Do you agree that there is a retro game gold rush happening? Or are speculators buying fool's gold? A bit of both? ✅Article @kotaku.com/deep-pocketed-collectors-are-fueling-a-retro-game-gold-1837073847
so... this is what is happening, whether it's wise or not. This Trump China trade war ALONG with the negative interest rates in other countries bonds along with money getting dumped into US Treasuries is making people who are "Cash and Equity Rich" look into alternative "assets" that can appreciate, well above or inline with inflation... so Gold is spiking, Jim Cramer is telling everyone to have 10% gold now, yield curve is inverting for a few minutes all the time past few years and this bot trading will likely cause a mini recession so, I do think the people buying these retro games are in it for 10 to 30 years... it is an alt to 10 to 30 year government bonds... I do think that is literally the logic going on is people are willing to divert a percentage of their net worth they'd have in 10 to 30 year bonds into these graded sealed comics, as some do or did with Wine... but like, think about it, if you are expecting a economic downturn, in 1-5 years... buying these up, then buying them in the economic downturn, and waiting for another bull market to sell them into would be the "smart" play.
The only way this kind of collecting will be worthwhile to these new collectors is if they can make a profit. A sealed video game inside a polycarbonate box seems pointless. No one paying money down the line would crack the case open, unsealed the box to play the cartridge within. Having such a graded game is about good as owning an empty box. By the way, this was very interesting to listen to and was hooked into the topic.
I feel of people who collect games, they may not be "into it" but I bet way more than 10% of video game collectors have sealed games, they are just not likely retro games... I have a sealed copy of 1806 for ps4 because it came with my used ps4 I bought, I am going to try and sell it for $1000 when I am 65, everyone start helping me out now and destroy every 1806, call our selves "The Order", then in 2039 we start selling them for $1000, bet nobody remembers the game and believes it's super rare
I mean, I own some games that are near 5K… but somehow I find it hard to believe anyone would truly pay that much for it. It’s just stupid stuff from my childhood that I happened to take with me.
"Did you know this variant of Super Mario Bros 3 is more rare and priced differently than the other one you are selling"? - The person who is artificiality creating perceived value
Or just a collector in general. Same thing about people who only played Nintendo products growing up but then collect other systems when they have no nostalgia playing them growing up.
Feel like the high end stuff that they are talking about in the article will just be passed back and forth between a few high end collectors and wont affect the regular video gamer one bit whatsoever
@@hauntedbarbiedoll It's the same in comics. People spending $100,000 on the first appearance of Spider-man don't impact the collector looking to spend $10 on a copy of Spider-man 700 in any way whatsoever. The person who wants to spend $5 on an SMB to play it and the person who wants to spend $5k on a sealed one to put on their shelf should each be able to do what they want without one affecting the other.
They've basically created their own eco-system in which they'll be trading around the same games at inflated prices until they get bored. But make no mistake, it's all 100% manufactured, and aside from yet again convincing some fool into thinking that box of games in the garage is worth thousands, this will have zero impact on actual retro game collecting.
Realistically this doesn't effect us. A game that has remained sealed this long will probably never be opened. Unless you like spending +800% on a sealed copy just to open it and devalue it
I have the sealed versions of my favorite games. It makes me feel that same nostalgia as before I opened it the first time, that brand new game I had just got. It's a great feeling but it can be very very expensive. I don't think it's such a bad thing to have a cartridge and another copy sealed in the box for the games you love most.
Slabbing a comic book in theory is an act taken to preserve the current condition of the book. Sticking a sealed box videogame into a protective case does what? Protects the box? Unless I'm wrong, it isn't going to do much to stop the electronics within the cartridge itself from decaying. If you buy a properly graded and slabbed comic, you have a pretty good idea of the condition of the entire product even if you never unseal it to flip through it yourself, and five years later you'll still have a decent idea of its condition. If you buy a graded and slabbed factory sealed NES game, then you only know the condition of the factory seal and the box. You don't know if the cart inside is functional, because it wasn't tested when it was graded, much less five years later. You don't know if the code had decayed, or the capacitors have failed, or if the battery has leaked acid throughout the case, all of which will become increasingly likely to happen over time.
same...that's why I went to emulation (Classic systems: NES/SNES/etc)/FPGA (Analogue Super NT, etc) it's about playing the games, not having tens of thousands tied up in them lol
@@diamanteloco I'm going a slightly different route of Everdrives and devices such as the DCEmu and Rhea. I'm also planning to migrate to FPGAs as and when they come out. As for my original stuff..... as you can see, I do still like to have and play games and ideally as authentically as possible but it's just too impractical to keep everything
In 1998 I sold my magic collection to a friend of mine for $500 under pressure from my dad that the market was about to crash on these cards. It included a NM Unlimited black lotus, 4 moxes, time walk and ancestral recall. I can't even bring myself to check the current going prices or I'll be sick.
When I buy a game, I buy it because I want to play the game, just like anyone else. I collect because I love the games themselves, not for an investment or anything like that. I only go for loose carts and get some of those universal cases for them to protect them. I still am shocked someone bought a sealed Super Mario Bros for $30,000 when its so common that people could have many copies of it. In my opinion, video games, regardless of their age or condition are meant to be played and enjoyed by people. I understand why people collect sealed games, but I do not agree with those reasons at all.
It's so refreshing to hear that. I am the same way, anything that is in my collection I fully intend to use. Plus I'm kind of cheap. If I wanted a Super Mario Bros in the Box, I would make the box myself and then print a manual then wrap it in tape. Plus at that point it would be something that nobody else has, and I think that's the real reason people pay that much for something so common.
Yep! I have over 700 games but everyone of them I have had an interest in playing. If I have no interest in playing a game then I won't buy it. Like I'm not personally interested in COD so I don't own any.
If the retro collecting market is starting to move towards sealed games and boxed games instead of loose carts then this is a sign that the market has moved beyond it's peak and speculators are looking for the last remaining gold mine in the hill. Especially when internet advertisements are starting to show "sealed games sells for almost 10,000" when it used to be "Your old video games could be worth thousands!!"
@@NerdyGirlComics I don't think that sealed games is a new market. I think the appeal for sealed games is limited to a smaller percentage of collectors and the high cost of sealed games will deter or price a lot of people out of the market. The value of sealed games probably won't encourage excessive buying since most gamer's want to play what they own. This is where the Collectors market should be in the first place since those items are the rarest and many loose carts are over valued considering that there are millions of copies in existence. Collectors can have the market for sealed games. I would rather see the loose cart prices come back down to reality after the market correction realigns prices back down to where they belong. The price spikes for every and any loose cart was mostly a nostalgia wave and partially based on a short lived fad. For me the documentary Nintendo Quest fueled my collecting drive to some extent but for many people like me that itch has petered out and patience for lower prices is now a bigger priority.
I found a sealed copy of some n64 game (cant remember exactly what is was cuz I hate N64) paid 3 bucks at good will sold it for 300, but other than forget that noise.
@@beatsinmycrates It's always cool to hold onto games for years, and see them shoot up in price (I have a copy of SOTN that I paid $40 for and now goes for double that). But people who buy graded copies and treat them like buying an investment like a stock is just dumb IMO.
@@jonyoungmusic Hmmm. I think you need to diversify your portfolio and put 10% of your retirement into 3DO games, another 10% in Silverhawk figures, and another 15% into Pogs.
I will say that I am one of the few collectors looking to build a complete Nintendo Switch collection. But I have an emotional attachment to the Switch. My ex left me around the time that the Switch came out. I was grieving, lonely, and bored, since she'd manipulated me into selling my entertainment library. I got a Switch in July of 2017, and it became a constant companion during the worst time of my life. So I have a desire to own everything that is released for the Switch because the system itself means so much to me. I don't think that level of attachment just happens for most people.
@@iDGF999 I think his comment was aimed at the part where pat said not many people try to collect complete sets for systems other than the NES. I for one am going for complete original xbox and wii u....almost there in both cases. I will never go for a complete NES collection, I mostly just want the games I had or played as a kid and maybe a few I missed.
I can only agree with you Pat! I'm 400 games deep in my "complete NES collection." I'm just happy to find a cart that might work. My prize is Bonk's Adventure, and I've had that since I purchased it in the 90s. You can't play a sealed game - its got no value to me in that state. My nostalgia needs to access the game and enjoy it first and foremost! As well with comic books - If I cannot read it, I've got no reason to purchase personally. Items are only worth what someone is willing to pay for it... And that's not for me. Great job always sir!
Because it is pristine. It's all an investment for her for the future... the problem is that DKC is like of the most common SNES games out there. It's fucking hilarious that she thinks she'll get anything 10 or 20 years from now.
This sounds like a great time to get your sealed games graded by Wata and sell them for massive profits to the new deep pockets. There is literally a warehouse full of sealed games, like NES ect (not all games obviously but the amount of sealed games in the wild is completely unknown).
They're not gone, they're just people like me who dont have kids. I have about $200 budget per week to buy video games. But I dont collect sealed games. I actually dont even own one.
