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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.
No because in a few years the hardware will be horribly outdated.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.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
iOS is getting a lot of rereleases. Knights of the old republic just came out too.
With all the consoles supporting downloadable games its cheaper to buy a few older games like this than an old collection. As the retro fad keeps going watch for more old crap to be released again
Just like music. In that biz it's called catalog sales
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?
n/t
I bought everything used. I bought mostly super-great games. I've made repairs. Stuff could appreciate over time. The real question is, will you keep your video game collection long enough for it to appreciate? The answer is almost always no.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Honestly, $25,000 for a complete collection of SNES games isn't that much considering how many SNES games were made. There were aprox 784 Super Nintendo games, which, if you do the math, is only $31 per game. This is considerably less than what many of those games retailed for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_Nintendo_Entertainment_System_games
It's going to take some time, and will certainly depend on the tastes of the collector. This being said, there is a growing second hand market, which I don't think will really overtake any modern game industry, but will certainly persist for a long time. Classics will remain classics, and there will be a few rare picks, but more than anything, I think the prices are pretty much going to stay level for a long time, at least until they become antiques because these things are still pretty easy to get your hands on and until they become super rare, nobody is really going to take an interest, and even by that time the games will be so dated that only the truly esoteric collectors will care so even so, with such a small after market, the prices will still remain low.
So no, most vintage or old video games aren't going to become more valuable over time and they certainly won't remain super-rare for a long while. They'll just remain just a little farther than arms reach at most, but not much farther than that, just gathering dust on the shelf because you have more important things to do.
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.
There are a few factors which affect collecting. The big one is that you have to be collecting the right thing at the right time. Things like toys and comic books seem to gain value when their target audience reached maturity and had enough disposable income to purchase nostalgia items. Once those people have the items in their hands, grow out of their collecting/nostalgia phase, or simply die off, those items tend to lose their value.
The other factor is supply and demand. We are talking about mass produced products. In many cases, the glut of unwanted items outweighs the demand for them so prices will remain low until most of the supply is destroyed. Hoarding doesn't really help here because every time a copy fetches a high price, a large enough number of hoarders will release their wares on the market and that will drive prices back down. So you'll probably find yourself holding onto the stuff for decades, and having to maintain it during those decades, just to fetch those high prices (unless you're lucky, of course).
As far as I understand it, the ones that make the real money are hideously rare, like the Nintendo World Championship gold cartridge for the NES.
A full collection makes money because it contains a lot of rare games in among the big sellers. Old console games are inherently collectable as well which helps.
The way to make money out of it would be to identify which games may become collectors items and start buying them up before a real collectors scene for the console starts to appear. The risky bit is they might not rise in value at all - it all depends on how strong the collector market is 10 years in the future.
I don't buy games because they might be worth more someday; I buy games to play, to have a good time, and even to appreciate them as a kind of art. I buy games that matter to me.
Circumcision is child abuse.
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?
When I was a poor college student, I sold my copy of "Star Fox Weekend Competition Edition" for beaucoup bucks... like close to $500. I also sold my copy of EarthBound for a considerable amount of money (I want to say like $200).
I recently wanted to purchase Metroid Prime Trilogy for the Wii, but found out I can't, because it's like $300 for a used copy. I can't do a pirated copy using an ISO image on the Wii because the game is apparently a dual layer disc and the Wii freaks out over that.
So, yes, some games will be (and are) worth money.
In most cases software doesn't become more valuable. Technology in hardware and software changes. Features become superceeded by new or improved ones. I have a copy of VisiCalc for the Apple IIe and I'm pretty sure that no one is looking for VisiCalc as much as a working floppy drive let alone an Apple IIe.
There maybe occations where a game generates some nostaliga but that isn't "appreciation" in the economic sense. Maybe if such a game only had a few copies left in the world that could increase in value but with the advent of emulation of entire platforms in current hardware which means an copying is limitless this doesn't seem feasible either. The only thing that would appreciate would be the physical parts: the plastic, paper and metal that went into the crafting of that item but the game itself can go on and on and on.
