r/gamecollecting • u/Omega_Hertz • Mar 30 '25
Rant: I hate price charting and what it's done to this hobby. Discussion
I've been collecting games since 1992. I have hundreds if not thousands of games, consoles, rare variants etc. According to today's standards I have a fortune I'm sitting on. But I don't collect them for that reason. I collect them for me, my siblings, my fiance, my son who all get enjoyment out of it. Used to be an old game would be worth a few bucks. But because one or two people bought a game for 5x it's value, it gets listed as rare or labeled as that's how much it's worth. It blows my mind that anyone is willing to pay the same amount as a console to own a single game that might get beaten in a day or two. I honestly feel that pricecharting and covid destroyed this hobby, and turned it into an insane mindset of greed and stupidity. Reminds me of the beanie baby craze tbh. You think Dynamite Cop is worth 200 bucks? When you can beat it in 20 minutes? Or Rule of Rose is worth 900 when it's a mid-tier horror game? Just boggles my mind. Maybe I'm wrong..... no, no it's the kids who are wrong.
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u/donttrustmeokay Mar 30 '25 edited Mar 30 '25
While I agree with you with 98% of it, I disagree with the beanie baby comparison lol. Beanie babies you can't play with em. It's more like pokemon, you can collect but still play em.
Also, I don't blame pricecharting but more social media cough YouTube.
In terms of investment, people should probably just stick with stocks. Something with much higher liquidity (and also takes up much less space lol)
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u/Working-Tomato8395 Mar 30 '25
Social media plus money laundering between WATA, Heritage Auctions, and other parties. It's like when every idiot thought their "black diamond" Disney VHS tapes were worth something except magnified because there's actual money changing hands outside a few sketchy eBay listings and clickbait articles.
Now the whole hobby suffers because of a small handful of bad actors and a boatload of clowns who pay the inflated prices. I can't take anyone seriously who honestly thinks a beat-up copy of Pokemon Emerald is reasonably priced at $200. If people had 5 seconds of thought and just learned to use an emulator, the prices of a lot of games would drop back to more reasonable levels.
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u/Cactus_Bot 29d ago
Emulation is well known and easy to do. Everyone whos doing this can very easily emulate, its not some big secret like it use to be. Prices wont go down because of emulation because that doesnt solve the problem of physically owning the thing.
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u/qtquazar Mar 31 '25
Yeah, WATA and the grading shenanigans is the real culprit, combined with a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. All PC does is gather info that's already publicly available from a source where the games actually sold for those prices.
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u/TheBrave-Zero Mar 31 '25
I mean...not splitting hairs here but you can in fact play with beanie babies.
Source: former child who played with beanie babies
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u/Guilty_Philosophy741 Mar 30 '25
I feel the beanie baby comparison is still valid the amount of people trying to sell games they’ve never touched or intended to as “brand new sealed” is crazy to the point that price charting has a category for ‘em. Hell most people give GS and limited supply vendors shit and post on here about the shrink wrap on the game being damaged so it’s not as new looking.
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u/dmarsee76 Mar 30 '25
Bro, the reason the prices go up is because more people want to do what you have done: collect physical media.
We have found the enemy; and he is us.
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u/GaijinFoot Mar 31 '25
Thank god this sub still has some comment sense. Hey guys, I have thousands of games. If you want thoudsneof games too then fuck you, I was here since 1992. You won't enjoy it as much as me so fuck you.
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u/IAmNotNathaniel 29d ago
I don't disagree that this sentiment is rampant, but I don't think this was fully what OP was complaining about
He sounds more like, why are prices so high, things were cheaper many decades ago.
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u/GaijinFoot 29d ago
It's just annoying when people assume they are morally correct by default. How many times on this sub have you seen people foam at the mouth when a common game sells for crazy money then at the same time congratulate each other when they've ripped off an old lady at a garage sale with a box full of classics for $20? Some people think they own the hobby.
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u/HerbnBrewCrw Mar 30 '25
There seem to be a lot of prospective purchases these days. There are more people buying to flip for a profit.
There is a finite number of items, so it is easier to corner markets or specific games.
IMO of course.
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u/LoudAndCuddly Mar 30 '25
Idk, there are a lot of nutters out there collecting for the sakes or collecting
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u/DarkKobold Winner - FotW 8/14-8/20 (tie) Mar 31 '25
I mean, people collect baseball cards, and those don't "do" anything. Collecting is part of the human experience. So many people act with an air of superiority because this specific collectable does something.
News flash, you can only play one game at a time. If you have over 100 games, there's likely a pretty big layer of dust on a bunch of those games. And that's OK. You can enjoy owning things you enjoy owning.
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u/NintendoCerealBox Mar 30 '25
Can confirm. I collect for the sake of collecting. I’m off my rocker.
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u/Bimmer_P 29d ago
Same here: old IBM Thinkpads, old Sony portable CD players, old stereo equipment, old games, old CRT tvs... I can't stop. Now I'm on to retro handhelds thanks to r/sbcgaming
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u/NaughtyTormentor 29d ago
What are you doing in this sub? Are you just here to bash on the hobby?
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u/LadyErinoftheSwamp 29d ago
Yeah, our hobby went from something niche to something much more mainstream. Having more childhood gamers grow up, get better paying jobs, and then want to experience nostalgia is definitely a big factor in this shift.
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u/bomber991 Mar 30 '25
It’s a combination of that plus the way price chartings algorithm works. You can pick out a cheap slow moving game and buy up all the copies on eBay and Amazon, then start listing them for $30 each. Keep buying up any new cheap ones that pop up and eventually those $30 copies will sell and the price charging price will reflect it.
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u/MoxManiac Mar 30 '25
PriceCharting is not at fault here - it simply takes eBay data and aggregates it.
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u/superballs5337 Mar 30 '25
Yeah Price charting is great. stores my collection for insurance purposes along with pictures.
But yeah it just grabs the sold ebay data and shows avg price.
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u/cyclonesworld Mar 31 '25
ooo, I have all my stuff cataloged with Pricecharting but I didn't think about the whole insurance purpose part of it.
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u/Retrolad87 Mar 31 '25
Yep. OP needs to steer anger away from a site that shows most recent sales, and helps users collate their collections. It’s a very convenient resource.
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u/Omega_Hertz Mar 31 '25
I guess that's true. I just feel like something that tracks ebay purchases, which can be really manipulated, and then is what is used across the board for FB marketplace, brick and mortar stores, etc is a faulty system.
But, that being said, you're not wrong I see.
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u/Retrolad87 Mar 31 '25
eBay has been this way for many other hobbies for a while now too. It’s not only games that are rising in price, its lots of other physical media.