My reaction to this is mostly bemused bewilderment and a litfle detached curiosity. As someone who collected enthusiastically as a child back in the early/mid-00s before it exploded into the mainstream, back when Atari was at the zenith of value and interest, kept an eye on the collecting scene off and on and got back into it in 2014ish, this all just feels like a totally different hobby these people are into. Nothing wrong with that I guess, but this camp is doing something almost unrecognizable--it's not video game collecting as it has always been, it's comic/coin/toy collecting applied to video games. Even the concept of "printings", and box variants is totally foreign and new to me. It's not that they're finally noticing things we missed, it's just a different paradigm that conceptualizes games in very physical terms. The thing is, though, and this is where I part ways with many retro gamers, the 'original'/old-school collecting scene wasn't purely about playing the games either. This whole "shelf collectors vs players" thing I see increasingly often (backlash?) feels contrived and like a false dichotomy to me. Video game collecting proper as I've always thought of and approached it lies in between these extremes. When I started collecting, it was like this: condition mattered, yeah, and you'd always seek the best copies and to upgrade, but rarity in the sense Pat talks about superceded everything when it came to value and clout. But what the game actually *was* mattered too. A Color a Dinosaur in the worst condition would've been a far more exciting find than a sealed or CIB Super Mario Bros., which a lot of people wouldn't have even given a second glance to. A rarer but actually good game would've been even more exciting and valuable. A game you didn't have or had never played was higher priority than one you had often regardless of rarity/value (buying and hoarding several copies wasn't much of a thing IIRC, multiples were valued as trading fodder). We'd aim to get as complete as possible, sure, but it wasn't the end-all-be-all. If you had any and all weird accessories that went with a game (SNES mouse, ROB, Super Scope, etc...), that was good, if you had a box, great, with manual too, even better. CIB was always sought-after but not a necessity--I got into CIB w/all inserts (ads, posters, etc.) and thought *that* was a little much/silly (but fun!). It was very nifty if you found a SEEEEEEEALED copy of a game (hell, I have a sealed Super Munchers just because I loved that game as a little girl and found it at a thrift store)--no, edgemeisters, nobody with sense tore them open and played them and they *were* highly regarded--but they were curiosities that never formed anything close to the core standard, and very few people went way out of their way to get sealed, that wasn't done. My mentality around sealed was always that they were the best condition that would serve as a kind of backup--should be kept sealed as that would ensure the condition of the contents inside wouldn't deteriorate too much so it ensured there'd be CIB copies in the future. Sealed were "extra", if you will. Needless to say, grading was a totally alien concept, nobody gave a whit about "printings", variants in sticker seals or whatever, and there was no dumbass conflict between "shelf collectors" and "players" and it wasn't common to disdain CIB and sealed if you weren't into them. Hell of a lot more overlap between collectors and those passionate about playing retro games--most cared about both aspects to a major extent and they weren't seen as somehow opposed. Physicality of media mattered but in different ways as described above, and rhe whole shebang was its own unique scene--not contemporary gaming mentality (physical media doesn't matter, it's all about playing, the hell with condition...) but not toy/comic/card/coin collecting-like either. It was all about history and niches and preservation at the crux. Anyway, long comment but there's my "alternative perspective" and something I've felt needed to be said for a long time. I really miss that, how retro game collecting used to be, and to me that's what it always will be. Can't help but feel like I speak for the silent majority of collectors who started long before the "bubble". I even go a bit further than Pat I think in that I reject some of the well-established developments of this decade (like that shelf collector/resellers vs players thing, and set/system completionism was always an extreme, weird niche too, not a common approach IME), and this grading, sealed, popular/recognizable (i.e., common) in better state taking precedence over rarity, games-as-totally-physical-objects stuff just doesn't feel like retro game collecting or hold any interest for me, even if I could ever afford it. If that's your bag then more power to you I guess, but it's not for me, not what captured and held my interest about retro games in the first place, and I really think it's fundamentally different enough to constitute an entirely different endeavor. FWTW. ◽▫👩♀
MissOptical I have a similar perspective. I started collecting in the late 90s/early 2000s to get games that I had always wanted to play and own that were cheap but often hard to find on the second hand market. But then I learned about emulation and then I could no longer justify buying physical copies of NES and SNES games. Because back then it was purely about buying games to play. I got back into collecting properly in 2015 when I was able to readjust my collecting aesthetic for the new era once I could understand what makes retro games valuable even though it's possible to play them for free using emulation. Even if I had the money to drop tens of thousands on graded copies of sealed games I probably wouldn't as graded games don't make my pp hard. I can appreciate that a sealed game is as close to new condition and if I can get one at a good price I'll get it but I won't go all out for a sealed copy. I'd be more than happy for high end sealed collectors to remain in a completely different league where their tastes don't affect the price of unsealed games
For me ( I started collecting in the 90s ) it was always CIB or nothing. I didn t care about sealed, since I was going to open and play the games anyway. But a game being CIB was mandatory. And of course it did have to be free of sunfading or scratches/torn boxes. I never understood why people bought "dirty" loose games
Honestly I think these sealed collectors are gonna end up pissing people off who are actual gamers/ collectors so that people won’t buy from them and they will be stuck with a bunch of sealed games that won’t sell and are worth the same as none grades ones 10-20 years down the road
The reason that comic collecting started becoming a thing was that comic readers wanted to read earlier issues that came out before they started buying comics. Superman has been around since 1938. If you didn't start buying Superman comics until 1968, maybe because you were born in 1960, then there was 30 years worth of Superman comics that you hadn't read and you wanted to. Remember that there wasn't much for reprints at the time so if you wanted to know what had happened earlier you had to seek out those earlier issues. Comics also were unique in their monthly release schedule. You had to buy an issue during the slim timeframe it was on newstands or you missed out. Books normally don't work that way. A popular book gets multiple print runs and can be available in stores for you to purchase for years. Retro game collecting started from people buying old games to play them. There are completists but a lot of us buy the games to play. There is a unique element of videogames where because they're software a "reprint" on a different platform might not execute exactly right. So that creates a market for old copies to allow for the buyer to play a game on the hardware it was originally released on. But all of that can be accomplished without a box and with later print runs. And this is a digital medium so it isn't like later prints are of a degraded quality. Collecting as an investment is a perversion of the original organic reason why a collector scene rose up in the first place. At least in this case it is focused on sealed games, which are of no use to collectors that buy games to play them. So I'm safe. I can buy my opened games, even complete-in-box, without some idiot spending thousands of dollars per game messing it up. Though I really think this speculation is silly. Action Comics #1 is worth a lot not just because it's Superman but also because it is rare as hell. Comics in those days were sold on consignment so unsold copies were returned and destroyed, not dumped into the back issue bin. Superman would not have had a fanbase already for his debut so the first issue would not have sold a well as later issues. Also comics are flimsy and easily destroyed, far more so than videogames. This whole thing seems completely made up by the people doing it.
I ve heard this since 2000. Every year the retro game bubble grew. I d be re happy if it all burst, I m not in this for the money. It won't happen though
I think whats happening is you got a select few rich/richer/stupid people out there who want to justify their costs. So they want to introduce the "Sealed/Graded" option as a way to gate keep, and add another high tier to the gaming collector world. It's basically a way to gentrify the game collecting world.
I love when you go in depth on stuff like this. I haven't seen you do a Not So Common Podcast in a while, and this is great! If you ever want a guest for it I'd love to be on there, I'm still a nobody youtuber though. lol
This will spread, once all the sealed NES games are too expensive for return on investments these new deep pockets will try to tap into other systems early. How long before "Want a graded Gamecube Twilight Princess? First appearance of Midna, bargain at $9K."
I like how Danielle is dropping her two cents all over the comments. I collect both comics and games and have for a long time. People like her don’t understand that the 2 hobbies are different and you can’t just assume what works in comics will work in video games. The collectors in each hobby have completely different priorities. The same 15 people will pass around these sealed graded games and that’s it.
Good vid. I thought the "left bros" comments at the 24 min mark shows the line in the sand between normal collectors and the "deep pockets" from other collecting fields. People like Danielle are just making presumptions of value when she's "blown away" that someone didn't value the left Bros variant at a certain dollar point. The fact that a variant exists is worth noting, but the dealers on the floor know what the prices are to move their games while being able to stay in business at a certain level of profit. A deep-pocket can buy a game and say it's a certain value due to a grade and condition, but the market that would see that type of distinction as value add is incredibly small right now. It's a highly speculative market, and of course those collectors are all too willing to have sites like Kotaku give it exposure to give that market potential to grow. What i don't understand is the motivation. You're collecting sealed games out of either nostalgia, or as an art piece, or as an investment. The people in this article don't sound like they are coming from a nostalgia mindset. The investment side doesn't make sense considering the comics market has a much larger pool of potential buyers which opens up liquidity, and it would be bizarre to sell off a ton of borderline blue-chip comics for speculative games (especially common games) unless you just wanted to realize some gains off the comics and needed a new asset. The only thing left i can see is as an art piece...or maybe just the thrill of the hunt/collector addiction.
Dang, now that these people that have been handed everything there whole lives are getting in to this, they will now be deciders of what's "rare". That chick seems very disrespectful to me like an armchair QB🤨👎
Those people are jnot collectors, they're speculators, and I can't stand them. they ruined comics years ago and now they have their greedy sights set on video games.
@@glycineairman 1. How do you know whether I have or have not met her? 2. How would you like it if someone came to your job with little to no experience and say "Oh, you didn't know about (enter know it all explanation here)" and treat you like you like you're a moron, I sure as heck wouldn't. So maybe you know the context in which its explained. 3. You seem to also be doing it with out knowing me, classy?
She came from having nothing and became very successful as a dealer of vintage comic books by demonstrating great business sense and taking risk where others balked. She is also an incredible marketer and a decent person.
@@joshuaentin11 then why is there this claim of acting like these people don't know ( such and such) and if she's just dropping all this coin on games and driving the price up it sounds like greed rules her life dear brother Numpsy. I didn't have a bed to sleep in nor a bedroom so I know what it's like to have nothing.
I really feel uncomfortable when I find out a game I bought years ago for $15 is now selling for hundreds. I just want to play the game. And now if something happens to my copy, I'll have to either settle with emulation of shell out the new price. There just doesn't seem to be room anymore for people who just want to enjoy old games.
