yankii said:
There are many Switch games I've bought for $200, and that's on the lower end. One was $150 for just the cartridge.
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why did you pay so much? it's not like the money went to the developers, I guess just to some guy on ebay.

if you're averse to piracy then ok, but arguably fine in this situation as like I said, devs aren't getting your sale either way.
 
cearp said:
why did you pay so much? it's not like the money went to the developers, I guess just to some guy on ebay.

if you're averse to piracy then ok, but arguably fine in this situation as like I said, devs aren't getting your sale either way.
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I don't care who gets my money as long as I can hold the game in my hands.
 
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Retro games are a scalpers paradise taking advantage of old gen y and gen x folks blinded by nostalgia. No I'm not paying 300$ for a snes game. I'll just play on emulator. Thank you.
 
lordelan said:
Yes.

And I'm glad I don't care. In the Wii era I found myself moving to "digital only" as soon as USB Loaders became a thing. I loved the fact I don't have to get my lazy ass up the couch to swap discs. I just launch another game from the USB Loader.
Same applies to my Analogue Pocket. I have a few cartridges and it's a nice feeling owning them but I refuse to take them with me as it makes the bag bulkier and everything is on the inserted SD card anyway.

However...
It's sometimes still a nice feeling to use physical media. Therefore I started putting NFC tags (NTAG215, the same as Amiibo) inside my cartridges so that I can use them on my MiSTer. Here's one of my favorite YouTube videos from a friend of mine showcasing the result on his MiSTer (that he put in a SNES shell):
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I think this is the "future" for me - Digital games with physical NFC/ID markers if I want to have "physical" media - There are a bunch of projects around this in the music scene where devices stream music, but you have NFC cards to select which playlist/album/etc to choose.
 
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Depends,
Most consoles get overpriced due to lesser model production which makes it more rare, if found on sale "boxed/unused" consoles get extremely overpriced. The console pricing has a ranking system based on how beat up or new it is. for example, a mint condition physical copy of earthbound with the guide and everything costs around a thousand, while a normal copy that had been used costs lesser.
The retro game market gets biased at most times due to the seller's intensions but most of the pricing is because of how "rarely" produced it is.
 
I don't know, but I kind of hope it is. I got a bunch of games and consoles I need to get rid of.

To me a flashcart/ODE is fine, I don't need the physical copy of the game, I do like original harware though. But I have duplicates of a lot of hardware too.
 
lightwo said:
Furthermore, surely there were a decent amount of Wii players who actually took advantage of GameCube support? I suspect it has more to do with how many people modded their Wiis and emulated GameCube/Wii games on their devices, given that they're fairly light systems to emulate nowadays.
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Uh, no. There were 32 million of us who bought the Wii Balance Board to use with Wii Fit and other exergaming titles. There's at least another 20 million who bought a Wii for exergaming who did not buy a Balance Board because they did not want to do yoga. That's 50 million of us who didn't care one bit that our Wii's had these useless GameCube ports on them (unless we played DanceDance Revolution). And since WE were the early adopters of the Wii, we did not buy GameCube games and by the time that other gamers starting buying the Wii (it was out of stock everywhere for 2 years! and the Balance Board was for the first year!) because it was popular, Nintendo started selling Wii's that couldn't even grab the smalled GameCube discs and didn't have GC ports. Sure, some Wii owners were actual Nintendo fanboys, but they already owned a GC and didn't continue buying GC games. The rest of us didn't because we didn't buy it to play games on! GC games did not benefit sales-wise from the Wii being able to play them. And GC games were no longer sold commercially by the time the GC/Wii was properly emulated by Dolphin.

Sorry, you're just wrong.


With physical discs going away, the market for retro games is only going to become more wild as older disc games will no longer have to compete among physical game collectors with new disc games. Even the Wii U library, duplicated as it is by the Switch, will become valuable by today's standards. Get them while you can! And especially 3DS games!
 
ChibiMofo said:
With physical discs going away, the market for retro games is only going to become more wild as older disc games will no longer have to compete among physical game collectors with new disc games. Even the Wii U library, duplicated as it is by the Switch, will become valuable by today's standards. Get them while you can! And especially 3DS games!
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That's also what I think. With physical games slowly but surely disappearing from store shelves, the price of retro games is only going in one direction, and that is up. I have a whole bunch of these old games, going back to the 16-bit era, and practically all of them with box and manual. I don't really care to keep them as I won't live forever, and I'm fine with emulators. Will be interesting to see how much money I can get.
 

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