| General and Gaming > Classic Video Games |
| Retro collecting is dying! |
| (1/31) > >> |
| jcalder8:
Yup I said it. I don't mean that it will be dead in a week or anything but I am calling it now that it will be dead within two years(really one and a half years since it is more likely to die over the summer than around Christmas) Over the last year I have seen the posts and interest on 3 of the forums that I frequent drastically decline. Long time users no longer posting and a lack of new users joining(of course this site is awesome(because of me.... and a little bit of soera) so it is still growing). What this says to me is that interest is starting to fade. It happened with sports cards and comics and it will happen with retro video games. Over the course of the year I think we will start to see an increase in the number of Ebay sales, everything from low end to high end, sales will be strong and people who are late to collecting will continue to buy or collectors will still need to pick up the missing items to their collections. The sales will increase because of the bump in resellers it is now more common knowledge that video games are worth uber monies(lol). This will over saturate the market and as the demand decreases resellers will end up being stuck with items they can't give away ex: SMB/DH. When this happens it's only a matter of weeks until the whole market crashes. The expensive items will always hold their value but, for example, Final Fantasy VII will plummet in price because there are so many of the damned things(lol). So what do you think? Am I on the money? Do you think it will happen sooner? Later? At all? |
| soera:
Heh first off thanks for the props! :D But in seriousness, I tend to see that its not necessarily going to die ... but its going to move onto a different kind of retro. Cartridge people are one brand of people and, for the most part, a lot of the serious hardcore collectors have gotten what they were looking for. Not all, but a lot. Soon its going to get into another type of retro collecting and thats going to be disk game collectors. They arent the type of people that are going to be scrounging the thrift stores and what not looking for nice CIB games cause, honestly, they arent to be had often at places like that. They are going to be the crowd that grew up with internet and are going to be buying every single piece of their collection on Ebay/Amazon/Craigslist and what not. And they arent going to be visiting websites looking for games cause every one of them is going to be on those places they search. I tend to see Dreamcast/Saturn/PS1/Gamecube stuff rising a lot soon. |
| hexen:
No. Retro collecting is far from dying... if anything it is becoming way too mainstream. The ludicrous price jumps over the last couple of years on pretty much EVERYTHING is pretty solid evidence to this, I would say. However, if you are right and people are becoming less interested in collecting old gaming stuff, I welcome it. I welcome it with open arms. If I can go somewhere and not have grandpa think his copy of Space Invaders for the Atari 2600 is worth $50... if I can go somewhere and not have a reseller buy up everything he sees and mark it up 1000%... then it will be some kind of miracle. However, while this nice little scenario you've laid out would be ideal, it isn't happening. Prices will continue to go up as hipsters with no idea of what things are worth continue to buy things at prices that are absurd and make people think it's ok to sell them for such prices. TL;DR: No, it's not dying. |
| jobocan:
I frankly don't think so. Maybe something will happen so that prices might start going back down in price to something more reasonable... But this is a fad that won't end for a while, especially with all the youtube channels and websites dedicated to retro collecting like the Game Chasers and such. |
| htimreimer:
its not dying but it is slowing down and i can see what soera said happening which is not a bad thing, it will still take 2 to 8 years before the market stable again but it will happen |
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