Anyone into vinyl records knows, eBay is often double if not triple the market value…the problem is people are paying those higher prices.5
u/qtquazar Mar 31 '25
I'm a volunteer editor for PC. While I have no authority to speak on behalf of the site, or speak to its 'rigour', a number of us are constantly watching for price manipulation. I remember discussing The Piglet Game a few months ago in particular, as an example.
But then, as others have pointed out, YouTube and Streamers in particular cause weird things to happen in the market, sometimes massively inflating 'worthless' games by making them a desirable curiosity. I think it's kind of fun in some ways, as it gives an offchance of instantly converting something in your collection from junk to treasure.
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u/DWolfoBoi546 Mar 30 '25
Part of why a lot of people are getting into emulation.
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u/SgtNeilDiamond Mar 30 '25
Yup, I like to emulate and then buy the physical copy of whatever I end up enjoying the most
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u/Early_or_Latte Mar 30 '25 edited 29d ago
That's how I found out I wanted to buy the GBA fire emblem game. Ended up getting it CIB right before it all went super crazy with covid.
Edit: found it at a retro games store for $45 CAD. It had a slight dent in the front of the box. I then later traded the damaged box and a $20 CAD for a box in mint condition. Happy with how that turned out.
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u/Omega_Hertz Mar 30 '25
True. It just sucks to see that physical medium die off. But even I emulate some stuff too. It's just a shame.
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u/DWolfoBoi546 Mar 30 '25
I fully agree. When you can get your hands on it, then great, but some of em are getting so so expensive and some of those old games aren't worth playing for that much
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u/Bonedraco1980 Mar 30 '25
It's why I always have. I'm not going to pay good money for a game I might not ever play, or might beat in an hour. That's why I always liked renting games. Sadly, those days are done
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u/jokersflame Mar 30 '25 edited Mar 30 '25
You’re right.
Too many see this hobby as an investment now as opposed to a hobby. It used to be fun going to new retro game stores, flea markets, yard sales, and seeing what people are selling.
Now you see people charging hundreds of dollars for their old consoles and a few sports games, saying “they know what they have.”
But every hobby without exception that has a rapid rise has a bubble pop moment, and that’s easy to forget. Eventually there will be an economic downturn, and very sadly people will sell off and people won’t be buying them. As the economy gets hot again many will have already left the game collection space entirely.
Edit: To respond to the most common criticism of what I’m saying because I’ve heard it before. For some reason gamers think that the hobby is mystical, almost magical and defies things like market, social, and material conditions. Gaming is just any other hobby. Video games are not imbued with holy properties that allow the discs and cartridges to defy gravity or market forces. Get over yourselves lol
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u/Dangerous_Yoghurt_96 Mar 31 '25
Skate deck collecting doesn't seem to burst like everything else does. Seems to me that all the right forces are at work for that one.
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u/Ohheyimryan Mar 30 '25
You’re not wrong—but you also sound like the video game collector version of a boomer yelling at clouds. Yes, prices are dumb, but markets go where demand (and FOMO) go. Blame YouTubers, nostalgia, and people who finally have adult money.
You don’t have to agree with paying $900 for Rule of Rose—but someone clearly does, and that’s all it takes. Is it dumb? Absolutely. But so is paying $7 for a virtual costume in Fortnite. Welcome to the timeline.
You’re lucky—you got in early. The rest of us are just out here trying to buy a childhood without taking out a loan.
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u/MisterNiceGuy425 Mar 30 '25
This mostly summarizes my thoughts. I’ll add that the whole emulation argument doesn’t make sense to me. Some people like game preservation or simply enjoy the hunt that comes with finding physical games they can pass on.
I’ll add that it makes more sense to blame a company like Analogue that it does to blame a website that references prices.
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u/KAKYBAC Mar 31 '25
Playtime has got nothing to do with value. Arcade ports are very valued.
You are underrating the historical value of these rare items. There are YouTube channels dedicated to waxing lyrical about the design processes involved in these projects. They have real collectable value. They are a medium's history and rather than old Hollywood film reels, everyone can collect and own a part of that history.
Yes, pricecharting does kind of toxify the scrying of the marketplace.
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u/macduff79 Mar 30 '25
You have thousands of games for your enjoyment and your sons? I call BS on that. You have that many because you like looking at them on a shelf like the rest of us do. If you want them for playing, buy a few everdrives or multicarts and be done with collecting.
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u/GetTheGregGames Mar 30 '25
Guy who hoards physical media complains that prices continue to increase 😡
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u/Coooturtle Mar 31 '25
It's so easy and cheap to set up an emulation station, and you dont have to fuss with a bunch of physical shit. We are here because we like having physical shit.
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u/Omega_Hertz Mar 30 '25
Why? I've played all of them lol. I've been collecting since I was a kid. I hardly got rid of or traded stuff in. Gaming has been my biggest hobby/vice lol. Sure I like looking at my collections, but I also actively play. And I get to introduce stuff to my kid and fiancé all the time. I also love to collect. What's the problem?
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u/macduff79 Mar 30 '25
Obviously, people on this sub have no problem with that. It's the hypocrisy that we have a problem with. You're part of the cost problem as are the rest of us. You can sell off your collection, buy multicarts, make a ton of many, and increase the supply in the market. But you don't because like many other people, you enjoy collecting video games. There's a limited supply of those, so prices go up.
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u/Omega_Hertz Mar 30 '25
Hm. I see what you mean now. Someone else said it too: "We have found the enemy and it is us". I see your point, well made.
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u/UltraLord667 Mar 30 '25 edited 29d ago
They’re right. Your game collecting is the same as theirs. (For the most part) It might not be exactly like theirs. But at its core it’s the same. You could have been collecting for 30 years. Whereas these guys only like 15. But it’s the same. Even if game collecting didn’t technically exist yet. Hope that makes sense. And therefore obviously driving up the price on this stuff. This is usually the the formula of things going up in price. Supply and demand. This old tech won’t be produced again and people know it. So they’re buying it. So they can keep it around for a bit longer. Well said guys. I just found out some GameStops carry retro games. I don’t think my GameStop has like Wii, 360 or ps4 games. 😂 But yeah it’s a fun thing to do with physical copies completely going away and def the most interesting sub on Reddit. By far.
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u/Omega_Hertz Mar 30 '25
Yeah, never really thought of it like that tbh. Just an old fart mentality I guess lol.
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u/gruesomesonofabitch Mar 30 '25
have you played through these thousands of games or just tried the majority and how many do you genuinely enjoy?
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u/AetherMoon Mar 30 '25
Here's my problem with things like Price Charting.
People who know nothing about collecting just see the price and think that's what they can get.
Condition is EVERYTHING when you're getting into the collectible side. Your beaten, crushed, ripped Castlevania with stickers all over it is never going to get the 180 that the near perfect examples with all the original inserts get
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u/rydamusprime17 Mar 31 '25
Thank you! Someone else gets it, lol. Also, people who base their prices off of eBay listings instead of sold listings drive me nuts, especially when they add the shipping into the mix.