This video game collecting craze makes no sense to me. You make great points. The things that typically make things collectible don’t really apply to video games. I don’t get buying things that have zero use (a sealed common game). I could see if there was some special level or differentiating feature of the game but I don’t get something that’s sealed being 100times more valuable then the 1000s of other mint condition copies. The even weirder thing is when you look up some of this stuff on eBay it’s readily available and way cheaper than at auction. They are literally losing money from day one.
This is an old concept, as old as the devil. Needless things, from the author Stephen King. A guy in the Maine knows exactly what you would sell your soul for.
I like to get games in good condition, preferably CIB (box, manuals, game, pack-in goods, etc.), but I will rarely EVER go out of my way to buy ANY sealed game secondhand.
The automotive scene have been suffering like this for a while as tuner cars such as the Mk4 Toyota Supra are made to be modified and raced on the track or cruised on mountain paths to the driver's content. But due to their iconic role in the Fast & Furious franchise, they're in the "Bring a trailer" or to the layman's term, 5-6 figure prices.
I had no idea they actually rated old video games like they do comics and cards. I'm trying to get old Nintendo games cartridges but they're almost impossible for me to get the good ones. Even old Game Boy games are super expensive sometimes.
If I had to recommend any system to collect for at a reasonable price, it's the Genesis. A good chunk of its library is affordable with the exception of a few games. Most of the big titles are less than 20 bucks. You can get complete games for dirt cheap as well. So that market is pretty nice right now.
When you buy a sealed game you know everythings inside the box, you know everythings in new condition, and if you have the money and want that feeling of opening up a sealed game you get that feeling you did when you were a kid. the smell is amazing and it takes you back and thats what most of this is about. love your book
The real test is going to be whether these comic dealers are able to resell a sealed Donkey Kong Country (or whatever) for an even more over-the-top price, or will that sealed DKC still be collecting dust in a year's time? Or will the dealer eventually be forced to mark it down and take a loss, just to get SOME of her money back? It's hard to imagine there's a person out there who would REALLY value having a sealed copy of such a common game. I would guess that many of the generic 'collectibles' dealers getting into the retro gaming scene with the mindset that it's just one more category of items that people collect, are going to take some serious losses. At the same time, their entry to the market will itself drive up prices in the short term. It's very difficult to realize that you're inside a bubble, until it pops. In business you always want to spend some time thinking about who would be your potential customer, and what would likely drive their purchasing decision. The person likely to be interested in spending thousands of dollars on a sealed DKC would probably have to associate nostalgic childhood memories with the game, and in the intervening decades to have done pretty well for themselves financially speaking. Maybe DKC was the first game they ever bought with their own money, or maybe they played it all the time with their relative or friend who is now deceased, or something like that. For whatever reason, this person wants to honor and remember those days with a sealed copy of their favorite game displayed on a shelf. They would be someone who has decided playing the game on emulators is not enough. They've decided that not even having an original cartridge and original SNES hardware is good enough. Even among this select group, how many of those people would ALSO very badly want to have a sealed copy of the game. I question whether this potential customer even exists. Personally I'll be playing one of my thousands of .ROMs instead of worrying about collecting nice things to put on a shelf. To me, THAT's what retro gaming is- it is retro, but more than that, it is GAMING. It's about actually playing the games. I literally have all the games that I could never find, and never afford as a kid. Probably around 1991 or so, I thought to myself, "When I grow up and get a decent paying job, I'm going to get EVERY Nintendo game." And I did! It's one of those rare childhood dreams that we can easily fulfill. I remind myself every day just how fucking awesome that is, and how in many ways we are living in a golden age. For me, if I was REALLY into DKC, I'd be trying to 100% the game, I'd speedrun it... I wouldn't celebrate my love of DKC by glancing over at my sealed copy on the shelf. But, to each their own!
Huh, I always just loved video games. All these values and money involved just doesn’t matter to me. If my collection was valued at $0 tomorrow, I wouldnt care; I’d still keep everything. Probably would go out and buy more haha.
@@adventureguide4725 🤔 The funny part is a millionaire who just started collecting games 9 months ago , thinks that their going to become even richer by paying an exorbitant amount for sealed Nintendo games , and it sounds like they know nothing about the gaming industry.... Thats funny 🤑 Or maybe it's just dumb.
I got a question for you Pat. OK lets say, you decided TODAY, that you were going to sell your entire Video game collection, and two people wanted to buy your Gold and Grey NWC carts, you knew that one person was a True game collector (By true I mean someone who loves collecting and playing video games for fun and for preserving the media format) and the other was just an investor, someone who has zero interest in video games but just wants them to be able to flip them 5 years from now for a profit. The "True" game collector offers you Near top dollar for both of them, but the "Investor" says, I will match this persons offer and throw in an extra 25k Who do you sell the games to?
OK I will explain it to you, Guy A says I will pay you 100k For that item, and Guy B says "I'll Match that and throw in an extra 25k. What Guy B is essentially saying is, What ever this guy offers you, I will match his offer and throw in 25k more. Understand now?
You are a troll and I am done entertaining you. Notice how 5 people gave a thumbs up to my question to Pat and your comments have ZERO thumbs up. It is because people have functional brains and understood the concept I was pitching to Pat, your brain seems incapable of understanding a very simple concept. This si the last time I will be replying to you. Bye dipshit.
If you’re a video game collector, you should be playing the video games you collect. There’s no point in having a sealed box on a shelf just sitting there. The only exception I can see is if you have the game already, and you find a sealed copy of that same game for a good price (which at that point you should probably just sell the sealed copy for a good amount of money).
if more and more comic book collectors start selling their stuff to begin collecting videogames (I heard of a few cases) does that mean that comic book value as a whole will decrease significantly?
In my opinion i think all this sealed game grading crap is a scam or a racquet, Its dealers buying between dealers just trying to create a inflated sealed game market. Remember there is no pension when u retire from video game collecting, so i guess the idiots are looking at it as a investment thinking if i buy it at $100,00.00 today it will be worth a 1 million dollars in the future when there old so its a gamble
If people with money are rolling the dice on a “Sealed” Kid Icarus then that’s their prerogative. Luckily, this shouldn’t bother the rest of us who collect the loose carts. 😄
It would be awesome to have enough money to go up to one of these seller's booths at comic con and drop a couple grand on donkey kong country and just open up the sealed copy to see their reaction.
One store was selling a 5 bolt super Mario copy for 60$.... my main store for retro games had like 10 copies of them at 15$ each. I bought 2 and took one for trade in to the other store for 30$ lol.
I fully agree with you Pat. Hell, I was there when my first run mario 3 was pulled out of the locked video game box at my local small town walmart. i still have the cart and such but i wish i would've kept the box now! either way it still plays just as well as it did in the day and i remember all the good times had from it. This is seriously going too far. I'm to the point where i'd be fine playing a rom just for the nostalgia, as will most i know. It is what it is, but there's a difference between a love of games and a love of money.
They don't care about the game. They care that the plastic box says the condition is good, that it is "rare", and that they are getting in early before prices go up. They have literally no interest in the contents of the box beyond that.
I have never tried to collect sealed copies, but I do have some. I honestly don't give a shit about them. The only people that will buy these overpriced sealed copies are the ones chasing the flavor of the month. She could buy sealed music cd's. They're like the new vinyl, right? There you go, lady. I just turned you on to the next big thing. Sealed music cd's, and that craze hasn't even happened yet. You're welcome.
I think sealed music CDs are starting to happen. I've been trying to acquire several for my collection. I like to buy them sealed and in new condition just because I don't want to find a scratched or damaged CD or booklet when I open it. In other words, I plan to open them and listen to them. And I'm finding out that there is a certain subset of music CD collectors that buy sealed music that don't open them for whatever reason. And so my music collection remains unfinished because I'm not willing to pay $50 to $200 for an out-of--print music CD. Well, in fact I have in some cases settled for used copies, but in most cases I was disappointed in the condition of the CD or booklet. I guess my point is this: Nostalgia is getting too expensive for me lately. Thankfully, I already have most of what I want. Same goes for games. I bought most of what I wanted when it was new in the store, and thankfully, I held on to them and the boxes they came in. Sure they're not sealed, but I don't care about that. I want to play the game and read the booklet or whatever else came in the box. I have no real desire to display a sealed box on a shelf that a visitor to my house would be afraid to even touch, much less look inside at the contents.
The only thing I can say is that I agree with the point of view of collecting for playing the games, not for having them enclosed forever. If a game is complete in box, a collector must take care of the cartridge, the manual, the box, and the other inserts that could be inside for preserve all of that at the finest possible state, for love to the game itself (maybe if it was a important part of the childhood), but PLAYING THE GAME at the same time, that makes collecting to be worth at the first time.
Doubtful. His stuff will not be coming to market anytime soon. And if they do.... Video game cases only have Six copies,, unlike cases of comics with 300+ copies.
While I appreciated a lot of Pat's thoughts on this subject, he totally lost me when he said he didn't care if he had certain vairants of carts, especially if that meant his collection was more valuable. Cmon Pat, we all know that's not true. You care BIGTIME and you used to always brag about having this game and that. 🤔🙄🤣🤣🤣
The fact that I didn't have a first-print Super Mario Bros. box until I just found one recently disproves that point. Most games in my NES collection I have no clue if they are the first-print run or not.
@@PatTheNESpunk Except you did a whole topic talking about how awesome it was and how rare it was. So obviously you care. I'm not saying you necessarily seek them out (although you did in that case) but to say you don't care about having rare variants in your collection that could possibly be worth more money is false and you know it. I'm sure you're looking to get as much money as you can out of your collection at some point. Which any smart person would do.
@@tek_lynx4225 If you have a sealed Amazing Spider-man: Web of Fire in nice enough shape for the 32x I'd probably pay close to $2k for that one...:) Stories like this do give me some pause though. I'd hate to spend a lot on a game and then find out there's a whole pallet full of them from some store that closed down 20 years ago!
