I collect and play a lot of old games (PS1, N64, Gameboy, and Ps2 are the main ones I buy for), but the prices on retro games are rising rapidly. Many games have doubled or tripled in price since around 2020. I like to play PS1 RPGs, but a lot of them are worth way more then I'm willing to spend nowadays. I usually prefer original hardware over emulating, but I've just been priced out of most systems (PS2 is about the only one that I care about where the price is still afforable, but even that is way up). Do you guys think this is a bubble that will pop, or are these insane prices here to stay?
(P.S. if you don't belive me look up any major game on pricecharting.com and look how the prices have spiked since 2020)
No, but it might eventually level off. It's an increasingly limited supply of will-never-be-produced-again products. It depends on the game of course. Worthless games should always be worthless, and if they inexplicably rise in price you know it's a bubble. Don't waste money on graded carts.
I'm assuming you care about simply playing the games instead of having collector-grade copies of the games.
For the PS2, if you have a fat PS2 you can throw a hard drive in it and play games off that. The entire catalog of every PS2 game ever made is on archive.org. It is about 5TB. All the software to do this is free; all you need is a hard drive and either an original network adapter + an IDE to SATA adapter (since they don't make IDE drives anymore) or one of the third-party knockoff adapters that support SATA natively.
For the PS1 and Dreamcast (maybe others but there are the ones I know about) there are hardware mods for the PS1 that let an SD card emulate the CD drive. I have never used one but am strongly tempted to get the Dreamcast one.
For the N64 and other cartridge systems look up the Everdrive. They emulate the cartridge, cost about $200, and let you play ROMs loaded onto an SD card. Game saves write to the SD card, and the cart has a UI to select which game you want to play when you power the system on. I have one for the N64 and it works great. I found a collection of every N64 game ever made (in all regions) on archive.org and threw it on either a 32 or 64 GB SD card.
Yes these things are expensive (except the PS2 mod), but as you note so are the games. You (eg.) spend $200 and you have every N64 game ever made and can also play homebrew games and the odd demo ROM for commercial games that never got released. If a game is $50, it's worth it if there are more than 4 games you want that you don't have.
I have already resorted to an everdrive for n64, GB, and GBA (Even ignoring just regular roms, there are a lot of good rom hacks to play too).
It's nice for games above what I'm willing to spend, but something about owning the actual carts makes it a more fun experience. Usually if I can find the original game for 30 dollars or less (Something increasingly hard to do these days), I usually still buy an original cart.
Fair enough. I'm the opposite in that I use the everdrive even for games I own.
For me it's only fun if it's a cart I had as a kid with ghosts from when I was a kid I can play against. But if I could pull the data off the cart and throw it on the everdrive I would.
They also make USB adapters for controllers and reproduction controllers that are already USB for use on your PC.
Generational shift is what you’re experiencing. Fags getting nostalgic. When they die is when you see markets fall off. 20 years ago, a coca-cola icebox from the post-ww2 era would run you 5 grand. Now they’re worth a third of that because the interested parties are pushing up dasies.
Last year I sold off 20k in c64 and atari 8 bit software. I got 1300 dollars for a folded sheet of paper. The vintage comuter market is rapidly shifting to PPC era Macintosh and x86 items.
This makes a lot of sense, as I've noticed that NES, Atari, and Genesis stuff is still decently priced, it's mostly mid-nineties to early 2000s where the prices have gone crazy high. Gamecube is probably the worst one (Some like Pokemon are even going for over a hundred dollars).
I have a ton of that to clear out too. Pro tip - buy when people laugh at you because ‘no one wants those!’. In 3-5 years you’ll be sitting on a gold mine. I bought hundreds of gameboy carts for 50 cents apiece in 2015. Most have increased 50-100 times in value. Ps2 will likely never pump, they produced soooo many discs its insane. If you want to pm me any titles you’re seeking I can check my stock on 2k era, I don’t have a ton but I do have a few hundred or so ps1, dreamcast etc.
PM sent
Ill get back to you on Saturday when im back at my house. I have to pull out some cd caddies from storage
Sounds good
It's also worth noting that the price increase started rapidly in 2020, it wasn't a gradual thing at all.
Yes that's a good sign of a bubble, but if there's a game you really want I wouldn't wait more than 6-12 months to buy it, unless you think the current price is ridiculously exorbitant.
I would argue it's a sign that the US government instantly devalued the dollar by about 30% by inflating the monetary supply with stimulus checks.
If you really want to track dollar devaluation it is best observed by pegging against gold and real estate.
With the current trend of games being less in depth than their counterparts made decades earlier… no. You can’t even get a copy of Ncaa football 14 for under $200 and in all likelihood even with the “new” NCAA coming out this July, I expect it to be a straight madden clone and lose any of the gameplay that made the game special like the coaching carousel. So since games are just prettier graphically, but uglier on the inside than those made a decade ago the reality is that older games will be a higher value. This is also why every modern system has a retro gaming collection to stream built into their “plus” plan.
It's the middle aged nostalgia factor. As you enter middle age you have the money and means to buy stuff you wanted as a kid. So, all the games go up in price by people who want to make extra money.
The best trick is to buy them before the nostalgia kicks in. My PS3 and 4 collection grew quickly because everything was around $2.
It goes back down when the same people enter geezerhood.
At the Portland retro gaming expo, we had Atari and odyssey games going for hundreds as the creators were treated like celebrities. Now I can buy all those games for $10 for the lot. The creators are still treated nicely though.
I'm waiting for arcade games to drop back. Every time I think I have the money, the price doubles.
That website is quite a resource. I had no idea my old copy of Conker's Bad Fur Day was worth $132.
What I’ve been doing is buying original hardware and then Everdrives for ROM cartridge based systems and jailbreak/softmod disc and hard drive based systems. You can do modless jailbreaks of Gamecubes, Wiis, Original Xbox, PS1, PS2 among many others. And once you do that, you can run images of games on original hardware (ahem legitimately acquired backups of games cough, cough).
So that’s how I deal with increasing game prices. Once I finished my N64 full set, I said no more.
The prices will level off at some point, but they won't really go back down. Look at the old comics - those that went up in price, stayed up.
Nobody wants to sell something like this for significantly less than they got it, if they can help it, so the prices are here to stay.
Honestly, just emulate/flashcart/burn discs and save your money for the very few games for which that's not an option.
Why would you buy those old games? We didn't even buy them in their heyday and every kid in the neighbourhood had a moded console while that one kid with a CD burner and internet didn't need to ask his parents for pocket money anymore.
Just pirate away and use emulators.
Yes, it's a speculative bubble. Prices are unlikely to fall as far as you'd like, since I imagine a lot of copies are going to leave the market permanently when the crash hits, but I do expect the price to drop heavily once people realise they're just chasing the greater fool.
Try collecting for the Sega Saturn. I bought a pre-owned game just before "the event" for three figures as an investment (it is a renowned game too) and in two years it had at least doubled its money and its now approaching four figures. The way things are going, my humble collection will become my pension fund in a couple of decades time! There are still some bargains if you are prepared to be patient and bid but its increasingly becoming a collectors market where sense, logic and affordability no longer apply.
And the alternative of using SD cards is just as expensive because unlike the mainstream consoles, the Saturn carries a premium that the developers are prepared to charge, knowing how expensive the games are. Most people rediscovering the Saturn - all the people who were exclusively PlayStation and Nintendo 64 back in the day and are now seeing what it offered, particularly in Japan and its 2D fighters - just uses Mednafen, Yaba Sanshiro and other emulators.
Why not just emulate?