Another day, another crushed copy of an 8th gen game arrives in the mail. This is alarmingly common with 8th gen, in terms of shipping copies. I showed you guys the last steam-rolled one I got. Today I got another one smashed. The fragility of PS4/XB1 games is somewhere between SEGA Saturn and Xbox 360 era. It's kinda bad. They can't take a lot of abuse, like PS2 or even 360 games could. If you stack something too heavy on one of these, it's just gonna shatter... and I'm not about the shattering. I need mint. Especially when it's brand new.
Now begin the headache of returns.
I bought 2 complete copies of Kuon from a bargain bin at a local game store for $5 each around 2013 or so. The freakin games is going for some insane amount like $700 or something. WTF...
I really think a lot of the horror games are overblown, even by the collectors. They're not super rare, and they're also not that great to play, generally. Kuon was a budget title by AgeTec, and yet it's the holy grail of horror games? I sold off a spare of Haunting Ground for a copy of Sunset Riders. In retrospect, should have held onto it and bought myself a Series X with it. Ah well, I've got some other JRPGs I'll use for that.
If older games had been even half this expensive back when I first started I'd have never got into it to begin with. I don't know how or why people do it now, or better yet how many of them afford it.
Honestly, I think it's a whole different demographic now. Collectors use to be your run of the mill gamers who had a lot of nostalgia for the classics, and would turn their nose up at a reseller pushing a $10 copy of Mario 3. Today it's a wealthy man's hobby. People for whom money is no object in collecting. It's happened to other collectible hobbies in the past, and I'd say it's started to happen to games around 3 or 4 years back, when people with crazy money started buying sealed games for exorbitant prices, which in turn began to effect CIB prices, and even loose copy prices. Throw in Covid checks and it was just fuel for the mine fire that'll be burning for years.
It's awful, which is why I collect mostly just modern stuff now.