Having bought countless numbers of games since being a wee lad in the late 80's I never once viewed the collecting as speculation or hedging for the future. Today I can see that the market has moved into speculation for a handful of games, which makes me a little sad. But as someone who would rather play games, so long as loose prices don't spiral out of control I will be happy and just watch for stories of graded games going for disproportionately high prices in a few years.
There absolutely is a video game gold rush happening right now. I am a very large high end collector who owns at least 300 ungraded sealed nes games. I absolutely hate grading, In my opinion its ruined collecting due to these ridiculous prices. Having said that i think im going to have to sell out due to these high prices since i dont think the market can stay this high or go much higher. I hate the thought of selling my stuff, but i do have a family to take care of, and i cant see buying more stuff at the current pricing.
If you do decide you want to sell some of them feel free to contact me on Instagram. I'm happy to buy them raw also. Or feel free to contact me anyway, it's always nice to see what's where when it comes to high end sealed NES!
Wonder if any of these sealed collectors know what a Framemeister is, or an OSSC. Wonder if they know the Master System has a built-in game. Or that the Super Gameboy CPU clock is like 2% too fast. Or what the difference is between the red- and white-button Genesis controllers. Or how to check for a Famicom adapter without opening up the game. I mean, why would they care about the minutiae of this hobby? They only care about two things: the price tag, and the condition. It's a shame really.
It sounds like some of those people who buy a never opened bottle of wine from like 1921 and keep it in their cellar and show people when they come around. It's not video game collecting, they are buying a cultural icon in perfect condition as a showpiece in a house. I doubt many will buy anything obscure or more than 2 or 3 games tbh.
I think that retro video game collecting is at the top of a proverbial mountain. If you're sitting on some rare or otherwise valuable games, now is the time to sell. An investing tip that was passed down to me by a very wealthy older gentleman was... "the best time to sell, is when most people are trying to buy (example now, people who grew up in the 80's or 90's and have found themselves with the right amount of money and nostalgia). Conversely, the market usually self-corrects so, when everyone else is trying to sell, that's the perfect time to buy (give it two years and you'll be able to fleece these fools that weren't true fans/collectors in the first place)."
I personally collect to play with my son . Sure we have emulators , modded NES and SNES Classic minis , soft-modded Wii and flashcarts for various consoles , but we do like have the original cartridges in hand . We don't need boxes and instructions or C.I.B. , but we do like a nice original label on them . My 15 year old loves collecting and playing them as much as I do , but we will never pay an outrageous amount of money for them . Love that the thumbnail shows M.U.S.C.L.E . A game that lots of people don't like C.I.B. .
This is one of the main reasons I’m subbed to your channel. Very informative videos and spot on opinions on our favourite hobby- which is gaming and trying to relive our memories through game collecting( I’m not a completionist by any means but I keep trying to collect games and consoles I’ve always wanted as a kid teenager and thank God I started collecting around 2005) Anyways just wanted to say a big thank you. Keep up the great work :)
This is a great topic. I don't actively try to get sealed games, however after years of hunting you always end up with a handful. I figure that my sealed games will never be opened thus I should have them graded just in case I want to sell them. I just think that crazy sealed/graded video game collectors would pay a premium for them and I would end up getting more money in the end.
Wii u completionism is actually kind of popular but based on prices I would say is mostly a trend in NA. The relatively small library makes it an appealing collection goal for fan of the console (or just idiots with a hole in their pocket). Some really bad games are going for stupid prices due to completionism, while some of these games are about $5 in PAL regions. Edit: A particular subreddit doesn't like it when I tell them that the only reason these bad games cost so much is that they are inflating the prices themselves.
Got a buddy who contacted me and showed me a sealed Dragon Warrior 3 he found, asked me if I was interested, I was at first until he showed me a $700 valuation, but a boxed copy is only like $150-$200 I don't see the point of spending an extra $500 just because it has shrink wrap around it.
I personally think we are in the middle of a retro gold rush right now. GameCube, PS2, and OG Xbox are pretty hot right now in terms of game collectability. I tried to find a used copy of Metroid Prime for my GameCube one time. It cost a few hundred dollars, so I didn't buy it.
I have got past even wanting to own the carts. They are to expensive and take up to much space. There is no difference to me playing on a modded nes mini or snes mini then a really cart
6:45 A sealed coin is actually a thing. A sealed coin is typically a limited *presses mushroom* release commemorative coin that is sold in a sealed collectors display pack. This means that that coin will always remain in mint condition whereas a rare coin found in circulation will always have some scratches to them. I don't collect coins, I just know that
It ultimately gets shitty with people outbidding preservationists for prototypes and unreleased games and then setting them on shelves to maybe accrete market value rather than, say, have the ROM dumped and preserved or something.
I see this as a bubble just like baseball cards I think. Maybe in the future a small number of games will have staying powet. (2 or 3 games) just like only a few comic books and baseball cards do, if you see this as a financial investment. With coins, at least there is value in terms of it being currency and precious metals.
It's a double edges sword. Speculation causes people to find copies of games that otherwise would have stayed locked away in someone's basement or attic but it makes the cost of collecting go up in the short term. The prices almost always go back down after people realise it's stupid and move on to the next big thing. Who knows, maybe sealed VHS tapes next! lol
ITT: Jealous people mad that people with money are buying things that they cant. Who cares. They are just gonna trade them between themselves. Regular retro will still be strong for normal collectors.
Do you agree that there is a retro game gold rush happening? Or are speculators buying fool's gold? A bit of both?
✅Article @kotaku.com/deep-pocketed-collectors-are-fueling-a-retro-game-gold-1837073847
...a bit of both Pat if i'm honest!
so... this is what is happening, whether it's wise or not. This Trump China trade war ALONG with the negative interest rates in other countries bonds along with money getting dumped into US Treasuries is making people who are "Cash and Equity Rich" look into alternative "assets" that can appreciate, well above or inline with inflation... so Gold is spiking, Jim Cramer is telling everyone to have 10% gold now, yield curve is inverting for a few minutes all the time past few years and this bot trading will likely cause a mini recession so, I do think the people buying these retro games are in it for 10 to 30 years... it is an alt to 10 to 30 year government bonds... I do think that is literally the logic going on is people are willing to divert a percentage of their net worth they'd have in 10 to 30 year bonds into these graded sealed comics, as some do or did with Wine... but like, think about it, if you are expecting a economic downturn, in 1-5 years... buying these up, then buying them in the economic downturn, and waiting for another bull market to sell them into would be the "smart" play.
The only way this kind of collecting will be worthwhile to these new collectors is if they can make a profit. A sealed video game inside a polycarbonate box seems pointless. No one paying money down the line would crack the case open, unsealed the box to play the cartridge within. Having such a graded game is about good as owning an empty box.
By the way, this was very interesting to listen to and was hooked into the topic.
I feel of people who collect games, they may not be "into it" but I bet way more than 10% of video game collectors have sealed games, they are just not likely retro games... I have a sealed copy of 1806 for ps4 because it came with my used ps4 I bought, I am going to try and sell it for $1000 when I am 65, everyone start helping me out now and destroy every 1806, call our selves "The Order", then in 2039 we start selling them for $1000, bet nobody remembers the game and believes it's super rare
Thanks, Pat.
If I had a game worth 40-50k, I'd sell it no questions asked. Then again, if I had a game like that, I'd probably have sold it when it was worth 5k.
lol so true
ditto, lol
@@alphatrion100 they were made to be played ..anything other than that is stupid
I mean, I own some games that are near 5K… but somehow I find it hard to believe anyone would truly pay that much for it. It’s just stupid stuff from my childhood that I happened to take with me.
But Donkey Kong Country is technically a Rare game.
@fripp555 Rare LTD? Ah. So it's Rare and Limited!
@@timgold577 *1UP sound*
@@timgold577 hahaha damn your good
"Did you know this variant of Super Mario Bros 3 is more rare and priced differently than the other one you are selling"? - The person who is artificiality creating perceived value
If you are collecting sealed games then you are not a video game collector, you are a box collector.
I collect them. And then I open them.
Theyre just stupid people
Or just a collector in general. Same thing about people who only played Nintendo products growing up but then collect other systems when they have no nostalgia playing them growing up.
a "collectionist"
not true, you are a collector, but not really a gamer. ;)
Feel like the high end stuff that they are talking about in the article will just be passed back and forth between a few high end collectors and wont affect the regular video gamer one bit whatsoever
This...
Agreed. The average person wants buy a game to play it, not buy a sealed game for several thousand dollars and just put it on a shelf.
@@hauntedbarbiedoll It's the same in comics. People spending $100,000 on the first appearance of Spider-man don't impact the collector looking to spend $10 on a copy of Spider-man 700 in any way whatsoever. The person who wants to spend $5 on an SMB to play it and the person who wants to spend $5k on a sealed one to put on their shelf should each be able to do what they want without one affecting the other.
They've basically created their own eco-system in which they'll be trading around the same games at inflated prices until they get bored. But make no mistake, it's all 100% manufactured, and aside from yet again convincing some fool into thinking that box of games in the garage is worth thousands, this will have zero impact on actual retro game collecting.
"I want my recent investment to pay off!" the article.
Speaking from hindsight, it's exactly like crypto. You cant trust the hype because the point isnt to buy to own, its to buy to sell later for profit.
People like those make me sick! They’re never going to play the games they buy it’s just going sit on a shelf in a plastic case.
There choice they don’t tell u want to spend your money on
@@79TEOG God, I only wish I was this stupid. If you're going to spout this generic argument at least do it with proper grammar.
