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Will Your Video Game Collection Appreciate Over Time?
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.
You can download emulators and ROM's for little to no money. The only time a game is going to be worth anything more then scrap value is if the cart is physically rare like baseball cards. There will only ever be a handful that will meet that kind of rarity.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
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. 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.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Take a 360. You put in the disc which may contain horrible game-breaking bugs and the first thing it does is connect to Xbox Live and get the newest patch for that game. Now, twenty years out.. What will perform the Xbox Live function so that you aren't left with a collection of buggy games?