In the end it would seem like "a video game collection" is only meaningful if it is complete or near complete because any specific piece of software isn't particularlly valuable no matter how many cat helmets or figurines they throw in.
I had a clearout in April. 50 C64 games, a dozen Atari ST games, around 100 PC games, some xbox and wii games, various bits of hardware including the c64, the ST, the xbox and the wii.
Sold the lot for £140 to a local shop.
The shop will have made a decent profit. Great - I want small local shops to stay in business. If I'd sold them individually on ebay I'd have made nearer £250, but it would've cost me 1-2 days effort.
More to the point.. fuck the money. Almost everything I sold is impossible to replace these days. I'd far rather it go to someone that wants it than to landfill.
Shit, I'm giving away something else from that clearout: An 80s Scalextric collection, including limited edition vehicles worth £380 in mint condition. Mine were toys; they've been played with. They're not mint. They're going to someone whose kids will play with them some more.
If you want something that'll appreciate in value, buy lego kits and never open them. Buy limited edition swiss watches. Just don't bank on selling off your Steam account for more than a fraction of how much it cost to populate it.
The buried copies of ET were pulverized before being buried in the landfill. You won't find any intact cartridges in there.
Things such as stamps, coins, and baseball cards are collected mainly because people want to own them.
Video games have functionality, and a lot of the market for video games is to people who want them mainly to play. While there are people who want the games as collectible items, similar to stamps or coins, this just isn't true of everyone who wants to get an old video game. Emulators, either legal or otherwise, will handle the needs of most people who want to play old games until you get to the era that is impossible to emulate well (PS2/Gamecube/Dreamcast/Xbox emulation is marginal and we're probably never going to be able to emulate anything past that, not counting handhelds.
The market for specifically original copies of old, rare games just isn't all that big, and the market for people who want to play old games is *not* the market for people who want to buy original copies of old games.
If we are talking older generations of stuff, the problem is usually only a few titles are really worth alot and most of worth nothing. So if you bought everything new at the time of release, you'd have a few titles worth big money, and most of the stuff loses it's value. Now if you were smart enough to figure out which games you don't need to buy (sports games, etc) and just bought the games that should go up in price, then waited to pick up the other stuff at bottom prices, maybe.
But collectors are a special breed. Like recently, I had some C64 software boxes & manuals (no disks) that a person wanted for his collection, and paid me decent for them. You have a collection, that has it's boxes & manuals also, you will get probably a decent sum for it.
Xbox 360, PS3 collections be worth anything? No idea. The Xbox One will NOT be a collectors item, and won't have collections selling in 20 years for lots of money. Why? Because no one will be able to play it's games.
Be seeing you...
... my collection of vintage wines will appreciate over time.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
This is what I do for a living, my company is the largest retailer and distributor of classic video games in North America (and most likely the world). Over the years we've built up a database with hundreds of millions of price points and sales transactions for tens of thousands of games. The overall trends haven't changed much, and with most games it's fairly easy to tell if the value is going to increase or decrease.
First, if you are talking about a new game - if you open it then it is highly unlikely the game will become worth more than you paid for it any time soon. If you don't open it and it is a limited edition or collector's edition, and actually contains figures, books, artwork, etc, it may increase in value. If it ends up being a popular game it can skyrocket in value, especially if no one expected it to be a huge success when it first came out. We bought several copies of the original Mass Effect Limited Edition in 2007, never opened them, kept the receipts, paid 69.95 for each and sold them all for over 1k each last year. During its peak unopened copies of the original World of Warcraft were going for several thousand dollars. But those are the exceptions. RPGs tend to do far better than other genres, most other games will lose value even if unopened.