Realistically this doesn't effect us. A game that has remained sealed this long will probably never be opened. Unless you like spending +800% on a sealed copy just to open it and devalue it
I have the sealed versions of my favorite games. It makes me feel that same nostalgia as before I opened it the first time, that brand new game I had just got. It's a great feeling but it can be very very expensive. I don't think it's such a bad thing to have a cartridge and another copy sealed in the box for the games you love most.
I don't collect sealed retro games, but If I find one sealed on the cheap, I don't open it,
Eat the rich, scan their comics, and open their sealed games
Slabbing a comic book in theory is an act taken to preserve the current condition of the book. Sticking a sealed box videogame into a protective case does what? Protects the box? Unless I'm wrong, it isn't going to do much to stop the electronics within the cartridge itself from decaying. If you buy a properly graded and slabbed comic, you have a pretty good idea of the condition of the entire product even if you never unseal it to flip through it yourself, and five years later you'll still have a decent idea of its condition. If you buy a graded and slabbed factory sealed NES game, then you only know the condition of the factory seal and the box. You don't know if the cart inside is functional, because it wasn't tested when it was graded, much less five years later. You don't know if the code had decayed, or the capacitors have failed, or if the battery has leaked acid throughout the case, all of which will become increasingly likely to happen over time.
Yes. I stopped collecting a long time ago because everything is so stupidly expensive.
same...that's why I went to emulation (Classic systems: NES/SNES/etc)/FPGA (Analogue Super NT, etc) it's about playing the games, not having tens of thousands tied up in them lol
This...☝
@@diamanteloco I'm going a slightly different route of Everdrives and devices such as the DCEmu and Rhea. I'm also planning to migrate to FPGAs as and when they come out. As for my original stuff..... as you can see, I do still like to have and play games and ideally as authentically as possible but it's just too impractical to keep everything
@@Noobsaibot21 Agree!👍
Same here
These Martin Shkreli-type trust fund kids are invading every hobby it seems. This is happening with synthesizers as well.
I'm curious, can you please explain what you mean?
wasn't shkreli self made? his parents were immigrants who worked min wage jobs.
Why does Ian keep looking at us with that smug face?
Too many shrooms
Ian's sitting on a Little Sampson, fit is a bit loose but it's just-like the good old days... 🤣😂😅😃😁
he's so high
Perhaps because he's part T-Rex, and knows it!
That good good IPA
....Oh FFS shut up Ian!!!!
In 1998 I sold my magic collection to a friend of mine for $500 under pressure from my dad that the market was about to crash on these cards. It included a NM Unlimited black lotus, 4 moxes, time walk and ancestral recall. I can't even bring myself to check the current going prices or I'll be sick.
you just lost 20,000 dollars worth of cards....
now you lost like 10 - 100 grand per card, You could've been rich!
When I buy a game, I buy it because I want to play the game, just like anyone else. I collect because I love the games themselves, not for an investment or anything like that. I only go for loose carts and get some of those universal cases for them to protect them. I still am shocked someone bought a sealed Super Mario Bros for $30,000 when its so common that people could have many copies of it. In my opinion, video games, regardless of their age or condition are meant to be played and enjoyed by people. I understand why people collect sealed games, but I do not agree with those reasons at all.
It's so refreshing to hear that. I am the same way, anything that is in my collection I fully intend to use. Plus I'm kind of cheap. If I wanted a Super Mario Bros in the Box, I would make the box myself and then print a manual then wrap it in tape. Plus at that point it would be something that nobody else has, and I think that's the real reason people pay that much for something so common.
Yep! I have over 700 games but everyone of them I have had an interest in playing.
If I have no interest in playing a game then I won't buy it.
Like I'm not personally interested in COD so I don't own any.
Oh wow!! You're a great human being.........
If the retro collecting market is starting to move towards sealed games and boxed games instead of loose carts then this is a sign that the market has moved beyond it's peak and speculators are looking for the last remaining gold mine in the hill. Especially when internet advertisements are starting to show "sealed games sells for almost 10,000" when it used to be "Your old video games could be worth thousands!!"
Or a sign of a new wave of collectors coming in and a new market rising.
@@NerdyGirlComics I don't think that sealed games is a new market. I think the appeal for sealed games is limited to a smaller percentage of collectors and the high cost of sealed games will deter or price a lot of people out of the market. The value of sealed games probably won't encourage excessive buying since most gamer's want to play what they own. This is where the Collectors market should be in the first place since those items are the rarest and many loose carts are over valued considering that there are millions of copies in existence. Collectors can have the market for sealed games. I would rather see the loose cart prices come back down to reality after the market correction realigns prices back down to where they belong. The price spikes for every and any loose cart was mostly a nostalgia wave and partially based on a short lived fad. For me the documentary Nintendo Quest fueled my collecting drive to some extent but for many people like me that itch has petered out and patience for lower prices is now a bigger priority.
I have zero interest in sealed games.
So dumb.
No kidding. Who the hell pays money to get a shitty game like MUSCLE or Kid Clown graded?
I found a sealed copy of some n64 game (cant remember exactly what is was cuz I hate N64) paid 3 bucks at good will sold it for 300, but other than forget that noise.
@@beatsinmycrates It's always cool to hold onto games for years, and see them shoot up in price (I have a copy of SOTN that I paid $40 for and now goes for double that). But people who buy graded copies and treat them like buying an investment like a stock is just dumb IMO.
I'm planning to retire off my sealed Power Rangers, ESPN Baseball, and Compton's Encyclopedia for Sega CD.
@@jonyoungmusic Hmmm. I think you need to diversify your portfolio and put 10% of your retirement into 3DO games, another 10% in Silverhawk figures, and another 15% into Pogs.
I will say that I am one of the few collectors looking to build a complete Nintendo Switch collection. But I have an emotional attachment to the Switch. My ex left me around the time that the Switch came out. I was grieving, lonely, and bored, since she'd manipulated me into selling my entertainment library. I got a Switch in July of 2017, and it became a constant companion during the worst time of my life. So I have a desire to own everything that is released for the Switch because the system itself means so much to me. I don't think that level of attachment just happens for most people.
But would you start collecting Switch sealed games?
@@iDGF999 I think his comment was aimed at the part where pat said not many people try to collect complete sets for systems other than the NES. I for one am going for complete original xbox and wii u....almost there in both cases. I will never go for a complete NES collection, I mostly just want the games I had or played as a kid and maybe a few I missed.
I can only agree with you Pat! I'm 400 games deep in my "complete NES collection." I'm just happy to find a cart that might work. My prize is Bonk's Adventure, and I've had that since I purchased it in the 90s. You can't play a sealed game - its got no value to me in that state. My nostalgia needs to access the game and enjoy it first and foremost! As well with comic books - If I cannot read it, I've got no reason to purchase personally. Items are only worth what someone is willing to pay for it... And that's not for me. Great job always sir!
Why did she pay 2 grand for a sealed Donkey Kong Country when it's only around $300 on price charting??
She's spending money to make money. She is hedging her bet on it's value by trying to inflate it's price
Because it is pristine. It's all an investment for her for the future... the problem is that DKC is like of the most common SNES games out there. It's fucking hilarious that she thinks she'll get anything 10 or 20 years from now.
Back in 05 i bought dkc and killer instinct sealed for 20 bucks a piece
Hoping some other rich idiot will give her double in a year or two and then he'll hope for the same. And the cycle continues.
Cause she's an idiot with too much money to burn
This sounds like a great time to get your sealed games graded by Wata and sell them for massive profits to the new deep pockets. There is literally a warehouse full of sealed games, like NES ect (not all games obviously but the amount of sealed games in the wild is completely unknown).
YES! Please go get them graded, then offer them to me!!
@@NerdyGirlComics I'll sell you a sealed Stadium Events for $400,000,000,000 dollars.
The next recession will end this and make it look silly. There will be a few games that have real long-term value but most of this is a joke.
When you compare sealed video game values to the absurdity of comic books and baseball cards, it's actually surprisingly low.
Just another example showing the middle class is gone. If you got the money your trying to diversify into “alternative investments”.
Sad...
They're not gone, they're just people like me who dont have kids. I have about $200 budget per week to buy video games. But I dont collect sealed games. I actually dont even own one.
Just buy stocks, bonds, crypto and gold, it’s not 1950, anyone can do it now.
Whaaaa! People with money are buying things I like and I cant because I make $10 an hour
And watch the investment tank. Or buy comics and sealed video
Games and watch your money appreciate.
My reaction to this is mostly bemused bewilderment and a litfle detached curiosity. As someone who collected enthusiastically as a child back in the early/mid-00s before it exploded into the mainstream, back when Atari was at the zenith of value and interest, kept an eye on the collecting scene off and on and got back into it in 2014ish, this all just feels like a totally different hobby these people are into.
Nothing wrong with that I guess, but this camp is doing something almost unrecognizable--it's not video game collecting as it has always been, it's comic/coin/toy collecting applied to video games. Even the concept of "printings", and box variants is totally foreign and new to me. It's not that they're finally noticing things we missed, it's just a different paradigm that conceptualizes games in very physical terms.
The thing is, though, and this is where I part ways with many retro gamers, the 'original'/old-school collecting scene wasn't purely about playing the games either. This whole "shelf collectors vs players" thing I see increasingly often (backlash?) feels contrived and like a false dichotomy to me.
Video game collecting proper as I've always thought of and approached it lies in between these extremes. When I started collecting, it was like this: condition mattered, yeah, and you'd always seek the best copies and to upgrade, but rarity in the sense Pat talks about superceded everything when it came to value and clout. But what the game actually *was* mattered too. A Color a Dinosaur in the worst condition would've been a far more exciting find than a sealed or CIB Super Mario Bros., which a lot of people wouldn't have even given a second glance to. A rarer but actually good game would've been even more exciting and valuable. A game you didn't have or had never played was higher priority than one you had often regardless of rarity/value (buying and hoarding several copies wasn't much of a thing IIRC, multiples were valued as trading fodder).
