iPhones are overpriced, not limited production cardboard boxes for Game Boy games.

Oh no dude, things are about to get way worse. The change is going to be from insta-fullsetters in any condition, to people with more money than sense, nitpicking every individual piece. Sealed collecting is going to explode. In pretty much every older, more mature hobby, condition rules all. This is a scary peek into our future:
 
Back on topic, a seller holding on to something truly rare and desirable may not have much of a reason to drop his price. He can sit on this $1200 listed copy as long as he wants. It's how the game is played. People with patience won't pay this. Someone with lots of money might. He's banking that holding it is going to be worth more in the long run. Just because you see it at $1,200, doesn't mean you need to buy it at $1,200.

Boxes are ridiculously priced. The more fragile and older the box the more expensive it's likely going to be. Also, the rarer the game. But Game Boy is more expensive than GBC or GBA. The plastic cases like DS, 3DS, GameCube, PS2, PS3, etc, are all dirt cheap in comparison. Cardboard boxes are sold very expensively in relation to the game. Not worth it in my opinion. I only have a handful of cartridge based CIBs, only for my favorite games.

yes.

Portable collecting is the future; especially in the 2000s and early Teens when all the console developers were cranking out was graybrown and dialogue-based games that nobody wants now the colorful, fun portables have a lot more collectability. That can extend to GB/GBC even if the games are not as colorful.

When are you gonna cave and give me red and blue CIB! Come on, Matt! 

 

Couldn't have put it better! Those boxes are tough to find and those CIB GB games are intense. Shoot Denis has been trying to finish a set for years and he still isn't done.

Game Boy is one of the funnest sets to collect. It's either expensive as fuck or good for collectors on a budget. It all comes down to having boxes or not. However, some of the games are very, very hard to find either way  

pal games (usually) have a smaller print run so why is the us version of Kid Dracula always still more expensive than the pal one?

This used to get me hot about stuff, you could go back a decade and see someone pay the same on a loose or complete game, maybe another $5-10 for the extra. Those days are dead.

The problem (or not) with this are many. For someone, one could argue anyone looking into this using such words as investment really need to get their head examined. Some others would rationally look into it as scarcity given the format. The boxes in general compared to manuals or dust sleeves of some sort like it or not were advertising packing, the crap you throw out to get to the goodies inside. And for those who would more likely keep the console sized stuff since they're bigger and may line up nicely in the day with the mind set of VHS boxes similarly sized, the Gameboy was a portable. The idea of portability is to carry the game and little else. Manuals even more got tossed on there, but boxes were likely even tossed heading back to the car with mom or dad as you jammed that thing into your Gameboy to get lost in a new experience.

Thinking of it either way you have to realize there are far less GB boxes or handheld boxed in general than console. People put the manuals up, stored the games in their little cases or even tossed those and popped them into a carrier, a bin, a drawer and that's that. So yeah, do they appear overpriced, sure, but are they? Sadly probably not. I have not bothered buying complete games since they started being charged for as a premium as it was unpalatable. I do have a few boxes, more manuals and a few with those maps/posters still, but mainly just the games alone. If I do have a box it's rarely on display, I put it up as they're old. I know I could make something on them but I see no reason to do it as it won't be replaceable really.

My advice to you, get over it. Just buy the game, or buy the game and the manuals. Better yet, if you want the manuals, buy lots, it may set you back a bit, but you can part out the doubles and worse for $5 a pop and chip away back out of it and maybe even break even or come out ahead. The boxes aren't worth it unless you have the means to cover the damages and comfortably.


I wholeheartedly agree with vectrex by the way.  GB (including Color and Advance) can be the most fun and the worst if you are after a little or a lot.  If you buy games, you can get so much as handheld games have a stigma where they're like lesser games, mini games, junk compared to console, whatever the case is they cost a lot less for cartridges than console games.  You can buy most of them alone or even in lots and get a lot of bang for few bucks.  But if you go into paper products it can get obscene and painful if you don't realize it jumping into it blind.  Between all the GB systems I've got over a 100 games and that's because they're cheap, fun, and varied.

yes

There are many more collectors in the U.S. and Canada than in PAL regions.
 