Now if you are talking about older games, its a completely different story. For the last 8 years prices for classic video games have been going up at a steady, rapid rate. There are a few main factors. 1) - People get older, get better jobs, have money, and want to either replay the games they loved as a kid, get the games they couldn't afford when they were young, or show the games to their own children. 2) - International buyers are buying a HUGE number of classic video games - many of them were never released in their country and they only way they can legal play the game is to import it from the US. 3) - These games aren't made anymore. The supply is only decreasing. A decreasing supply combined with a rapidly increasing demand means price increases.
As long as people continue to enjoy collecting games, and as long as they continue to enjoy playing classic games on the original systems, prices are likely to increase, although more slowly than in the past. Virtual Console, PSN, and other re-releases usually result in a small increase in demand for the original games (unless they were already way too expensive). Roms have been around for far longer than we've been doing this and the demand for the originals, and the prices, are still increasing. But keep in mind that unless you are talking about unopened games, then the prices are increasing relative to their value a few years ago. A good, new NES game for bought for $60 in 1988 may only be worth $20 today. But in 2010 you could have bought it for $6. In 2008, $3.
If you have a bunch of old video games and need some cash, I'd sell them. Don't count on them to skyrocket in value. But if you don't need the cash and if you still enjoy playing them, it's fine to hold on. They should continue to increase in value. If they are new games - sell them as quick as you can! But not to GameStop. Sell them on Ebay or Craigslist. Places like GameStop will rip you off and give you half what you could have gotten selling it yourself.
One full of old Atari games, or a truckload of LISAs? A LISA is worth about $10,000.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
yea and your going to get that when something was written on paper in machine language for something that no one understands anymore
I'd say the consoles and games to keep an eye on for the longer term are, curiously, the ones from the current hardware generation. I'm not including the Wii here, which is a) not really current generation any more and b) easily to emulate using the excellent Dolphin.
The PS3 and 360, however... while it might take a long time, certain models of the hardware and certain games may have value in the longer run. The next generation is going to be a very stark break in terms of back-compatibility. Sony are talking about some kind of cloud-based software emulation for PS3 games on the PS4, but precedent would suggest first that this will involve paying again for games that you already bought once and second that it will probably only be available for a limited range of games. Microsoft have made it clear that they don't give a damn about back-compatibility.
And frankly, neither platform seems to be within years of having an emulator capable of running commercial titles. With both machines having slightly awkward architectures (the PS3 in particular), I wouldn't be surprised if it were many years until we saw such a thing - if indeed we ever do.
On that basis, I have a bit of a niggling worry that current-gen console games could become a bit of a "lost generation" in terms of preservation for the future, as existing hardware either fails or just gets thrown in the trash as the next gen hits. Sony's cloud plans probably mean that major commercially-successful PS3 titles will remain available for the immediate future. And towards the end of this cycle, the PC market became important enough that almost everything was ported to that. But other than that? Might be worth holding onto some of those more niche games (at least the high quality ones) for both consoles; the likes of Valkyria Chronicles, Demon's Souls, the Forza series and so on.
Plus if emulation never does happen, there'll still be a need for original hardware to run those games. I used to think that the first-gen PS3s, with their full hardware PS2/PS2 back-compatibility) would be the ones to hang onto, but the fact that almost all PS2 titles can now be run emulated on a PC might detract from that. On the other hand, if you have a non-firmware-updated early PS3 that can still be used for a Linux install, that might have some novelty value down the line.
And then there's the Wii-U, which really does seem to be flatlining, with monthly sales now down into the tens of thousands. If the console does go on to be an epic flop (which we'll probably know for certain after Christmas 2013), then on the current trend it looks set to have substantial rarity value going forward if you keep it in good condition, with the potential for a lower number of units shipped than the Dreamcast.
At the best of times, buying things because it/the collection will be worth a fortune down the track is dumb. The cases where something does get valuable decades down the line involve a combination of scarcity and desirability. And it's nigh on impossible to predict what will be that combination. In general, if anyone cares enough to buy it in the first place when it's new, they do so in sufficient quantity that it never gets that scarce. If not many get sold to begin with, it's usually because not many people want it, so it's unlikely that enough people will want it enough years down the line to get into bidding wars over it. So in short, buy a thing because you want the thing for its own sake, not because you want money down the line. Buy shares in a company if you want that.