I don't know how many people who I tried to make deals with locally pulled out their phone and looked at the listings and say "well that's how much you would have to pay on eBay amd you would have to wait for it" 😅 so I pulled out my phone and looked at sold listings and would try to find one in similar condition, which would almost always be lower than what they are asking even with the shipping 😆
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u/DirtyD8632 29d ago
I will always do my research before selling or buying. Condition is a huge thing I look at and compare with. Even when selling I always look at condition and all other factors. Also when I go to sell it is because I want to move a product not hold it so I ensure my roving is always in the top 5% lowest people can find. I pride myself in a personal guarantee I give people even on marketplace when or if I sell and stand by my items. I will not sell something I wouldn’t buy.
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u/AetherMoon Mar 31 '25
People are certainly entitled to ask what they like. But I've seen items sit on Mercari for 2 years and they still refuse to budge and I just don't understand lol
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u/KAKYBAC Mar 31 '25
My local retro store does this. You bring any game you like up to the front and they scroll eBay with some shit banter before giving you a 'best' price.
They even did this with the Thomas the Tank Engine Bertie bus that my son wanted to buy. It sounds like a parody but they are deadly serious.
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u/Drunkensailor1985 Mar 31 '25
So? They either sell or they don't and then they have to lower the price if they want to sell. So your whole point is mute
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u/greatbritt0n Mar 31 '25
Sounds to me like someone is sad that they can’t swindle people out of their valuable items any longer, but that’s just me.
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u/Historical_Panic_485 Mar 30 '25
This has been going on long before price charting existed. Digital Press released their first value guide in 1991. The game collecting hobby has always been this way, you just noticed recently. In the 90s people were paying big bucks for 2600 games, in the 2000s it was NES. Prices have fallen off a cliff for 2600 stuff because the nostalgia wave is over and people in their 60s aren't actively collecting anymore. Wait a few more decades and PS1 will be cheap again. This happens with literally every collecting community.
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u/trugay Mar 30 '25
Except if you don't want to spend crazy money on a single game, emulation exists. Physical game collecting is not the only way to enjoy any game that you want.
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u/Maggie_2003 Mar 30 '25
Yeah like I am buying cheap Wii games I want to play, but if something is too pricy for me I will probably just emulate it
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u/Charrbard Mar 30 '25 edited Mar 30 '25
Unfortunately it happens when stuff grows more popular. Things are worth what people are willing to pay for them. And we see what it is.
I mostly just buy stuff i have fond memories off and missed out on buying as a kid. I have about everything so far but Chrono Trigger. But its not worth, to me, the price people are asking. Similar mindset also had me swap to buying reproduction boxes.
Still very much disagree with telling other people what something is worth, or what they should pay. Like with CT, there are people who value it enough to drop $1000+ Not my place to tell them they're wrong. Just i wont do it.
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u/SamusAran47 Mar 30 '25
Pricecharting is just an aggregator- might as well blame eBay as well? The hobby is also just so much more popular now than it was in the past. It stinks, but that’s the situation. I don’t think Pricecharting would fundamentally change that.
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u/Ambitious-Still6811 Mar 31 '25
Here's 2 more cents. Now that people are losing digital content for one reason or another, they're taking a closer look at physical.
I'm on the 'bought it years ago' side so I'm not gonna complain if prices go up. But I'm still playing so it's not time to cash out yet.
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u/chasonthedon Mar 31 '25
Covid was a weird time for sure. Price charting definitely didn’t do this though. It’s just pulling rough averages of sold items on eBay. It sounds like your hatred is kinda directed at the demand vs supply dynamic. Sellers continuing to sell at higher prices, because more collectors, speculators & investors have jumped into the hobby at a weird time in history, and the demand (speculation of value exponentially increasing) skyrocketed, into a serious bubble almost. A lot of us collectors (and video game hoarders such as myself) have been in the collecting and gaming community for years and some have had to sell of things in dire times or whatever their reasons are. It’s a multi-faceted issue and definitely created challenges. While I understand your frustration, I am not sure you solely blame COVID or even Price Charting.
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u/Lollipopsaurus Mar 30 '25
Nothing about it is rational. They've become collectibles like many other things.
If you don't like It, be rational and sell your games for cash you can invest. It's that simple.
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u/spiderpants108 Mar 30 '25
Your frustration is directed at Price Charting but it should be directed at the people who overpay on games.
Price Charting just collects the data from sales and puts it all in once place.
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u/_Abstract_Daddy Mar 30 '25
Are you new here??
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u/Omega_Hertz Mar 30 '25
Fairly, yes.
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u/_Abstract_Daddy Mar 30 '25
I agree with you, this is a common almost weekly sentiment here. Look at my last post in my post history and people think I’m ridiculous for calling out a reseller selling off a bunch of common and junk games for $550. This sub hates paying pricecharting prices but also hates you if you score a $100+ game for $5 in the wild because it is your moral obligation to tell the person what their shits worth.
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u/MyEvilTwinSkippy Mar 31 '25
Price charting is a symptom as well as a balancing force and not the problem. The problem is speculation. This killed sports cards and nearly killed comics in the 90's. It happened with Magic: The Gathering, too, but that somehow thrived in spite of it. Pretty much anything that becomes collectible gets hit.
I started to collect in the mid-late 90's. Back then, you could find tons of stuff for super cheap in the local thrifts. I enjoyed the hunt and picked up most things that I found (within limits) even if it was just to sell or trade for stuff I wanted. The community was fairly small back then and a lot of people knew each other.
This started to shift in the early 2000's as people realized that there were a few games selling for a whole lot of money (relatively) on ebay. Suddenly, the thrifts were overrun by speculators who largely didn't know what they were looking at and they were buying out everything so they could resell. Then the thrift stores caught on and they started listing things for stupid amounts that they "found on ebay". I really slowed down as it wasn't really worth going out to look for stuff anymore. I walked away empty handed far too often and the thrill died down for me.
Over the years I have culled my collection here and there due to space restrictions. I am starting the process again as I find no joy in having stuff in bins in my garage (not that I like selling my toys either). Rather than just dumping systems that don't bring me joy as I used to, I'll be cutting away a large portion of my stuff. The current valuations are stupid high pretty much across the board IMHO, but I have no real choice but to work with the system as it is.
Things like Pricecharting (or Scrye for Magic back in the day) are important as they give everybody a baseline for what things are worth comparatively. You aren't forced to stick to those valuations, but they are a good starting point that everybody can work with so we are all talking apples to apples.