We'd aim to get as complete as possible, sure, but it wasn't the end-all-be-all. If you had any and all weird accessories that went with a game (SNES mouse, ROB, Super Scope, etc...), that was good, if you had a box, great, with manual too, even better. CIB was always sought-after but not a necessity--I got into CIB w/all inserts (ads, posters, etc.) and thought *that* was a little much/silly (but fun!). It was very nifty if you found a SEEEEEEEALED copy of a game (hell, I have a sealed Super Munchers just because I loved that game as a little girl and found it at a thrift store)--no, edgemeisters, nobody with sense tore them open and played them and they *were* highly regarded--but they were curiosities that never formed anything close to the core standard, and very few people went way out of their way to get sealed, that wasn't done. My mentality around sealed was always that they were the best condition that would serve as a kind of backup--should be kept sealed as that would ensure the condition of the contents inside wouldn't deteriorate too much so it ensured there'd be CIB copies in the future. Sealed were "extra", if you will.
Needless to say, grading was a totally alien concept, nobody gave a whit about "printings", variants in sticker seals or whatever, and there was no dumbass conflict between "shelf collectors" and "players" and it wasn't common to disdain CIB and sealed if you weren't into them. Hell of a lot more overlap between collectors and those passionate about playing retro games--most cared about both aspects to a major extent and they weren't seen as somehow opposed. Physicality of media mattered but in different ways as described above, and rhe whole shebang was its own unique scene--not contemporary gaming mentality (physical media doesn't matter, it's all about playing, the hell with condition...) but not toy/comic/card/coin collecting-like either. It was all about history and niches and preservation at the crux.
Anyway, long comment but there's my "alternative perspective" and something I've felt needed to be said for a long time. I really miss that, how retro game collecting used to be, and to me that's what it always will be. Can't help but feel like I speak for the silent majority of collectors who started long before the "bubble". I even go a bit further than Pat I think in that I reject some of the well-established developments of this decade (like that shelf collector/resellers vs players thing, and set/system completionism was always an extreme, weird niche too, not a common approach IME), and this grading, sealed, popular/recognizable (i.e., common) in better state taking precedence over rarity, games-as-totally-physical-objects stuff just doesn't feel like retro game collecting or hold any interest for me, even if I could ever afford it. If that's your bag then more power to you I guess, but it's not for me, not what captured and held my interest about retro games in the first place, and I really think it's fundamentally different enough to constitute an entirely different endeavor. FWTW. ◽▫👩♀
MissOptical I have a similar perspective. I started collecting in the late 90s/early 2000s to get games that I had always wanted to play and own that were cheap but often hard to find on the second hand market. But then I learned about emulation and then I could no longer justify buying physical copies of NES and SNES games. Because back then it was purely about buying games to play.
I got back into collecting properly in 2015 when I was able to readjust my collecting aesthetic for the new era once I could understand what makes retro games valuable even though it's possible to play them for free using emulation. Even if I had the money to drop tens of thousands on graded copies of sealed games I probably wouldn't as graded games don't make my pp hard. I can appreciate that a sealed game is as close to new condition and if I can get one at a good price I'll get it but I won't go all out for a sealed copy. I'd be more than happy for high end sealed collectors to remain in a completely different league where their tastes don't affect the price of unsealed games
You pretty much summed up in a really nice post what’s so special about retro game or collecting in general. Bravo!
For me ( I started collecting in the 90s ) it was always CIB or nothing. I didn t care about sealed, since I was going to open and play the games anyway. But a game being CIB was mandatory. And of course it did have to be free of sunfading or scratches/torn boxes. I never understood why people bought "dirty" loose games
Honestly I think these sealed collectors are gonna end up pissing people off who are actual gamers/ collectors so that people won’t buy from them and they will be stuck with a bunch of sealed games that won’t sell and are worth the same as none grades ones 10-20 years down the road
Collecting sealed games would depress me. They're like new cars whose fate are never to be driven
The reason that comic collecting started becoming a thing was that comic readers wanted to read earlier issues that came out before they started buying comics. Superman has been around since 1938. If you didn't start buying Superman comics until 1968, maybe because you were born in 1960, then there was 30 years worth of Superman comics that you hadn't read and you wanted to. Remember that there wasn't much for reprints at the time so if you wanted to know what had happened earlier you had to seek out those earlier issues. Comics also were unique in their monthly release schedule. You had to buy an issue during the slim timeframe it was on newstands or you missed out. Books normally don't work that way. A popular book gets multiple print runs and can be available in stores for you to purchase for years.
Retro game collecting started from people buying old games to play them. There are completists but a lot of us buy the games to play. There is a unique element of videogames where because they're software a "reprint" on a different platform might not execute exactly right. So that creates a market for old copies to allow for the buyer to play a game on the hardware it was originally released on. But all of that can be accomplished without a box and with later print runs. And this is a digital medium so it isn't like later prints are of a degraded quality.
Collecting as an investment is a perversion of the original organic reason why a collector scene rose up in the first place. At least in this case it is focused on sealed games, which are of no use to collectors that buy games to play them. So I'm safe. I can buy my opened games, even complete-in-box, without some idiot spending thousands of dollars per game messing it up. Though I really think this speculation is silly. Action Comics #1 is worth a lot not just because it's Superman but also because it is rare as hell. Comics in those days were sold on consignment so unsold copies were returned and destroyed, not dumped into the back issue bin. Superman would not have had a fanbase already for his debut so the first issue would not have sold a well as later issues. Also comics are flimsy and easily destroyed, far more so than videogames. This whole thing seems completely made up by the people doing it.
To me it sounds like the retro bubble is about to turn into the Tulip bubble burst. The correlation is so similar it's eerie.
Marty Moose i remember it happening to the beanie babies back in the 1990s and I just stopped buying them after the bubble burst.
Tiptoe through the tulips?
I ve heard this since 2000. Every year the retro game bubble grew. I d be re happy if it all burst, I m not in this for the money. It won't happen though
I think whats happening is you got a select few rich/richer/stupid people out there who want to justify their costs. So they want to introduce the "Sealed/Graded" option as a way to gate keep, and add another high tier to the gaming collector world. It's basically a way to gentrify the game collecting world.
This...☝
I love when you go in depth on stuff like this. I haven't seen you do a Not So Common Podcast in a while, and this is great! If you ever want a guest for it I'd love to be on there, I'm still a nobody youtuber though. lol
@patthenespunk I’d love to come on the show and talk about some of the points you brought up from the article!! When we doin this?!
You would wreck him.
This will spread, once all the sealed NES games are too expensive for return on investments these new deep pockets will try to tap into other systems early.
How long before "Want a graded Gamecube Twilight Princess? First appearance of Midna, bargain at $9K."
I like how Danielle is dropping her two cents all over the comments. I collect both comics and games and have for a long time. People like her don’t understand that the 2 hobbies are different and you can’t just assume what works in comics will work in video games. The collectors in each hobby have completely different priorities. The same 15 people will pass around these sealed graded games and that’s it.
Good vid. I thought the "left bros" comments at the 24 min mark shows the line in the sand between normal collectors and the "deep pockets" from other collecting fields. People like Danielle are just making presumptions of value when she's "blown away" that someone didn't value the left Bros variant at a certain dollar point. The fact that a variant exists is worth noting, but the dealers on the floor know what the prices are to move their games while being able to stay in business at a certain level of profit. A deep-pocket can buy a game and say it's a certain value due to a grade and condition, but the market that would see that type of distinction as value add is incredibly small right now. It's a highly speculative market, and of course those collectors are all too willing to have sites like Kotaku give it exposure to give that market potential to grow.
What i don't understand is the motivation. You're collecting sealed games out of either nostalgia, or as an art piece, or as an investment. The people in this article don't sound like they are coming from a nostalgia mindset. The investment side doesn't make sense considering the comics market has a much larger pool of potential buyers which opens up liquidity, and it would be bizarre to sell off a ton of borderline blue-chip comics for speculative games (especially common games) unless you just wanted to realize some gains off the comics and needed a new asset. The only thing left i can see is as an art piece...or maybe just the thrill of the hunt/collector addiction.
Get 'em, Pat!
I'll be laughing when my sealed Upper Deck Baseball Card set sells, since it's guaranteed to have a Griffey rookie card. ;)
Strum Dogg Ha ha. Card number 1. I’ll give you six dollars for the set.
@@chasejackson7248 a 9 to a 10 in baseball card grades is a big difference.
You should have told her about the "eliminatorr boat duel" "VARIANT"
Jay from the Game Chasers can let her know.
Pixel Game Squad has a video of a guy with a WAREHOUSE full of sealed vintage games.
Dang, now that these people that have been handed everything there whole lives are getting in to this, they will now be deciders of what's "rare". That chick seems very disrespectful to me like an armchair QB🤨👎
Those people are jnot collectors, they're speculators, and I can't stand them. they ruined comics years ago and now they have their greedy sights set on video games.
Slandering Danielle when you've never met her? Classy
@@glycineairman 1. How do you know whether I have or have not met her? 2. How would you like it if someone came to your job with little to no experience and say "Oh, you didn't know about (enter know it all explanation here)" and treat you like you like you're a moron, I sure as heck wouldn't. So maybe you know the context in which its explained. 3. You seem to also be doing it with out knowing me, classy?
She came from having nothing and became very successful as a dealer of vintage comic books by demonstrating great business sense and taking risk where others balked. She is also an incredible marketer and a decent person.
