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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?
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.
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