With the source code whatever game it is can be redeployed on contemporary hardware.
you don't need that even.
technically what you need is to own the legal right for it.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Cartridge based games don't have moving parts and will be playable forever and their from the beginning if gaming. They'll probably hold some value but no one will care about your halo collection.
This will be even more irrelevant as more software eventually become single activation / digital download only.
when something was written on paper
OCR. If anything, defeating CAPTCHA is driving OCR research.
in machine language
That didn't stop Doppelganger from disassembling and commenting Suepr Mario Bros.
for something that no one understands anymore
CPUs and graphics chips are becoming documented, both through black box testing (the old method) and more completely through decap and delayer (the Visual 6502 method). Quietust and others have been working toward a transistor-level simulation of the Nintendo Entertainment System as a reference implementation against which efficient emulators and FPGA clones can be tested.
Cartridge based games don't have moving parts
How exactly? A cartridge slot's pins bend every time a cartridge is inserted. This goes double for the front-loading NES with its funky ZIF connector.
I'm collecting games so that I can re-play them in the future, or play them at all since I have quite a few that are unopened or at least unplayed. And I won't have to rely on any server authentication to do so! I'll also have the original unchanged and uncensored versions. Some games that have been re-released have included modifications and changes that are a result of expired agreements or what the developers deem "fixes" and other such things. Even NES and Genesis games.
Even if the next generation of game consoles holds me hostage, I'll still be able to go back to my game collection and play those however and whenever I want.
Twinstiq, game news
I've been into classic game collecting since the mid 90's (back when the real Atari was actually still around). Up until last year I had a massive gaming collection that spanned multiple systems from the Atari 2600 to Neo Geo (many were boxed as well). For the longest time, anything classic would sell. Loose 2600 games, common 5200 games, Vic-20 cartridges, Colecovision stuff, anything as long as it was pre-1985ish. People were reliving their childhood, only this time they had access to a much bigger allowance and they wanted everything they were denied back when they were kids. Then after awhile I started noticing that no one wanted the loose stuff anymore, people were now paying big bucks for manuals and boxes (originally people wouldn't give you much if anything extra for the box). The reason behind this was that all the big time collectors had the loose games, now they needed something new to collect so they went for the extras (boxes, manuals, catalogs, etc.). Loose games would sit there on gaming convention tables gathering dust other than a handful of very rare titles. Now we're getting to the point where the big time collectors have all the common and uncommon stuff they need, boxed and otherwise, so it's only the rare and extremely rare stuff that's selling. Those will always be worth money because there aren't enough of them for every one to have one. So everyone that was hording common and loose classic gaming stuff like it was gold are discovering that their Pac-Man cart is worth exactly 10 cents and not the $10 they were lead to believe. Unfortunately it would appear that many brick and mortar gaming shops still haven't gotten this memo.
Another thing to consider is the age of the collector. Back when I got into the hobby (mid 90's) Pre-Nintendo stuff was all the rage because that's what the current collectors grew up with. We were all 20 to 30 somethings who grew up with a 2600 joystick firmly affixed to our hand and that's what we wanted to collect for. However about 7 or 8 years ago I started to notice that the classic stuff I grew up with wasn't selling as much as it used to, and it was NES stuff that was starting to go for big money. I found this odd because up until that I point I was grabbing NES games out of bins at flea markets for $2 each, and suddenly even the common games were going for six or eight bucks, while boxed games were going for $80-$100 or more depending on the title. Then it occurred to me that the kids who grew up with the NES were now old enough and wealthy enough to start buying all the games that they missed out on as a kid. So the valuable and collectible games had shifted from Atari era stuff to NES era stuff. That doesn't mean that the Atari stuff was worthless now, but only the rarer stuff kept its value, the rest started to slip. Now we're starting to see SNES and Genesis stuff rise value (the NES stuff hasn't started to fall off yet, but its coming) and eventually we'll see the Saturn and PSX stuff skyrocket as well (although the rarer stuff already has).