@@joshuaentin11 then why is there this claim of acting like these people don't know ( such and such) and if she's just dropping all this coin on games and driving the price up it sounds like greed rules her life dear brother Numpsy. I didn't have a bed to sleep in nor a bedroom so I know what it's like to have nothing.
I really feel uncomfortable when I find out a game I bought years ago for $15 is now selling for hundreds. I just want to play the game. And now if something happens to my copy, I'll have to either settle with emulation of shell out the new price. There just doesn't seem to be room anymore for people who just want to enjoy old games.
Everdrives, and burned discs, that's what I plan on doing
This video game collecting craze makes no sense to me. You make great points. The things that typically make things collectible don’t really apply to video games. I don’t get buying things that have zero use (a sealed common game). I could see if there was some special level or differentiating feature of the game but I don’t get something that’s sealed being 100times more valuable then the 1000s of other mint condition copies. The even weirder thing is when you look up some of this stuff on eBay it’s readily available and way cheaper than at auction. They are literally losing money from day one.
yeah especially since they think that they know everything which makes them loose a lot of money
This is an old concept, as old as the devil. Needless things, from the author Stephen King. A guy in the Maine knows exactly what you would sell your soul for.
I like to get games in good condition, preferably CIB (box, manuals, game, pack-in goods, etc.), but I will rarely EVER go out of my way to buy ANY sealed game secondhand.
The automotive scene have been suffering like this for a while as tuner cars such as the Mk4 Toyota Supra are made to be modified and raced on the track or cruised on mountain paths to the driver's content. But due to their iconic role in the Fast & Furious franchise, they're in the "Bring a trailer" or to the layman's term, 5-6 figure prices.
You still need to say it Pat... “Ian...”
Good video and interesting commentary. Do more like this! 😌😉☺️
I had no idea they actually rated old video games like they do comics and cards. I'm trying to get old Nintendo games cartridges but they're almost impossible for me to get the good ones. Even old Game Boy games are super expensive sometimes.
Look into multi carts on etsy...trust me you will be better off
Honestly anything SNES and above is super pricy. Why is Donkey Kong Country $20? Everyone had that game. It's crazy.
@@fernicusmaximus9282 have you ever had a woman love you before
Game boy and NES are coming down, still not real cheap, but coming down. Maybe hold off
If I had to recommend any system to collect for at a reasonable price, it's the Genesis. A good chunk of its library is affordable with the exception of a few games. Most of the big titles are less than 20 bucks. You can get complete games for dirt cheap as well. So that market is pretty nice right now.
Mario is such a know-it-all on this subject.
Finally got a “vaaaaaalue”, 40 minutes in.
Let the record show that even if I had millions of dollars, I wouldn't spend it on sealed games.
heck no, complete a library for your favorite console/consoles!
When you buy a sealed game you know everythings inside the box, you know everythings in new condition, and if you have the money and want that feeling of opening up a sealed game you get that feeling you did when you were a kid. the smell is amazing and it takes you back and thats what most of this is about. love your book
Can't say just because in your game collection you seek Seaaaaleeed games your not a gamer. If anything your a top level gamer
Something I never understood, why did the first gen consoles never get a collecting frenzy? Atari, Coleco, etc
The real test is going to be whether these comic dealers are able to resell a sealed Donkey Kong Country (or whatever) for an even more over-the-top price, or will that sealed DKC still be collecting dust in a year's time? Or will the dealer eventually be forced to mark it down and take a loss, just to get SOME of her money back? It's hard to imagine there's a person out there who would REALLY value having a sealed copy of such a common game. I would guess that many of the generic 'collectibles' dealers getting into the retro gaming scene with the mindset that it's just one more category of items that people collect, are going to take some serious losses. At the same time, their entry to the market will itself drive up prices in the short term. It's very difficult to realize that you're inside a bubble, until it pops.
In business you always want to spend some time thinking about who would be your potential customer, and what would likely drive their purchasing decision. The person likely to be interested in spending thousands of dollars on a sealed DKC would probably have to associate nostalgic childhood memories with the game, and in the intervening decades to have done pretty well for themselves financially speaking. Maybe DKC was the first game they ever bought with their own money, or maybe they played it all the time with their relative or friend who is now deceased, or something like that. For whatever reason, this person wants to honor and remember those days with a sealed copy of their favorite game displayed on a shelf. They would be someone who has decided playing the game on emulators is not enough. They've decided that not even having an original cartridge and original SNES hardware is good enough. Even among this select group, how many of those people would ALSO very badly want to have a sealed copy of the game. I question whether this potential customer even exists.
Personally I'll be playing one of my thousands of .ROMs instead of worrying about collecting nice things to put on a shelf. To me, THAT's what retro gaming is- it is retro, but more than that, it is GAMING. It's about actually playing the games. I literally have all the games that I could never find, and never afford as a kid. Probably around 1991 or so, I thought to myself, "When I grow up and get a decent paying job, I'm going to get EVERY Nintendo game." And I did! It's one of those rare childhood dreams that we can easily fulfill. I remind myself every day just how fucking awesome that is, and how in many ways we are living in a golden age. For me, if I was REALLY into DKC, I'd be trying to 100% the game, I'd speedrun it... I wouldn't celebrate my love of DKC by glancing over at my sealed copy on the shelf. But, to each their own!
Huh, I always just loved video games. All these values and money involved just doesn’t matter to me. If my collection was valued at $0 tomorrow, I wouldnt care; I’d still keep everything. Probably would go out and buy more haha.
That's funny shitt , Danielle lost $500,000 buying sealed Nintendo games... lol 😂
What's funny about it?
@@adventureguide4725 🤔 The funny part is a millionaire who just started collecting games 9 months ago , thinks that their going to become even richer by paying an exorbitant amount for sealed Nintendo games , and it sounds like they know nothing about the gaming industry....
Thats funny 🤑
Or maybe it's just dumb.
I find it just sickening, tbh lol.
That vALue 😂😂 the voice crack killed me 40:20
Any speculator market is always hurtful to the actual fans of the content. All the prices go up and no one can actually buy anything!
I got a question for you Pat. OK lets say, you decided TODAY, that you were going to sell your entire Video game collection, and two people wanted to buy your Gold and Grey NWC carts, you knew that one person was a True game collector (By true I mean someone who loves collecting and playing video games for fun and for preserving the media format) and the other was just an investor, someone who has zero interest in video games but just wants them to be able to flip them 5 years from now for a profit. The "True" game collector offers you Near top dollar for both of them, but the "Investor" says, I will match this persons offer and throw in an extra 25k Who do you sell the games to?
OK I will explain it to you, Guy A says I will pay you 100k For that item, and Guy B says "I'll Match that and throw in an extra 25k. What Guy B is essentially saying is, What ever this guy offers you, I will match his offer and throw in 25k more. Understand now?
You are a very dumb person. You do not seem to understand a VERY simple concept that everyone else seems to grasp with ease. Just give up at life.
You are a troll and I am done entertaining you. Notice how 5 people gave a thumbs up to my question to Pat and your comments have ZERO thumbs up. It is because people have functional brains and understood the concept I was pitching to Pat, your brain seems incapable of understanding a very simple concept. This si the last time I will be replying to you. Bye dipshit.
Gonna end up like beanie babies and baseball cards
Baseball cards are making a comeback tho
@@RetroHabit82 I don't buy that.
@@RetroHabit82 never gonna be like it was tho
I have 44 minutes to kill
Let's go!
If you’re a video game collector, you should be playing the video games you collect. There’s no point in having a sealed box on a shelf just sitting there. The only exception I can see is if you have the game already, and you find a sealed copy of that same game for a good price (which at that point you should probably just sell the sealed copy for a good amount of money).
if more and more comic book collectors start selling their stuff to begin collecting videogames (I heard of a few cases) does that mean that comic book value as a whole will decrease significantly?
In my opinion i think all this sealed game grading crap is a scam or a racquet,
Its dealers buying between dealers just trying to create a inflated sealed game market.
Remember there is no pension when u retire from video game collecting, so i guess the idiots are looking at it as a investment thinking if i buy it at $100,00.00 today it will be worth a 1 million dollars in the future when there old so its a gamble
If people with money are rolling the dice on a “Sealed” Kid Icarus then that’s their prerogative. Luckily, this shouldn’t bother the rest of us who collect the loose carts. 😄
@@tedlogan5628
Right on
It would be awesome to have enough money to go up to one of these seller's booths at comic con and drop a couple grand on donkey kong country and just open up the sealed copy to see their reaction.
One store was selling a 5 bolt super Mario copy for 60$.... my main store for retro games had like 10 copies of them at 15$ each. I bought 2 and took one for trade in to the other store for 30$ lol.
I fully agree with you Pat. Hell, I was there when my first run mario 3 was pulled out of the locked video game box at my local small town walmart. i still have the cart and such but i wish i would've kept the box now! either way it still plays just as well as it did in the day and i remember all the good times had from it. This is seriously going too far. I'm to the point where i'd be fine playing a rom just for the nostalgia, as will most i know. It is what it is, but there's a difference between a love of games and a love of money.
Also half of these games people are paying big money for if they played them once they would not be happy in any way shape or form just saying
They don't care about the game. They care that the plastic box says the condition is good, that it is "rare", and that they are getting in early before prices go up. They have literally no interest in the contents of the box beyond that.
I have never tried to collect sealed copies, but I do have some. I honestly don't give a shit about them. The only people that will buy these overpriced sealed copies are the ones chasing the flavor of the month. She could buy sealed music cd's. They're like the new vinyl, right? There you go, lady. I just turned you on to the next big thing. Sealed music cd's, and that craze hasn't even happened yet. You're welcome.