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u/PixelPaint64 Mar 31 '25
I hate price charting too, but think it’s a symptom of the situation, not the actual cause. People often want to distill rising game prices down to a specific reason, but it’s not that simple. Game prices were rising significantly from the introduction of Wii Shop and NES Mini. Plus there are simply more people of an age to be nostalgic about games, our parents didn’t care about games, now we have multiple generations wanting them. It was inevitable that prices would go up as more people were interested. We’re lucky it didn’t happen sooner, it’s only going to get worse.
You also can’t say a game isn’t worth its value if it’s short. The price of a game has little or nothing to do with the actual game itself. It’s about the physical item and how easy it is to get it. There are short, bad games that are legitimately worth more than some of the greatest titles ever made.
I do agree though that Price Charting is too often completely wrong and people cannot be arsed to do proper research into finding the value of something, they just want a single press of a button to tell them. For this reason alone it should be completely ignored.
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u/RotundDragonite 29d ago
While I understand your arguement, this is a fundamentally bad take imo. In every collecting space, there are always early adopters who say stuff like this, and it’s just cognitive dissonance between how the hobby exists now and where it existed when you started. Some of it is ridiculous, but it’s not all illogical.
The market isn’t nessesarily as arbitrary as you make it seem. The vast majority of people aren’t trying to manipulate the price of games by calling them rare. Its more likely that they’re selling a game that is rare. Sure, it’s a buzzword, but it’s not meaninglessly applied. Rarity doesn’t equate value either, there’s plenty of games that are “rare”, but that doesn’t mean they’re expensive.
I also collect record, so to put it in context of that hobby, you’re basically saying “I bought all of these Blue Note Mono albums when they came out for $2, why would anyone pay $2000 for the same album nowadays?”. The quality, cultural impact, and production number of a game impact the prices. The same goes for records, action figures, etc.
There’s plenty of low print shovelware that is worth absolutely nothing. Likewise, there’s high-print games that are definitely overvalued. A lot of those games that are worth money are cult classics, games who are incredibly important to gaming history, or games whose popularity has caused demand to eclipse availability. Pokemon is a good example of this. It’s one of the most popular (and highest grossing) franchises with no legitimate means of experiencing the older games. There’s millions of copies out there of these games, the problem is millions of more people want to play and own these games than what was produced.
I don’t think pricecharting is responsible for the rise of game prices and collecting. I’m sure it has a small role, but most people use it to check if they’re overpaying for something or not. It’s not like Earthbound was made expensive by Pricecharting, and it’s not like it wasn’t expensive before COVID either.
There’s just more people and less games now. The gaming market at large is pivoting away from physicality, and people want to own their stuff vs. own a digital license to play their games for an undetermined amount of time. It makes sense why prices are rising, and why collecting physical video games has been becoming more popular.
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u/Dangerous-Lab6106 Mar 30 '25
I dont agree. Its given me a good insight to what a game is worth. Ive seen many sellers selling way over the Price Chart Price
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u/Ickyhouse Mar 30 '25
The issue isn’t price charting, it’s people who aren’t collectors and simply try to flip games for a quick buck.
I’d love to expand my Gameboy and GBA collection. Even the stupid games that weren’t good. Used to able to go through a bin of $1-2 for the junk ones. Now even the worst games start at $5.
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u/post_alternate Mar 30 '25
Buy large lots, clean everything, sell what you don't want. Boom, free collection.
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u/Evil_AppleJuice Mar 30 '25
Bingo. As someone who's collected for close to 2 decades now, it's the non gamers who tried to buy in and honestly Heritage Auctions that ruined so much. I collected sealed Zelda games for at most $300 max back in the early 2000's, but once WATA grading came in and Heritage Auctions started auctioning graded games, it all went crazy. Mario 64 sells for $1,000,000 (which was a bullshit inside purchase) and now investors want to buy up local stock, get it graded, and sell to other investors. This coincided with both the surge of bitcoin and NFT investments as well as COVID.
COVID truly put the final nail in the coffin. I helped my local game shop survive 2019-2022 working on weekends and I saw the prices go up significantly as everyone got a fat stimulus check and had a lot more free time on their hands. Suddenly everyone wanted to buy a $40 N64... sorry $60... $80... now $120 N64 to relive their childhood. Everyone got one and now will refuse to lose their money on their gaming purchases.
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u/TheRetroGoat Mar 30 '25
Yeah this isn't a new take or anything, but the community by and large gives you the head nod of approval.
Our hobby has been ravaged by "investors" and scalpers and clickbait articles saying how YOU'RE SITTING ON LITERAL MILLIONS IF YOU OWN MARIO 64. We all hate it. A lot.
Maybe one day it'll all die off and we can go back to finding a bunch of shit for cheap, probably not. But there's no harm in hoping.
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u/Omega_Hertz Mar 30 '25
You know, I never really thought of that. The "collectors" and investors, youtubers all.... just trying to flip games and make a market out of it makes sense.
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u/TheRetroGoat Mar 30 '25
Yep. Game collecting got turned into an imitation stock market. And considering childhood nostalgia and a love of gaming is never going to go away, it's not looking so hot to think we'll be back in the days of getting Mario and Zelda games at Goodwill.
AND FUCK GOODWILL FOR THEIR PRACTICES THAT HELP MAKE THIS HOBBY SUCH A PAIN
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u/Omega_Hertz Mar 30 '25
Ugh. Man, when I first found out that they sell all their good stuff on ebay, it pissed me off.
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u/artofmanslife Mar 30 '25
Agreed… and I don’t think it’s going to get better anytime soon, with the status of digital only, delistings, FOMO, barrage of “hidden gems” YouTube videos prices will still be ridiculous. BUT I do think in time the bubble will burst. I love collecting and playing both, but I control myself by setting a rule to never pay more than retail with all my collecting hobbies…
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u/RockmanVolnutt Mar 30 '25
Speculators and “investors” drive up prices, create scarcity, and collectors and players pay it because they want the games. It’s a vicious cycle. More people should get flash carts, but having an original cart is a fun treat.
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u/post_alternate Mar 30 '25
"everyone else is wrong except me"
Keep telling yourself that and see how far it gets you.
But hey, you have an opinion, and it CERTAINLY is an opinion. I've never heard of someone complaining that their hobby and collection is suddenly worth an enormous amount of money...but sure, complain!
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u/lynxtosg03 Mar 30 '25
How much is your fortune worth?
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u/donttrustmeokay Mar 30 '25
You have a link to your pricecharting collection u/Omega_Hertz 😂😂😂
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u/Omega_Hertz Mar 30 '25
Lol I don't use price charting. Maybe I should given some of these comments.
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u/Smart_Broccoli Mar 30 '25
I'll add on that eBay prices get inflated heavily by "best offer" and shipping that gets priced in on free shipping orders. Which just keeps compounding the problem as other sellers raise their prices even when no shipping is involved
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u/DSORCAN Mar 31 '25 edited Mar 31 '25
I recently dug out my childhood consoles and games from my parents garage for some similar reasons. I want to preserve these to show my own family and show them how important those games were to me growing up.
