Will Your Video Game Collection Appreciate Over Time? 127
An anonymous reader writes "Pundits tell us that the world of console video gaming is in dire straits, but recent collections of console video games have sold on eBay for tens of thousands of dollars. There are still a lot of video game disks and cartridges out there, but is it worth your effort to try to complete your collection and sell it on eBay? If you're a potential buyer for a massive collection of video games, are they likely to appreciate over time, or is this a really bad investment? Market research company Terapeak runs some numbers and suggests that it depends on your goals, the size and quality of your collection, and the console you're focused on." There's a film crew hoping to bypass the uncertain hoarding phase, though, and just mine a landfill in New Mexico for the legendary hoard of dumped Atari inventory.
Re:No, because (Score:2, Insightful)
No because in a few years the hardware will be horribly outdated.
Only a few will want to play the games.
And a lot of the games these days depend on being popular with a lot of people. What's the point of playing a massive multiplayer game with 3 people.
Most games from the 80s-90s are not multiplayer.
No, ROMs and emulators (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No, ROMs and emulators (Score:5, Insightful)
Classic videogame gadgets are valuable for a decrescent amount of collectors.
Everybody will die someday, including the ones that, now, are willing to spend some serious money on buying their childhood back.
No, because comics. (Score:4, Insightful)
Compare that with an industry that's gone on to consider sales in less than the millions of copies to be failures. Rarity simply isn't an issue, whether it's console games or comics since the early Nineties-- going back to the Superman example, there may only be a few hundred copies of the one that made the news earlier, but they overprinted the Death of Superman (polybagged at the factory, packed with a black mourner's armband) by a massive degree for the sheer number of idiots who thought they'd make a killing on speculation when it eventually became rare.
Not really. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's look at the typical life-cycle of a collectible using baseball cards.
When they first came out in the early 1900s, nobody really cared about them. Through the 70s and 80, they were mostly seen as kids stuff and abused, lost & thrown away. Supplies of cards up through this time are fairly limited. Around 1990, news hit of a baseball card selling for half a million dollars [wikipedia.org]. Things changed overnight - every kid was treating their cards like treasure. People have held on to them in pristine condition. These days, you can buy unopened, complete sets of cards from the mid-90s for less than their original retail value. They have become so un-collectible that their value hasn't even kept up with inflation.
Video game collecting has passed this point. Sure, you might still see big deals on used NES collections but anything much newer was sold in large enough numbers and preserved well enough that unless you have sealed boxes, it's just used junk. There's always going to be exceptions but, for the most part, I wouldn't plan my retirement on keeping my XBox clean.
Re:No, because (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps a car analogy...
GP is trying to say that only sports cars are popular, because they're fastest. No one will ever value a VW Bug because it's not fastest. Buses and Vans won't stay popular if your friends only want to ride in faster better vans. Newer faster cars will mean all the old hot-rods will be considered SHIT. Which is bullshit. It's like saying the Mona Lisa is crap because Digital Art has more bits per pixel. Some folks like classic cars. Some folks love classic games. The tech level of the hardware the game runs on is the artistic medium -- Watercolors are still valuable even though oil on canvas reproduces more vibrant color; Not all cars are great or worth anything to a collector, but the interesting ones are. Same with games.
An MMO dies because the server dies, not always because of lack of players. City of Heroes was making money, but that it was still successful while new games flopped caused embarrassment to the studio, so they killed it. If you collect a car but leave out the transmission and part of the engine, then it's not worth hardly anything. The client is not the whole game, it needs a server to be called the whole game, and thus be collectible. For this reason I don't play online games that don't have a private server community. Leasing a car is not the same as owning it.
Sorry, I got a bit of paint on that car analogy...
Patches are a Problem. (Score:5, Insightful)