I'm picking up about one game a month on average, and it's typically a new release of some kind. Video game collecting has all but lost its appeal to me, and it's been that way for at least a few years now. I've owned nearly every game I ever wanted to and the idea of paying a ton of money for the ones I still would like to have sounds very unappealing. If game prices were to crash hard tomorrow and you could go to a thrift store or a flea market and pay Contra for $5 again, or Earthbound for $15, I don't even know if that would get me excited about collecting again.
My journey as a collector was one of the most fun, exciting, and rewarding periods of my life, and like all good things I wish it could have lasted forever. I've put a lot of thought into why I'm no longer into collecting, and while I could list half a dozen reasons or more why I stopped caring about it, I think it can be summed up by saying people and their interests and priorities naturally change over time. It happens to everyone, and aside from game collecting it has happened to me easily 10 times in my life so far. While video game collecting was certainly the most involved I ever got in one of my interests, at the end of the day it was still just a hobby. I tired for years to find new avenues to stay excited about game collecting, but every time I did this I was faced with greater and greater diminished returns on my overall enjoyment of the hobby.
Regrettably, I have yet to find a hobby to replace game collecting in terms of how passionate I was for it. I have focused on other interests, but nothing yet has kept me up until 3am researching interesting retro games I'd never hear of, getting up at the crack of dawn to beat an army of other resellers and collectors to the flea market, or spending all my disposable income (and then some) on games I wanted. I miss that feeling and I hope I discover something else that can ignite passion in me the way collecting used to. I still love playing video games, probably more than ever, but I just wish I was as into it as I was when i was paying all these games that I'm not actually clearing from my backlog.
You might wanna look into vinyl or even CD collecting, if you're a fan of music. It's something you can take at a more casual pace than game collecting, because it doesn't feel like there's millions of people competing and scalping a finite thing, like with physical games. It does go on, but to a much lesser extent.
I'm not gonna say that I'm not interested in games or collecting anymore, because I am. There's just many factors now which work against actually doing it, it became stressful for me at a certain point. I felt like I was trying to rush to complete goals before they became even more cost-prohibitive, and then my goals would get reworked and become even broader, and that would add to the stress. I have a clear path to competition as far as retro. It's just hard to jump back into it now.
I feel like a lot of the regulars here are very down on not just collecting, but also modern games. That's one area where I disagree totally with the sentiment. I'm still pretty motivated, and excited for collecting modern releases. I absolutely don't care about Limited Run, or any such similar company. I think they're all borderline fraudulent. I'm just talking about like standard publisher / retail level games. For me, there's been plenty of games in the past several months to come out, and I still enjoy the pursuit in staying on top of those releases. I've picked up Alone in the Dark reboot, Rise of the Ronin, South Park Snow Day, AC Mirage got discounted down to $30 recently. I've picked up Princess Peach Showtime, and there's plenty of others I've had to pass up on, that I want to go back and pick up. I've got Stellar Blade pre-ordered. I wanna pick up Dragon's Dogma II, Pacific Drive looks really cool... and so on.
To me, modern collecting is almost as fun as it's ever been. I know there are concerns about the long-term sustainability of modern game discs, but there's resources like "DoesItPlay?" that are quite useful. A surprising amount of releases are functional without updates. If you're into collecting DLC, there's external HDDs and all of that jazz with which to store all of your update revisions and data on. I'm personally not worried about any of that, and I feel like it's all kind of beside the point of collecting, anyway. Ultimately, we all recognize the best and easiest route to playing any legacy platform or game is just flash media and emulation, and yet so many of us choose to keep buying old cartridges and discs that we don't necessarily need, why not buy modern discs that we won't necessarily need down the road, as well? It's all for the love of the collection, which is something that hasn't yet become totally lost on me. I'm still having fun with buying new games.