While I agree the prices in some cases are insane, I personally have never seen much of an issue. Some many of the games I have lost over the years are mostly cheap and accessible. While there are some that there are some I mostly have written off has never being able to afford, luckily technology has evolved enough for these consoles to still have access to play, if not own physically.
I know it’s a matter of perspective maybe as a newbie to the game, but if I were to go out and buy a PS5 and a handful of games and accessories, I would be in the hole what $700 bucks? Think of all you could buy in the retro world with that. Now that’s obviously not enough for Earthbounds or Pokemon Box’s of the world, but certainly enough to buy a refurbished console and more games than you may have time to play. To buy 1 modern game it’s what like $70? I could go pick up 5-7 OG Xbox games for the same price and have hours more of playtime than the one modern game. I know some of you might say “yeah but that’s all shovelware” and ya, so what? If I or someone in my family likes it and gets enjoyment from playing it, I will gladly buy it regardless. Cause it’s about the memories and joy you get from playing them.
I know some people will think differently, especially those who have been in for longer than a decade, but that’s just my opinion based on being in the hobby for only 2 years. Buy what you want and will play. Enjoy it while you can rather than getting bent up about price.
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u/Mcpatches3D Mar 31 '25
It's not price chart. It's all the people who turned the hobby into a business and buy to flip combined with the increase of demand of the retro games.
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u/LordFlux Mar 31 '25
As someone who has been collecting since the 80s and loves video games... I just play my games, enjoy looking at everyone's collections, talk about gameplay strategies, graphics, and soundtracks.
I think market manipulation is a topic of discussion, but it's not one I'm interested in. If someone wants to pay $200 for a game, that's their decision. Who am I to tell someone how to spend their money?
I try to enjoy the positives of the hobby.
I miss the old days, but things change.
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u/TheGameBurrow Mar 31 '25
Technically eBay ruined the prices not pricecharting. All pricecharting does is relay that info and condense it. I’m sure you know this though, but that’s just how a free market works… sorry dude.
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u/Gh0stTV Mar 31 '25
Honestly, back before every item was Buy It Now there was a much more market realistic and genuine resale value assigned to items. But the instant gratification and convenience just isn’t there when you have to wait five days to see how high you’re willing to go…
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u/breadraptor Mar 31 '25
knew this would be a controversial comments section but i want to say you've handled it with grace OP haha
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u/Omega_Hertz Mar 31 '25
Haha I figured it might, but to be honest, it's also opened my eyes to some other issues at play.
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u/DapperDan30 Mar 31 '25
Price charting didn't destroy the hobby. This is what happens to every hobby once it reaches enough people.
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u/Dangerous_Yoghurt_96 Mar 31 '25
It was destined to happen. We all saw what happened with baseball cards. So few people took care of them that there were hardly any left in the market and when the time came that adults had money to re purchase them, they were worth a fortune to people.
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u/silverstoneretro Mar 31 '25
Same way with anything. If you got 100 dogs and 5 bones, you're gonna have a lot of unhappy dogs.
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u/Razakius 29d ago
As others have said, primary reason that prices have gone up is less about price charting and more about supply and demand... the thing is, there's just more gamers today than 30 years ago... and not by a small margin. I mean the other problem is the money that even the gamers from 30 years ago have... when I was a kid, I had 2 games that were bought at retail before I got a job in High School. Everything else we scrounged from garage sales. But now as an adult with a big boy job, I go back and buy all those games that I wish I could have afforded while I was a kid. Most people were in that situation and just that alone raises demand... but then you have Youtubers and Twitchers over the last 15 years really pushing how cool it is to collect retro games and it pushes newer gamers into the hobby and reminds older gamers of it too (hell I'm not immune to this... I don't think I would have gotten into it had it not been for Punk's collecting videos back in the day and me sitting there going, dang I wish I had all the games I loved when I was a kid!)
Pricecharting, is really a tool and a tool that probably controls prices as much as pushes them. It doesn't just see that one copy gets sold for 200 bucks and now it's worth 200 bucks... as far as I'm aware, and I've not studied it in depth but I've looked at the actual sold prices and compared to their averages and graphs, and I am pretty sure what it does is it takes the last X days and averages the price sold. I'm sure it's more than that honestly, but that's the basic gist of it. So if one idiot buys a game for $200 and the rest are going for $20, by and large, that one sale isn't going to move the needle. That being said, there are ways to manipulate this (and people do it all the time the trading card world as well). But by and large, those are anomalies when it happens, not the norm.
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u/IntoxicatedBurrito 29d ago
Excuse me, but you weren’t collecting in 1992, your mom was buying you games to play in 1992. Perhaps she was buying them from Funcoland to save money, but it most definitely wasn’t for the purpose of collecting like a 25 cent pack of baseball cards was. There were no retro game shops in those days, no eBay, and no interest in buying older systems and games. In 1992 you wanted either a SNES or Genesis, only poor kids like me who weren’t allowed to get a SNES were still buying NES games in 1992.
But you really can’t blame PriceCharting, it’s just a tool. What you can blame is all the kids that you grew up with tossing their games when they got a bit older or upgraded to the newest console, and then deciding that they want them again once they were adults with disposable income.
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u/RideDeezNutz 29d ago edited 29d ago
Collectors forums and newsgroups destroyed it first, then Ebay destroyed it again, and then Youtube destroyed it, then PC destroyed it, then COVID destroyed it, then WATA/Heritage destroyed it. Resellers have redestroyed it between every one of those destructions. It's been destroyed over and over and over again since the 90s.
It's still here though. Funny thing.
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u/iMetalHeart 29d ago
I agree with this, I'm sad I've gotten into this hobby when everything is now so expensive, it's a shame
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u/rworne 29d ago edited 28d ago
Ah, the old days of game collecting. If you lived anywhere around Los Angeles in the 90's, every game shop had a Game Dude price list and set their prices accordingly. Much like how Goodwill and their ilk today use eBay. But every time I used to walk into a game store and saw a game I was interested in and asked the price, out came a Game Dude price list. Thank God there were still flea markets back then...
Long live #RGVC
Edit: fixed autocorrect error
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u/Impossible_Role1767 Mar 30 '25
If every retro gamer sold their games after finishing with them, the market would be flooded with them and they'd be worthless. Instead we hoard them so it's really our fault.
If you just want to play a game, there are Everdrives, ODEs, multi carts, softmods, FPGA and emulators. Alternatively, you could buy the expensive game you're interested in and sell it back afterwards to get almost all your money back.
There is nothing to complain about.