I think sealed music CDs are starting to happen. I've been trying to acquire several for my collection. I like to buy them sealed and in new condition just because I don't want to find a scratched or damaged CD or booklet when I open it. In other words, I plan to open them and listen to them. And I'm finding out that there is a certain subset of music CD collectors that buy sealed music that don't open them for whatever reason. And so my music collection remains unfinished because I'm not willing to pay $50 to $200 for an out-of--print music CD. Well, in fact I have in some cases settled for used copies, but in most cases I was disappointed in the condition of the CD or booklet. I guess my point is this: Nostalgia is getting too expensive for me lately. Thankfully, I already have most of what I want.
Same goes for games. I bought most of what I wanted when it was new in the store, and thankfully, I held on to them and the boxes they came in. Sure they're not sealed, but I don't care about that. I want to play the game and read the booklet or whatever else came in the box. I have no real desire to display a sealed box on a shelf that a visitor to my house would be afraid to even touch, much less look inside at the contents.
@@goopah well I posted that 2 years ago. Guess I shoulda took my own advise. I am thinking now sealed covid tests will be the next big thing.
@@ItIsNot1984 I'm going down to Vegas and betting on you immediately! Sealed Covid Tests. Got it. Thanks!
I dont like the way Mario was talking about the jews
The only thing I can say is that I agree with the point of view of collecting for playing the games, not for having them enclosed forever.
If a game is complete in box, a collector must take care of the cartridge, the manual, the box, and the other inserts that could be inside for preserve all of that at the finest possible state, for love to the game itself (maybe if it was a important part of the childhood), but PLAYING THE GAME at the same time, that makes collecting to be worth at the first time.
List of Tim Atwood's stuff goes up online.... Danielle Smith goes and cries in a corner.
Doubtful. His stuff will not be coming to market anytime soon. And if they do.... Video game cases only have Six copies,, unlike cases of comics with 300+ copies.
@@NerdyGirlComics He's already started posting publicly. Who knows what he's done privately already.
You don't think someone with money like wouldn't just buy them up at any price and then just triple it?
@@NerdyGirlComics Only six copies of sealed Stadium Events... LOL.
While I appreciated a lot of Pat's thoughts on this subject, he totally lost me when he said he didn't care if he had certain vairants of carts, especially if that meant his collection was more valuable. Cmon Pat, we all know that's not true. You care BIGTIME and you used to always brag about having this game and that. 🤔🙄🤣🤣🤣
The fact that I didn't have a first-print Super Mario Bros. box until I just found one recently disproves that point. Most games in my NES collection I have no clue if they are the first-print run or not.
@@PatTheNESpunk Except you did a whole topic talking about how awesome it was and how rare it was. So obviously you care. I'm not saying you necessarily seek them out (although you did in that case) but to say you don't care about having rare variants in your collection that could possibly be worth more money is false and you know it. I'm sure you're looking to get as much money as you can out of your collection at some point. Which any smart person would do.
he used to always say the same thing about Stadium Events(World Class Track Meet variant). Now he owns a copy.
Uncle frank is one of the most chill rad guy I ever seen
M.U.S.C.L.E. Was such a bad game. When I had this as a kid it frustrated me so much I stabbed it with my pocket knife.
Should've bodyslammed it into Oblivion though.
It’s so bad like the Power Glove.
i want it just because i collect the figures
I have a sealed Virtua Racing for 32X. She can give me 2k for that haha
@@tek_lynx4225 I can take one off your hands...
@@tek_lynx4225 If you have a sealed Amazing Spider-man: Web of Fire in nice enough shape for the 32x I'd probably pay close to $2k for that one...:) Stories like this do give me some pause though. I'd hate to spend a lot on a game and then find out there's a whole pallet full of them from some store that closed down 20 years ago!
ewwww the Mushroom of Death 32X, can't we just act like it never existed
Having bought countless numbers of games since being a wee lad in the late 80's I never once viewed the collecting as speculation or hedging for the future. Today I can see that the market has moved into speculation for a handful of games, which makes me a little sad. But as someone who would rather play games, so long as loose prices don't spiral out of control I will be happy and just watch for stories of graded games going for disproportionately high prices in a few years.
There absolutely is a video game gold rush happening right now. I am a very large high end collector who owns at least 300 ungraded sealed nes games. I absolutely hate grading, In my opinion its ruined collecting due to these ridiculous prices. Having said that i think im going to have to sell out due to these high prices since i dont think the market can stay this high or go much higher. I hate the thought of selling my stuff, but i do have a family to take care of, and i cant see buying more stuff at the current pricing.
If you do decide you want to sell some of them feel free to contact me on Instagram. I'm happy to buy them raw also. Or feel free to contact me anyway, it's always nice to see what's where when it comes to high end sealed NES!
Wonder if any of these sealed collectors know what a Framemeister is, or an OSSC. Wonder if they know the Master System has a built-in game. Or that the Super Gameboy CPU clock is like 2% too fast. Or what the difference is between the red- and white-button Genesis controllers. Or how to check for a Famicom adapter without opening up the game. I mean, why would they care about the minutiae of this hobby? They only care about two things: the price tag, and the condition. It's a shame really.
It sounds like some of those people who buy a never opened bottle of wine from like 1921 and keep it in their cellar and show people when they come around. It's not video game collecting, they are buying a cultural icon in perfect condition as a showpiece in a house. I doubt many will buy anything obscure or more than 2 or 3 games tbh.
Danielle is sponsored by WATA, she don't spend a buck on all those games. WATA give games to she exposed it on his social networks.
I think that retro video game collecting is at the top of a proverbial mountain. If you're sitting on some rare or otherwise valuable games, now is the time to sell. An investing tip that was passed down to me by a very wealthy older gentleman was... "the best time to sell, is when most people are trying to buy (example now, people who grew up in the 80's or 90's and have found themselves with the right amount of money and nostalgia). Conversely, the market usually self-corrects so, when everyone else is trying to sell, that's the perfect time to buy (give it two years and you'll be able to fleece these fools that weren't true fans/collectors in the first place)."
I personally collect to play with my son . Sure we have emulators , modded NES and SNES Classic minis , soft-modded Wii and flashcarts for various consoles , but we do like have the original cartridges in hand . We don't need boxes and instructions or C.I.B. , but we do like a nice original label on them . My 15 year old loves collecting and playing them as much as I do , but we will never pay an outrageous amount of money for them . Love that the thumbnail shows M.U.S.C.L.E . A game that lots of people don't like C.I.B. .
I like CIB if I can get it for a good price, but yeah all you need is the cartridge to play thr game
I thought it was dying. Which one is it?
This is one of the main reasons I’m subbed to your channel. Very informative videos and spot on opinions on our favourite hobby- which is gaming and trying to relive our memories through game collecting( I’m not a completionist by any means but I keep trying to collect games and consoles I’ve always wanted as a kid teenager and thank God I started collecting around 2005)
Anyways just wanted to say a big thank you. Keep up the great work :)
Ian looks a little under the weather. He ok?
This is a great topic. I don't actively try to get sealed games, however after years of hunting you always end up with a handful. I figure that my sealed games will never be opened thus I should have them graded just in case I want to sell them. I just think that crazy sealed/graded video game collectors would pay a premium for them and I would end up getting more money in the end.
Wii u completionism is actually kind of popular but based on prices I would say is mostly a trend in NA. The relatively small library makes it an appealing collection goal for fan of the console (or just idiots with a hole in their pocket). Some really bad games are going for stupid prices due to completionism, while some of these games are about $5 in PAL regions.
Edit: A particular subreddit doesn't like it when I tell them that the only reason these bad games cost so much is that they are inflating the prices themselves.
Got a buddy who contacted me and showed me a sealed Dragon Warrior 3 he found, asked me if I was interested, I was at first until he showed me a $700 valuation, but a boxed copy is only like $150-$200 I don't see the point of spending an extra $500 just because it has shrink wrap around it.
I can't wait to see the massive glut of worthless sealed Switch, PS4 and Xbox One games in the future from people speculating
I always wonder what retro video games were found stashed away in some corner of the stock rooms of toys r us.
I personally think we are in the middle of a retro gold rush right now. GameCube, PS2, and OG Xbox are pretty hot right now in terms of game collectability. I tried to find a used copy of Metroid Prime for my GameCube one time. It cost a few hundred dollars, so I didn't buy it.
I have got past even wanting to own the carts. They are to expensive and take up to much space. There is no difference to me playing on a modded nes mini or snes mini then a really cart
6:45 A sealed coin is actually a thing. A sealed coin is typically a limited *presses mushroom* release commemorative coin that is sold in a sealed collectors display pack. This means that that coin will always remain in mint condition whereas a rare coin found in circulation will always have some scratches to them. I don't collect coins, I just know that
Uncirculated coins are usually sealed, but circulated ones can be too, especially if they’re rare. You can send anything in to be graded.
It ultimately gets shitty with people outbidding preservationists for prototypes and unreleased games and then setting them on shelves to maybe accrete market value rather than, say, have the ROM dumped and preserved or something.
I see this as a bubble just like baseball cards I think.
Maybe in the future a small number of games will have staying powet. (2 or 3 games) just like only a few comic books and baseball cards do, if you see this as a financial investment.
With coins, at least there is value in terms of it being currency and precious metals.
Prospecting ruins every hobby eventually.
It's a double edges sword. Speculation causes people to find copies of games that otherwise would have stayed locked away in someone's basement or attic but it makes the cost of collecting go up in the short term. The prices almost always go back down after people realise it's stupid and move on to the next big thing. Who knows, maybe sealed VHS tapes next! lol
It's crazy how spot on you were about a year early. Wow.
ITT: Jealous people mad that people with money are buying things that they cant.
Who cares. They are just gonna trade them between themselves. Regular retro will still be strong for normal collectors.
Awesome discussion. I did comics for 30 years and now onto games. Sealed or not but complete important.