Simply put, if I hadn't got into collecting around the time I did, I would have never got into it.
That was 15-years ago, back when cheap games were plentiful and few people were doing it, or reselling them. My local thrift stores, flea market, garage sales, and everywhere else you could find cheap used games consistently produced deal after deal for me. I probably built 90% of my collection before 2016 or so, which by then collecting already sucked, but at least decent deals were still here and there by then. Really, collecting started becoming worse and worse from a difficulty and price perspective around 2012/2013. Still, it didn't reach demoralizing levels until I'd say 2017 or so. This was around the time I stopped hunting for games regularly and pretty much cut out thrift stores and the flea market entirely from my regular spots. And then there is the post-COVID collecting scene which is a whole other level of bullshit with how much prices skyrocketed due to stimulus checks and general inflation.
To be honest, I haven't really given a crap about collecting now since around the time COVID began. For a while, even before COVID, I kept on doing whatever I could to get myself enthusiastic about collecting, but the combination of having most of what I'd always really wanted, the prices and scarcity of finding things I still wanted, and just being a bit burned out on collecting never allowed me to get into video game collecting like I once was. I feel like this would have inevitably happened no matter what, but I feel like the real catalyst that changed how I felt about collecting was when I was forced to downsize to pay off some medical debt in 2017. My games went from being these ultra personal, special artifacts, to just material goods that could be bought and sold. Sure, I still loved many of the games for how fun they were or what they meant to me personally, but a big chunk of my games essentially mattered more to me for how much I could sell them for than keeping them on a shelf like some sort of trophy. Still, I tried expanding my horizons about what I could focus on collecting next, and a lot of this is present in various threads I created and contributed to between around 2018 and as recently as the beginning of this year. But I finally decided to be honest with myself and admit that while by definition I'm still a game collector, by my own admission I'm really not anymore.
As I said, I've owned nearly every game I've ever had any interest in. I've experienced many times the joy of finding a pile of games for well under their going rate on ebay, or finding some rare unicorn game for just a few bucks. And while it was all fun and exciting to find these sort of deals, or just games I really wanted, and add them to my collection, it never really made me that happy in the long run. There are certainly exceptions to this, but overall, I don't really care about collecting now. I refuse to pay the prices that many games are going for now. Hunting for games is an act of futility that requires an inordinate amount of time to find good deals, compared to the deals you're actually finding (aka 20-hours of looking so I can buy a few moderately desirable PS1 games for 50% of ebay...no thanks). And while it might sound like blasphemy, I've come to appreciate flash carts and ODEs as a means of playing both games I own and don't own, versus owning the original physical copies. Me from 5 years ago would have had a heart attack hearing this, but I'm totally fine popping in my Everdrive 64 and playing Mario Party 2 just as much as owning the original copy. In all honesty, if flashcarts had been available, or at least as well made as they are now back in 2008 when I started, there's a good chance I'd have never got into collecting even remotely as much as I ended up doing. I honestly feel sorry for anyone who started collecting within the past 8 years, and especially the last 3 or 4.
At the moment I've been in a continual downsizing phase, only keeping games that I either really enjoy playing and/or games that I have a personal attachment to. I will literally take my copy of Super Mario 64, Shenmue, and Ocarina of Time with me to the grave, but having Ape Escape 2 on the PS2 feels like something that I might not want to hold onto for more than another year or two. I've become way more involved in other interests of mine, and while this doesn't mean I don't like gaming anymore (quite the contrary), it was something absolutely necessary for me given how I did feel about gaming and collecting fairly recently. And yes, the absolutely terrible state of game collecting right now certainly was a contributing factor to this.
Overall, I'm just very happy I got into collecting when I did and that after all this time I have many wonderful memories about deals I got, massive scores I found, people I met and befriended along the way, and just being able to build the collecting I once had and to a degree still have. Very few people regardless of when they got into collecting will get to know what it was like to own many of the games Ive had over the years, and because of that I feel very blessed. And I am still very grateful for all the games in my collection that will always mean a lot to me.