So my point is, yes classic gaming can be a good investment, but only for a short time. However unless you're constantly selling off and buying at the right time (before the next trend hits) you're eventually going to lose money or at best break even. The days of mega cheap games that are going to rise in value are over, because people are already looking for what's going to become collectible in the future even with the current stuff (sort of like comic books). That's why we always say not to get into classic game collecting for the money, because there really isn't any. Get into classic gaming because you love the games.
I got lucky because I bought the bulk of my collection when people weren't thinking of what it would be worth in the future, we were thinking of the here and now. When I decided to sell off my collection due to an upcoming move to a smaller house, I actually made a good deal of money on it. However that's because I bought it back before the collecting boom
The problem with emulating the original Xbox is that there really isn't much to emulate.
It's basically a non-ACPI non-BIOS based PC with a well-known Nvidia GPU and chipset. It has all the standard idiosyncracies of a standard PC chipset like APIC registers, the PIT, etc. There's a custom PIC that handles power and the front LED light, that's been reversed engineered.
The games are compiled against Microsoft's XDK. If you look into the Cxbx project (don't know it's current status) the plan was to create a sort of "loader" that would merely load the code from the game. link it into DirectX, and play it directly.
I think there is just not much interest in emulating this system. Sort of like how N64 emulation has stagnated.
But it certainly is possible. Hell, for the NES they've even gone so far as to reverse engineer the protection chip in the cartridge, finding out how the custom microcontroller works and everything. With no documentation and an electron microscope image of the IC. And after reading how the Xbox's firmware was dumped and reversed, and how eventually they "gained entry" into the Xbox 360 and PS3, I think with enough time and resources anything is possible. It's just that the less popular a system is, the less possibility of hackers wanting to create an emulator for it. Also we are living in an ever rabidly post-DMCA litigious society which also affects resources and what people have the time to do.
They're on a standard board like your video card.
Video card? This computer is a laptop, and the majority of laptops have onboard video.
Anyway, the slot that a desktop PC's video card sits in has a metal pin for each of the contacts. This pin inside the slot bends when the video card is inserted into the slot. People change cartridges in a video game console far more often than they change video cards in a PC.
Game collections like my old Sun2/3 workstations will appreciate over time. But they will go from almost no value to a little value. A quote that comes to mind is about investing in artwork:
"You had better really like it because you may wind up owning it for a very long time"
I'm just curious if anyone out there is maintaining any type of "price guide" or can speak first-hand to the value (or lack thereof) of the electronic hand-held video games that were popular in the early 80's?
For example, I found my original Tandy Radio/Shack "Cosmic Fire Away" game in a box not long ago, and after cleaning it up, realized it still plays as good as when it was new with a fresh set of batteries in it. I knew it was the original version they released. (I remember Radio Shack coming out with a newer model with a yellow plastic case instead of the blue one I have here, because my younger brother got it one Christmas.) What I didn't know until I happened upon it on Wikipedia is that the one I've got was made in 1981 and was only sold for a year.
I know my brother and I also owned a couple games from "Bambino" including "Safari" - a game in an olive green, round plastic case where you had to move a cage around and try to capture animals as they randomly popped up on the display.
These were pretty big deals, technology-wise, at the time, because they transitioned hand-held games from using LED lights or segments to represent things (remember the old Mattel football/soccer/baseball games from the 70's?) to drawing realistic looking icons - eventually in more than one color.
Other than www.handheldmuseum.com though, I don't see a lot of references to these at all? Are they just largely forgotten by most people -- eclipsed by the console and computer game genre?
Aol 1.0 floppy disks are worth between 10-20 dollars.
Proof, if any is needed, that people are idiots.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
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Have a bunch of unopened Atari games, still worth $2 each, like the price they were originally sold for. Why? because nobody wants them just like most old games. If you buy a video game as an investment, you need to get a life.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.