Hey folks!
If I don't appear familiar, it's because I've been more pre-occupied with my other collecting hobby for a while, and am returning to game collecting as a primary focus. One ebbs, the other flows, as it were.
I had a discussion with a fellow collector chum in the UK about how sustainable this market is. We get along because of a shared fascination with gaming, classic gaming, gaming hardware, and our own personal quirks. We aren't doing this to build some kind of asinine future "nest egg" or to get rich. But we're getting increasingly jaded by the gross inflation of prices on the secondary market. Neither of us believe this is sustainable, and will eventually lead to a retro gaming "recession" if not a full-blown "crash."
At some point the horrible reseller gouging and eBay effect (wherein regular people look up Buy It Nows and think they can charge equally offensive prices, you see this at garage sales and second-hand stores) will simply kill the fun and enjoyment of this hobby. It has become apparent that there are people out there, like some people from Nintendo Age, that seem to want to control market prices with artificial shortages and price gouging. With
Tim Atwood threatening to offload his collection to deliberately destabilize the gougers.
This other mega-collector, noted at Kotaku, is preparing to offload a massive collection at the end of May.
Personally, I don't do this looking for a big pay-out in the future. I don't even seek the most valuable titles. As far as I'm concerned, this is the worst reason to collect
anything. It destroys the fun, and it is horribly unpredictable, for instance, remembering my mother collecting Beanie Babies and the bottom falling out of that in the worst way.
Prices have shot up to an insulting degree in recent years. Around 5 years ago, I got my Jaguar and 4 boxed games for around $80 or so. One of those was the original Rayman, which then, was around $30, so I was pretty happy with the deal. Now, eBay sales have gouged this regularly up to around $200--
just for the Rayman game.
How much are we, as collectors, willing to tolerate? When major stockholders start offloading like the two links I noted, stock markets tend to plummet, and it signals an end. Where I live, more stores selling classic games have closed than are now open. Are we at a tipping point in this?
I'm curious if there is a general consensus, or a growing feeling out there that resellers and gougers and some ethically reprehensible collectors have caused serious harm to this hobby. While a market crash would undoubtedly drive prices back down again (which would be great), it also risks making some titles that much harder to find.