Slashdot Mirror
The Business of Videogame Reprints
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?"
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.
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