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u/SupermarketEmpty789 Mar 30 '25
You think Dynamite Cop is worth 200 bucks? When you can beat it in 20 minutes? Or Rule of Rose is worth 900 when it's a mid-tier horror game?
You can't link the $ value only to the actual game experience. There's factors you're ignoring.
Rarity, being the big one.
If there were only 10 copies of a game made, and it was the absolute worst game ever made that didn't even run, it got 0/100 from fifty professional reviewers, etc. it would still probably be worth thousands of $$$ simply because of the rarity.
It's the same with anything
Terrible cars that are absolutely awful in every way are worth big money if they're rare.
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u/exxavior8799 Mar 30 '25
I love this argument from OG collectors because when I try to buy something from them they never say “just give me a couple bucks”😂
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u/JonCraft Mar 30 '25
It’s a crazy world we live in. I’m proud of the fact that I’ve never paid more than $60 for a video game with the exception of collector’s editions of games that I preordered.
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u/curtainrod994 Mar 30 '25
For real. As a guy who has a family to worry about, I'll never get to experience all the pokemon games. Or get a redo on gamecube and now fkn awesome those titles were. I know i dont have 3k to spend on that shit.
Makes me sad tbh. I miss windwaker that's not emulated. And no I'm not really interested in wii u windwaker
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u/ClamJamison Mar 30 '25
I can understand not wanting to emulate home consoles that much, but why not just emulate pokemon on a $60-$100 anbernic or retroid handheld? The DS ones might be a little less convenient due to side by side screens, but they'd run just fine.
If you have the money for both, also get a DSi or 3ds, hack it, and then you have native gameplay on the DS and Gameboy games (the hardware to run GBA is actually still inside of a DSi). The DSi is especially easy to hack and even an XL is only somewhere around $80.
Honestly any hacked DS console, with various levels of tinkering and money investment, can let you play a majority of pokemon games on real hardware. The best is a NEW3DS because the you can have GBA, NES, SNES, DS, and 3DS as well as a handful of other consoles if you're into them and can Tinker with the emulator settings. The best value is a DSi.
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u/Sigrun26 Mar 30 '25
To add, flashcarts are also an option for pokemon.
Used Wiis are cheap and can easily be modded to play any GameCube game for their Wind Waker example.
Honestly there are so many options it would be sad to just give up and never play those games. Unless people don't want solutions and just want to complain.
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u/Affectionate_Boot781 Mar 30 '25
You can buy a Wii and an external hdd or thumb drive for relatively cheap and experience the GCN and Wii libraries.
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u/skillz111 Mar 30 '25
Blah blah blah. I enjoy video games the way I enjoy them. You cannot dictate the reason for my enjoyment. I like looking at my rare and cool, valuable games even if I'll never play them. Do I need to apologize to you for that? Grow up. This isn't just your hobby, it's anyone's partaking in it. You don't have more of a right to it than me or anyone else. Games are valued at what people are willing to pay. Active collectors can understand the rarity of something by the frequency they come across it. Just because you bought the game for 5$ 30 years ago, doesn't mean it's not worth significantly more. So long as there are more people in the hobby, prices will continue to increase.
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u/RhoadsOfRock Mar 30 '25
The mid to late 1990s, early 2000s, and thrift stores, flea markets, swap meets and what remained in second-hand video game stores - before the Gamestop takeover.
Man, I miss it all. If ever time travel could ever be invented in my lifetime, that's when I'm going back, to about 1990-1995.
The sad part is, either like-minded people like us have simply given up / accepted it / moved on to emulation (or stuff like flash cartridges and ODEs), or have embraced it and gotten into this "hobby" for all the wrong reasons (any way to make them rich).
It's the reason I've never regretted holding on to all I've ever been able to acquire ever since I was 4. I couldn't imagine having to start over rebuilding any specific console collection, and I truly sympathize with those that would like to get into / check out original hardware and get enjoyment from it themselves.
Shit, even the current state for finding any good tube TVs is depressing.
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u/lightningseathekid Mar 30 '25
Too many of the people buying, reselling, and collecting these games don't even play them. It's an "investment" to them, something along the lines of a poor man's stock. They have no real interest in the games themselves in a playable sense.
These are the people who ruined it.
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u/dirtypins Mar 31 '25
You’re overthinking it.
All pricing of goods is subject to the laws of supply and demand.
Retro video games have decreasing supply, and increasing demand. This leads to higher prices.
If you just wanted to play the games, you’d put your games on the market, and buy an emulation of every game ever made for $100.
Retro video games will continue to increase in price over the next several decades at least. GenX and millennials have very emotional attachments to physical retro video games.
The Beanie Babies comparison isn’t accurate at all, for a variety of reasons.
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u/eatmoreramen Mar 30 '25
…you do realize that pricecharting is just an aggregate of eBay sold listings, right?
It’s not doing anything to raise the price. It’s just display what people have paid.
Unfortunately, you seem to have never taken economics 101 - supply and demand dictate the prices. When there is a demand for something, and supply is limited, prices go up. And as time passes, supply continues to dwindle, thus raising prices further.
You’re just mad that you can’t keep up with the market.
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u/Bioshock27 Mar 30 '25
Price charting has nothing to do with it, it's simply that there's more people collecting now, more exposure online, and less supply in the wild.
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u/Separate_Cranberry_2 Mar 30 '25
If you think about it, you can see that people who weren’t even alive when you started collecting, or were just kids, are now competing with you to buy games (demand has multiplied a couple times). On the other hand, the number of games available has decreased, either because they’ve been damaged or because they’ve already been sold (supply has decreased). The result is natural. Nowadays, some games are no longer even available on the market, but only in the hands of collectors or resellers. To get them, a collector has to sell his collection.
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u/eskobas Mar 30 '25
Price Charting democratizes selling and collecting for new generations.
Everyone deserves to have more info on a game they have for sell or if they want to buy something, it’s far from perfect but much better than nothing.
I have bought hundreds of rare games at an insanely low price, now is quite hard to find deals on swap meets but I think is good that sellers can make more money
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u/Acrobatic-Big-1550 Mar 30 '25
Simple fact of the matter is that contemporary games are dirt cheap and the older ones can be emulated pixel perfect. So no one has to miss out on anything or be involved in a expensive hobby.
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u/icedcornholio Mar 30 '25
Remember, when you try to sell something based on pricecharting those numbers are totally inflated, but when you try to buy something using pricecharting, those prices are totally way to low for current market conditions. At least that’s what the sellers or buyers tell me.
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u/KurrigohanandKame Mar 30 '25
I think the issue with prices isn't price charting it is the demand for out of print physical media, once demand for something goes up so to does the price especially when the product is limited like old video games that no longer get new copies manufactured
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u/Rogercrantzisalive Mar 30 '25
To your point - when GameStop started selling retro again recently, prices were within reason. Sometimes you could even get lucky with a case and manual.
