/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.7838929]

Have retro games have experienced a pricing bubble before? I know particular systems have but I think the pandemic is the first time it's been the entire medium

[Anonymous No.7838950]

It's hard to say. Especially because this means the average price for the used game is still significantly under the price they sold for originally. Maybe old games were truly undervalued for a long time. I don't know.

[Anonymous No.7838951]

don't worry anon those prices will drop once everyone's pushing 80 and realize their babby tier "investments" have no liquidity to pay for their nursery home

[Anonymous No.7838957]

>>7838929
>have esl zoom before?

[Anonymous No.7838958]

>Maybe old games were truly undervalued for a long time.
It's this. The truth is that it's outright insane that prices were ever as low as they were. Almost 95% marked off their retail price. It's simply insane that you could buy 5 games each which cost $40-70 at release for under $10 in the 2000s. Nobody knew what they had and just assumed they were worthless because the market had "moved on". It's been 20 years and everybody knows thousands of people are looking for these games, they're not going to sell you something they bought at $50 and have sat on for 25 years for $5.

[Anonymous No.7838961]

>>7838958
Gaming was always viewed as disposable entertainment in a rapidly growing and developing medium.

[Anonymous No.7838986]

>>7838961
>Gaming was always viewed as disposable entertainment
Only until gen 4 when games actually got good.

[Anonymous No.7839174]

>>7838958
I think about this with a lot of games. Where I see people angry that when a game costs more than 30 bucks or so. Looking at Price Charting, I looked at PS2 games. The first 25 games sell now for over 100. That's a minimum of doubling in price over 15 years or so. The highest one is still Kuon, for 415, so about 8 times. Not bad. But this is on a system with over 1000 games.

Looks like the top 76 games are 50+ dollars. Which means less than 5% of the releases maintained their value at all. Some games were cheaper at release, but this is a rule of thumb. Just doing fast math. Though, 50 dollars USD in 2005 is about 67$ and so even less of it has held it's value in real dollars.

SNES has more high priced games, and I'm not going to count it out. The top ones are all Completion editions or otherwise extremely limited copy special releases. Including those though you need to go about 170 in (fast counting here, I apologize) to get below 50 USD. So the top 150 games have about held their value. This doesn't include boxes and manuals and such, and back then those were maintained so the numbers here are probably lower and for cart only. This also does not include that 50$ in 1992 is about 97$ in real 2021 dollars. So a large portion of these do not hold there value.

And so, awhile back I wondered how much would it cost me to have a complete collection of SNES carts. At the current prices, excluding the competition carts, the number is about 50k (once again, fast math). This is about the price of a new mid range F-150, the best selling car in the US.

So, the numbers have definitely gone up. This is true. Though most games sell for less than retail still, many games for significantly less than retail. A complete collection is a real amount of money, but an amount a below median income earners could buy if they were dedicated and willing to save. For wealthier dual income earners, or tech workers or whatever, it's even more doable.

[Anonymous No.7839179]

>>7838929
Also, it's impossible to say if this is a bubble (the defining feature of which is they pop), or simply a correction.

[Anonymous No.7840951]

>>7838929
Depends on the console and games

[Anonymous No.7840958]

>>7840951
Nobody wants Atari games because 99.99% of Atari games are horrible.

[Anonymous No.7841008]

>>7839174
>Though most games sell for less than retail still, many games for significantly less than retail.
This isn't the best argument. Cart only games, or even opened complete games, aren't a good comparison for sealed games, especially when many used copies aren't even in like-new condition. Granted, there might be some sealed older games that you can get for less than their old MSRP, but by and large no.
>>7838958
That's probably how a lot of surging markets go, and for a logical reason
>thing is popular, a lot of people fall in love with it
>thing becomes simply outdated, people sell off to buy new items, forget about them, throw them away, etc
>thing becomes cheap as dirt and basically garbage
>time passes
>some people have nostalgia for the old thing, but no longer have it due to step #2
>they start buying the old thing
>this and other factors (modern revivals, media, etc) cause widespread re-awareness of the old thing
>people enter mad scramble buying mode in an effort to reclaim the thing they once loved
And all the "losers" who still played their NES games alongside their PS2 are suddenly "hip"

[Anonymous No.7841041]

>>7838929
Supply and Demand. No new supply entering the market and zoomers are jumping in on these too now due to social media, Youtube, etc driving them even higher.