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The Business of Videogame Reprints

Posted by Zonk on from the dredging-up-the-past-for-profit dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Recently certain 'rare' videogames like Rez, Disgaea: Hour of Darkness and Gitaroo-Man have circulated in the market starting at internet retailer Game Quest Direct. How did a seemingly unknown retailer end up getting these games? By acting as a financing publisher. Is this a possible future for other online retailers?"

4 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. Also on PTB by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    http://www.pressthebuttons.com/2006/01/when_rare_i snt_.html

  2. Reprints vs. originals by badasscat · · Score: 1, Informative

    From TFA:

    Reprints could not be distinguished from the originals, which brought the value down of their collection.

    BS. Reprints can always be distinguished from originals. It may not be easy, but there are always differences - different paper stocks for the manuals, different type, a different dot printing pattern on the picture on the disc, or whatever.

    If you're a "collector", you have nothing to worry about from these reprints. It's pretty stupid to be "collecting" for the PS2 at this point anyway - in the grand scheme of things Rez is not all that rare, and people who do truly collect games based on rarity are not going to give it all that much notice in the future regardless of the reprint. It takes time for the real rarities to bubble up, because by nature they didn't make much of a ripple on first release... but what usually happens is somebody will find something at a garage sale or whatever, say "I've never seen THAT before..." and show it to their friends, and a reputation grows. There are games for the PS2 that have sold fewer than a thousand units - Rez is not one of them.

    But even if it was, nobody who's been collecting anything for very long would say a reprint affects value in the least. That's no different than saying a JC Penney copy of a Tiffany lamp affects the value of the original, or that a reprint of Spiderman #1 affects the value of the first run... it doesn't. And sure, to a layperson they may look the same, but the real collectors can spot the difference instantaneously.

    I say, good for them if they want to reprint games like Rez - and I say that as an owner of the first pressing. I may even buy a reprint just to have both (I do this with comics too). More people should be able to play this great game - the appeal of Rez is not so much that it's rare, but that it's just an amazing experience.

    1. Re:Reprints vs. originals by badasscat · · Score: 2, Informative

      Just because it is "rare" doesn't mean it is worth finding, ESPECIALLY if you are a gamer. I guess that's my point. I'd rather track down a copy of PDS to play it, not own it.

      In that case, PDS is, like all Saturn games, extremely easy to obtain, and for nothing. What are you worried about by buying an original copy, Sega getting their cut of the profits? They're not getting anything from a used sale on Ebay at this point. If all you want to do is *play* the game, just find some ISO's somewhere... right? There's no moral reason not to (unless Sega does issue a re-release for this decade-old Saturn game).

      Presumably you go out and try to find an original copy used for some materialistic reason. You want to own an original PDS. You don't just want to play it, or you'd have just downloaded it from somewhere and called it done.

      The point being, almost everybody is a collector to some extent. The only thing that differs is degree.

      Anyway, what you are talking about and what real hardcore collectors of "rare" games do are two different things. That's why I said "collecting" for the PS2 is pretty pointless right now - if you are collecting for the sake of rarity, then you don't even know what you want at this point. If you are collecting because you want to play the game, then you're not really collecting, and you shouldn't care at all about these reprints "lowering the value" of your original run. And if you do care, then you shouldn't have bought the game based on its value to begin with... because it's not that rare! See what I'm saying? You can't win if you buy a game like Rez based on how rare and valuable it supposedly is while the system is still current.

      I'm agreeing with you in one sense, but my original point was disputing the article's assertion that these reprints "lowered the value" of the original print run. There is no inherent value to lower, and if there was, a reprint wouldn't lower it. If the value of a game drops because of a reprint, then there wasn't any real value there to begin with and the prices being paid previously were simply inflated. Collectors don't buy reprints, and the only thing that can lower the price of an original print is the collector market drying up. Obviously, if people stop buying originals in favor of reprints, then there was no collector market to begin with.

      People who collect games for the sake of value or rarity (and there's nothing about doing this that's any more wrong than collecting rare hat pins or rare refrigerator magnets or rare paintings or whatever else you're into - it's a hobby in itself) do so decades after the fact. We're still basically in the Atari 2600 era of collecting right now, and just starting to scratch the surface of the Famicom/NES and the 16 bit systems. That's about how long it takes for the collector community to really get organized and start doing things like creating rarity lists and keeping each other updated as far as how often various games come up. If you're collecting stuff for current systems thinking that value's gonna hold, you're in for a world of hurt in a few years no matter what happens.

      My list is not up to date (it's current as of December 2003) but here are some *really* rare PS2 games, along with their cumulative sales numbers to date (don't ask me how or where I got this, but these are NPD numbers - not just weekly, but all time up to that point):

      I-NINJA 4,850
      XGRA:EXTREME G RACING 4,771
      SPACE CHANNEL 5 SE 4,720
      BATTLESTAR GALACTICA 4,691
      LOONEY TUNES:BACK IN 4,638
      BOMBASTIC 4,323
      ROGUE OPS 3,627
      VIRTUAL-ON MARZ 3,280
      MONSTER 4X4: MASTERS 3,145
      FUGITIVE HUNTER: WAR 3,135
      SMASH CARS 3,006
      METAL ARMS: GLITCH 2,899
      GLADIATOR: SWORD 2,632
      GOBLIN COMMANDER 2,452
      WHIPLASH 2,427
      KYA: DARK LINEAGE 1,765
      BUTT UGLY MARTNS:ZOOM 1,267
      MUPPETS PARTY CRUISE 867

      A couple of those games (like Space Channel 5 an

  3. Re:Reason #327 to hate Gamestop by ClamIAm · · Score: 2, Informative
    What does unsealing the package acomplish?

    People who are in the market for "rare" things are more often a bit smarter than the average sheep. If they see a used copy of Rez, they won't think anything of it. If they see a new copy of Rez at their local Gamestop, they might think "hey there's a source of these somewhere". They would then discover this site. And Gamestop would lose a sale. This is basically Gamestop trying to maximize its profits.