Retro Game Price Inflation

General and Gaming > Classic Video Games

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htimreimer:

--- Quote from: george on June 24, 2012, 01:20:28 am ---Want it cheap? Then hit up the garage sales. :)

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or you can go to a thrift store the saskatoon value village is where i got sonic the hedgehog in mint for 4 dollers ;D

desocietas:

--- Quote from: george on June 24, 2012, 01:20:28 am ---I think a lot of gamers are hitting the age of their 30s and they want those classics they grew up with.

Also, on eBay, you can find that classic game easily, but you have to pay a premium for finding it so easily. Want it cheap? Then hit up the garage sales. :)

--- End quote ---

This. We're nostalgic and have money (kind of) to buy things now. :)

theflea:
Its funny 10 years ago I was made fun of collecting old video games, people treated them like old VHS tapes are today. a rare game I payed $40 for 5 years ago goes for over $200 now. Personally if i walk into a store or at a flea market and find a game with no price, ask how much? and get "hold on let me look it up" as he looks it up on ebay i walk. I don't mind paying a fair price on a game, but if you go by what sellers are posting games at buy it now or high prices on Amazon. Then don't expect to sell much and you might have trouble paying the rent.

blipcs76:

--- Quote from: theflea on August 09, 2012, 06:52:22 pm ---Its funny 10 years ago I was made fun of collecting old video games, people treated them like old VHS tapes are today. a rare game I payed $40 for 5 years ago goes for over $200 now. Personally if i walk into a store or at a flea market and find a game with no price, ask how much? and get "hold on let me look it up" as he looks it up on ebay i walk. I don't mind paying a fair price on a game, but if you go by what sellers are posting games at buy it now or high prices on Amazon. Then don't expect to sell much and you might have trouble paying the rent.
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Yeah, I found a NES R.O.B. at a garage sale a few months ago and they had $50 on it. Not sure if it worked or not, but I offered $20 to them for the "Nintendo robot ;)" to the lady who was at the cash table. They told me to ask one guy and as I made my way over there another guy rudely cut me off and said "No! They're twice that much on eBay!" So I naturally walked off. I hadn't priced them in a while, so when I got home and looked up actual auctions, most were ending around $60.

I don't understand people who look at Buy It Now prices on eBay and think they'll get that amount on a garage sale. When you've got people who are specifically looking for your item online and won't pay what you're asking with BIN, what makes people think that some random garage sale customer is going to pay top dollar? Ugh.

I get irritated with people who look up the BIN price of their items and then ask that on their garage sale as much as I hate people who thumb through stacks of games and scan the barcodes of every single game to look up it's value. I've spent years learning what games are rare and valuable and now some reseller with a smartphone is going through and snatching the best games.

hexydes:

--- Quote from: george on June 24, 2012, 01:20:28 am ---I think a lot of gamers are hitting the age of their 30s and they want those classics they grew up with.

Also, on eBay, you can find that classic game easily, but you have to pay a premium for finding it so easily. Want it cheap? Then hit up the garage sales. :)

--- End quote ---

This is exactly it. For those in your late 20s-early 40s, remember how baseball cards were huge when you were a kid, and there was a huge market for them? You know why that was? Because that's what your dad collected when he was a kid, and he was trying to recapture a part of his youth. Demand up, supply stays the same, price goes up. There were obviously some rare cards out there, but the market peaked when people were buying entire seasons of that current year in order to get a rookie card of that year's top player(s), because it would be "a good investment". Most of that stuff isn't worth much now, because that generation got over it.

Same thing will happen with our generation. The big differences in video games compared to cards are:

1. Games/systems cost a ton more to buy as compared to pictures of people on cardboard. It was so easy for a mom to throw out some "silly cards" after their kid went off to school, not to mention they are much smaller (again, easier to toss).

2. Mass production. Most of the games for the mainstream systems were made in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions (or tens of millions sometimes). I don't have any stats to back it up, but I would be willing to bet that there were a LOT more copies of Earthbound made than 1914 Babe Ruth rookie cards.

We're definitely in a bubble, and it will collapse as the people in our generation with only a passing interest/nostalgia move on to other things. If we learned anything from housing in 2008, what happens when a bubble pops? Good news for you collectors out there.

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