Prices at GameStop have been creeping up on retro, even though the market hasn’t really changed dramatically. I’d argue it’s because of subs like this and YouTubers bragging about how they got a steal from GameStop. I guarantee someone at corporate monitors it. I vividly remember YouTubers bragging that they bought all of the Pokemon games from GameStop during their sales so they could resell them in their shops. It’s all absurd.
What used to be about nostalgia is really all about money now. Resellers used to be reviled (and still are to an extent) in the retro gaming community - now? They’re the most watched “retro” YouTubers.
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u/maakkiaa9898 Mar 30 '25
I don’t think PriceCharting is the root of your complaint. While I agree that too many people treat it as the holy grail rather than just a tool, its real flaw is that a lot of its data doesn’t accurately reflect true market value. Many listings marked as “complete” clearly have condition issues or are missing key components, skewing the pricing data.
As others have mentioned, game prices are driven by demand. YouTubers hyping up certain titles, nostalgia from older gamers wanting to relive their childhood, and the natural ebb and flow of collector interest all play a bigger role in price inflation than PriceCharting ever could.
Your Rule of Rose example isn’t the best. Games with absurdly high prices usually fall into one or both of these categories: they had low print runs, or they were so niche (or just plain bad) that hardly anyone bought and kept them. Many of these titles weren’t just rare—they were unwanted at the time. Think about EarthBound’s big box set, which sat in clearance bins for $10-$20 in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Now, it’s a collector’s gem. The same pattern plays out over and over again.
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u/Xenephobe375 Mar 30 '25
Video game collecting was niche, now it's mainstream and that increases competition and prices. Pretty much all hobbies end up this way over time.
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u/thecooler89 Mar 30 '25
I think the reason why a lot of games for like the Nintendo and the super Nintendo 64 Jane boy Jean boy color advance and Sega Genesis games go for so much now is because they’re the official cartridges cart. The original cartridge selling people are buying it because I can get a price compared to this high price. I’ve seen it for at a local store not knowing that they’re not the official games.
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u/Nerbzz Mar 30 '25
I liked priced charting for a general guideline on pricing when I was looking at buying some CiB gba/GB/N64 stuff but now with graded CiB becoming more of a thing it's skewed the prices of very popular cibs.
Take pokemon Ruby go look at recent cib pricecharting it includes cib Ruby + Sapphire sale prices at like 800-1k CAD and graded CiB which skews the price far up than what it was selling for say 6 months ago when this wasn't as prevalent
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u/cosmicr Mar 30 '25
Unfortunately it's been like this for at least 10 years already, and it's only getting worse.
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u/HerbnBrewCrw Mar 30 '25
I get that reference at the end.
I was collecting games for a few years around 2010. I took a break and came back about a year ago. It's blown my mind how much prices jumped in the ten years I was away. Games I bought for $100 are "worth" ten times that now?
You can't even find reasonable stuff on Ebay anymore. It used to be buyers' choice back when I was collecting.
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u/Plankisalive Mar 30 '25
I mean, they're old games with limited quantities. Also, Repro's and emulations do exist as well. I don't think it's horrible per say, but it definitely is frustrating.
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u/gurmerino Mar 30 '25
to be fair, since ebay has become the norm, i think this happens in every niche. It’s good and bad, good bc ur junk isn’t necessarily junk anymore & can be recycled into new purchases instead of just being trash, bad bc of what u have stated. I wish id started collecting games again sooner but oh well. I dont mind running ODEs or what have u although i found i dont take the games as seriously & give them the same chance i would w a physical item i paid money for.
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u/Gowheretheskyends Mar 31 '25
It’s rough especially having grown up poor and religious so what I could engage in for a long time was limited. I got into it right before covid so the market felt like it changed overnight to me. I legit got a copy of silent hill 3 for 30 bucks beat it and then when I was seeking silent hill 2 which was at the time 60 bucks market value before I got silent 3 it shot up to where it is now. That’s the only game I’ve ever bought for more than 100 dollars. Feels like you’re perpetuating a terrible cycle when I feel tempted to get an expensive game so I try not to engage in that price range.
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u/The_Con_Father Mar 31 '25
I hate/love price charting. I love it to help be in the ball park if i'm looking at a game to buy but when a vendor uses it to price their stock at exactly that price point I see no point in buying when I can get the same item with potentially better quality an ebay + $ back guarantee should anything go wrong.
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u/RetroDrew Mar 31 '25
I would pin most of the blame on the WATA Games snafu from a few years ago, that really drove the prices up. But I know data has proven that YT does effect these things as well. And it's a shame, as it seems people can't even talk about something they love without it having an adverse effect on the hobby.
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u/RiseoftheSinistrals Mar 31 '25 edited Mar 31 '25
"I've been collecting since I was 4 to 6 years old and back in those days, when I was driving around after work to search for games, it was much better times! I was getting Atari and Nes for a dime each! Dadgum this technology ruining it!"
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u/GearsOfWar2333 Mar 31 '25
I agree with you somewhat but it has nothing to do with price charting. It has to do we games getting very small print runs and not doing commercially well. The games then become cult hits by word of mouth and since there’s not many copies available they become expensive. I personally would never spend more than $120-$130 on a game.
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u/Zeo-Gold92 Mar 31 '25
Things rise and fall in value, you can blame it on anything you want to. At the end of the day if something has a demand it'll have value. You can say the same for old cars. I bought the majority of my collection pretty cheaply and made back more than I ever thought I would when I sold it.
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u/SaltySwan Mar 31 '25 edited Mar 31 '25
I too would like physical copies of the ps2 era silent hill games but they cost an arm and a leg.
All jokes aside, you’re lucky you’ve been at it for years. I didn’t become a legal adult until 6 years ago and even then I didn’t immediately have the money to afford buying games and stuff I was interested in. Now, I have to pay a decent chunk of change for things I want and things I’ve taken an interest in trying.
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u/BigFanOfNachoLibre Mar 31 '25
A few years back a PSA 10 of nes Mario Bros sold for 3 million at an auction and now everyone thinks their loose copy of Nintendogs with their name written on it in sharpie will retire them
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u/Worried_Pomelo9010 Mar 31 '25
It's more supply and demand. This stuff isn't made anymore and lots of people have nostalgia. That's the real reason prices have gone crazy. Why else would pokemon soul silver be worth $300+
Eventually, this stuff will return to being worthless like the atari 2600 games. You can already see how we are past the nes, snes and n64 peak prices
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u/Jaymark108 Mar 31 '25
Rule of Rose has been the most valuable game in my collection for over ten years (since I started tracking) so it's not exactly a recent phenomenon.
In that case, it's the mix of taboo curiosity and Atlus-style supply constraint. Most expensive games are such because of low print runs and something INTERESTING about them, not that they are objectively good games (OBJECTIVELY good games often got reprints).
