need to make a bible out of this.
Most of these are true. For me, games not saving properly or saved files being deleted simply makes me angry! It seems to happen less with newer games, but still, it's so unacceptable.
I read articles of people selling their huge game collection for thousands of dollars, and an unopened copy of Final Fantasy 7 maybe able to sell for thousands of dollars in the future like old unopened Apple iPods and iPhones.
As someone who's a casual retro collector (as in I buy retro games that I want to play), I will say that selling collections and making thousands of dollars is kind of a misnomer. That price is really based off of what you own. So it's either because of the sheer amount of games you're selling, or you own a good bit of "boutique" titles that are worth a ton of money. If someone sells 100 games, they can make anywhere between a couple hundred , or a couple thousand entirely based on what they own.
These articles usually are a bit misleading, as it causes people to think they're sitting on a goldmine with their stash of old games, when the vast majority of the time you don't make nearly as much money as these articles say.
This is true there is a chance that a game collectors may only make hundreds to thousands of dollars or less from selling their game collection. But, hundreds to thousands of dollars can be useful if the collector suddenly needs money for expensive bills like medical bills to cure an injury like hurting your back lifting heavy boxes.
I wasn't saying people shouldn't sell their games, that's their choice. I just wanted to give a public service announcement that these articles commonly mislead people into believing that, for example, their PS1 collection is worth thousands of dollars, or that an incredibly common game like Final Fantasy VII is worth hundreds of dollars. This can also either hurt, or just seriously annoy local stores that sell retro games, because they get tons of customers getting angry that their stack of PS1 games is only worth $200. They usually walk out the door not giving business to the stores, or just have pissed off employees.
I'm friends with the guy who owns a retro store in my city, and he lost count of how many times he's seen customers pissed off that they're only getting $10 for Legend of Zelda (he sells it for $15), and they insist it's worth significantly more because it's the gold cartridge, aka the most common one.
I wasn't discrediting the fact that those people in the articles made thousands of dollars on their collection, it's wise to take precaution and note that these articles are based off people selling a sheer amount of games. If you read an article of someone selling their game collection and made $30k, usually that means they sold thousands of games.
Price charting on eBay and such should be used to ballpark, especially with eBay, as there's a significant difference between listed price and completed price, and stores generally charge less than eBay. Kind of defeats the purpose of the store if they charge the same, or more than eBay. Though stores also have to take into account with what's going to sell in the local area. My guy had to turn down a guy who owned an expensive space shooter, because he knew it wasn't going to sell here.
Sometimes online sellers like to charge "collector's prices" on things, like charging more for the normal version of Final Fantasy VII than the Greatest Hits version, but stores will sell both for the exact same price.
I think it is best to treat video game collection as a hobby, and not as something you can get very rich doing like gambling or other investments like stocks where you can lose all your money, or become very rich.
That’s definitely the big issue in the collecting scene right now. Collectors are pissed that scalpers are coming in and jacking up prices on games, especially whatever the hot new console is to collect. You see the exact same situation that happened to the NES Classic, where people are hoarding multiple copies of an expensive game just to price gouge on eBay.
I think game companies may make fewer games, and consoles to cause scalping problems where there are many buyers, but not enough consoles and games
I don’t see how it’s benetifial to the developers to make little copies of games/consoles. It makes more sense from an economic standpoint to make more copies if they knew there was high demand, or they’re Nintendo and are dumb at gauging customer interest like with the NES Classic.
Unless you think the companies are working with scalpers to get a cut off the second hand market prices, it makes no sense for companies to do it just for scalpers. That’s the only reason why a company would do anything for scalpers.
They may generate more news about their consoles and games from articles which say the games are sold out. Some people may buy sold out games at a latter time after they learned about the game from all the news that the game is sold out.