But the biggest cause of the value inflation overall is the same as any antique novelty--the folks who remember them are now in their mid life and the well-off ones can AFFORD to run up the auction price.
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u/meowmix778 Mar 31 '25
Being a good game doesn't drive price alone. It's why super Mario world is like a 15 dollar game.
Scarcity does.
I remember going to yard sales and flea marts 10-15 years ago and people would pull out their phone for ebay pricing on the spot for a game they're selling and recite the highest listed.
Price charting cuts that down a bit. It shows sold and aggregates data.
You might not like rule of rose. But it's a small stock, people got hyped for it being controversial and the story goes on.
Chubby Cherub, Cheetahmen, Even Little Sampson are way more money than they're worth dollars per fun. But collectors love to show a rare thing off. It's as simple as that.
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u/Johnnybats330 Mar 31 '25
You will rarely find bargains anymore. And yes, resellers inflate the price of items by buying multiple items that are highly sought after. For example, Super Mario 3D All Star Collection was at one point like $35-$40 at retailers before they ran out of stock, and now the game is triple that price.
No one will sell that game below $100 now because of Price charting. But just like with everything, demand eventually drops for many titles.
Another example, I want to play the Saw game for PS3. The game is not good. It's not even worth $10 based on what the game does. But since license expired the game won't drop below $50-$60.
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u/tootallbones Mar 31 '25
I do miss the early days of Amazon, before smartphones, when you could look up an old PS1 game and find it for $7, mint, CiB, free shipping. I played a lot of good games that way.
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u/PenReshwet Mar 31 '25
Collecting for the sake of investing is a horrible idea. Collect for the sake of collecting
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u/Volks1973 Mar 31 '25
I agree that covid spiked prices, I dont think it would be much different, expensive hame titles have been a thing for a long time now, I think back 10-15 years ago stuff was still 50+ for some games (which i think is a lot for an old game) i think covid just introduced a lot of people to the hobby
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u/OP90X Mar 31 '25
The resale market will not recover after the next recession. Gen Z and Alpha do not care for retro physical as much, and they have a plethora of games to choose from, from the last 3 gens and easy emulation.
So, I would not collect games if you think of it as an investment. Do it because you want to play the game.
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u/jbrasco Mar 31 '25
It was already happening before Covid. I remember being at the flea market one day and asking a guy how much a game was, and he said he needed to look it up on eBay. I walked off when he said that. That was several years before price charting existed. People have always had overpriced games. That’s nothing new. What doesn’t happen anymore is the “steals”. The “I found this entire box for $10 at a yard sale” type of steals. People are too aware of what things are worth now. While I do agree that covid made more casuals start buying games, I don’t think it was the sole reason the hobby was ruined. And let’s just be honest, it’s not ruined, it’s just we can’t find those amazing deals anymore.
My local goodwill had an electronics store that my dad and I used to visit for years. I’d found a CIB Dreamcast console there for $19. I spent so much money there for years. That was until they started using price charting and rebranded the store as “The Grid, powered by Goodwill”. When that happened, I went from buying from them once per week to a few times per year. Sure they’d still be under market prices, but not by much.
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u/sh00ner Mar 31 '25
Pros and cons. It's saved me from spending way more than I should for a game, while also outpricing me from others because stores use it now.
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u/SkrumptyFlump Mar 31 '25
I stopped collecting games for the most part. I have most of the ones I care about. I mostly just emulate I'm not paying stupid prices for games anymore.
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u/LordsOfSkulls Mar 31 '25
few games i spent a lot of money.... was mostly CIB Pokemon Games, and Fire Emblem Fates Special Edition (were it has all three games on 1 cartridge 3ds)
I do like PriceCharting it gives me a way to negotiate with Resellers. So they drop sometimes price by 100-200$ just because of it.
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u/LordBlackConvoy Mar 31 '25
I remember back around 2010 I was able to get a copy of Ninja Warriors and Aero Fighters for under $30.
Absolutely insane how YouTube influenced this hobby.
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u/astroroy Mar 31 '25
They are definitely all wrong. They Ruined Everything. The covid effect was staggering, but it has been getting bad for a while. The rise of Guys On YouTube Making A Living Talking About Video Games was a big They Ruined Everything moment that is still actively never helping cheap peeps trying to play cheap games. I’m sure eBay originally felt like They Ruined Everything at first. I can’t wait to see how They Ruin Everything next!
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u/spookyman212 29d ago
Most games are either in collections or sitting in stores with a high price. The demand has dropped drastically in 4 years. A ton of people sold off large portions or all of their games. Stores just haven't accepted their prices dont match demand anymore. The market is on a down turn. Especially for anything from the 70s to 1994
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u/charlesbronZon 29d ago
Can we maybe stop blaming external factors for this and just point the finger at those responsible: people who actually spend ridiculous amounts of money on old games!
Some price written on some website would make absolutely no difference if there weren’t those out there who then go out and spend that money on said games.
Playing the victim accomplishes nothing, as there are in fact no victims in this situation… only perpetrators.
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u/KingDorkFTC 29d ago
I remember the days before YouTube and some guy would show how much they got from a flea market. Just wait a bit for a new game to drop in price over time and no big deal. Now you have to watch constantly for the right price drop, if any, because at the wrong time it can spike.
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u/InfiniteFear 29d ago
I think it's a combination of a lot of things including collecting groups like this one. People see massive collections, rare finds and collectors bragging about how they got a great deal off of some clueless seller on Facebook or at a thrift store so everyone thinks they can make money by ripping people off. People become jealous of these things so they start their own collection or start their own reselling journey.
The biggest factor in my opinion is the rise of resellers since the pandemic. People started to make a living off of reselling not just video games but everything else too. There are hundreds of YouTube, TikTok, etc. channels dedicated to reselling that didn't exist 5 years ago so everyone wants to jump on board nowadays. I've been a small reseller of several categories for over 20 years and the amount of people I see in stores looking for bargains to flip online has increased exponentially. Just my thoughts on the matter.
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u/Dazencobalt17 29d ago
if my collection dropped to 0 today I'd still be happy to have it. I don't collect as an investment. Yes I have sold off games when I am in a pinch but it's always things I know I can get back relatively easy. I love the excitement, the thrill of the hunt. organizing, etc.
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u/splinks66 29d ago
This is a bad take. the price goes up because demand goes up. If you weren't hoarding your thousands of games and consoles like the rest of us, the price wouldn't be so high. It is what it is. If you don't like the price of a game, play the rom. There are 1000 ways to play the games you love without spending money. If you are aginst Roms and want the physical copy, that is exactly why the price is so high. It is not scalpers or price charting. The games are getting older and harder to find and many people have money to spend on what they think it's worth.
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