Game Boy CIB is pretty expensive, and while I wouldn't say it's overpriced, I would say there are larger price gaps between loose and CIB than most other systems.

I haven't seen anyone mention it, but one of the reasons for lack of complete copies is GameStop/eb made a decision to throw out all their boxes to save room. That's was easily 100k+ boxes/manuals/inserts right into the trash.

I bet almost as many Game Boy boxes wound up in gas station trash cans as home ones

What year was that? I didn’t think they even had gameboy cibs in the store any longer at that time.
 

Yeah, I thought that was a decision for them to throw out DS and GBA paper/cardboard.

Don't think they were still dealing in GB/GBC at that time.
 

That was, let’s see I left there in 2012, it was a few years before that, so let’s call it 2007/8 somewhere around there, a few years before they stopped taking in as trades. Now by that point many individual stores already had been throwing out the boxes for years just to save space but that’s when the entire company switched. Some stores tossed a few, bigger stores tended to toss a bit more or had up until then saved the “good” boxes like Pokémon or Mario titles to make them easier sell. Ironically some smaller out of the way stores tossed an insane amount because they were so off the radar they never kept up with these instructions because no one checked on them. I got sent to the middle of nowhere at that time and was told make it compliant. They still had N64, PS1, all the Nintendo handheld boxes, and a mt dew colored Xbox all stashed in the back. So at around 5000 locations at the time, even at 20 boxes per stores which would be very conservative that’s 100k. But prior many stores had been tossing for years so overall given the amount of inventory that made its way through GameStop, that’s just a ton of boxes/manuals. They now do the same thing with ds. Maybe it’s just because I was there tossing them out, maybe it was as prevelant at other stores, maybe they had more storage space. Don’t know, just ballparking, but that’s certainly where a ton of them went. I was also friends with the manager at those little video game stores inside holly wood video. I think it was called game crazy. When they took any vintage in they always tossed the boxes. We’re even nice enough to save them for me. Don’t know if that was a store policy or a company policy though.
 

This is why GameStop was always a pain. You had company policy, but then you had a lot of store/district/region policies. I started right at the time of the merger when the first set of rules came out to make the companies operate the same. My first store was so freaking small that I was immediately told to throw out every handheld box/manual and sell cart only. The previous manager was eb and he had piles of games in the back that weren’t in the front because the store was a shoebox sized thing. So the entire time I was there, we tossed all handhelds. But that’s becuse I just kept with that decision whenever I changed stores because I preferred the uniform look. But it wasn’t official policy to do this. But I also wasn’t like going rogue and the only person doing this. But some stores kept boxes long after that. While others did both. Ultimately if you had the regional or district managers backing you could do either.

Sorry don’t mean to ramble just throwing this out there for future reference if anyone needs it. You’d be amazed at the stuff we threw out over the years.

Only CIB GB I still have is a factory sealed VGA 90 Altered Space. Handheld collecting is rad. Wish I had more.

After a few months of educating myself on the issues, I have to say that I somewhat disagree with this statement. First, over the last 4 years, nothing in the Nintendo lexicon of games have went up FASTER than the Gameboy CIB have. According to gamevaluenow, Gameboy has tripled over the last 4 years, whereas the NES has only doubled. The demand is actually there.
What makes people think that the gameboy is cheap, or less in demand is that the loose carts are around $10 on average. However, over the last 4 years, even the loose carts are beginning to travel north. This (in relation to the SNES loose carts) which haven't moved in 4 years.
I personally feel as if the gameboy system is quitely becoming a bohemoth to collect for.
The point is that gameboy boxes are going up fast. It's probably going to be real hard to even collect loose pretty soon.

 

They're not traveling that far compared to console games speaking of cartridge only. It's that last Nintendo cartridge based format (gameboy family) where the loose game, most of the library can be still bought in that $30 and under range as it really drops off after that and upward for cart only prices. It's very accessible compared to other Nintendo systems.

It already was a behemoth to collect for even if you were going in on the cheap with game alone because there are so many releases it's ridiculous, even more if you go into the region specific stuff outside of the US into Japan and the PAL territories. The real problem is just paper as pointed out, especially the cardboard paper because handheld games were seen more as throw away value on anything but the cart more than other stuff due to their handheld nature. More manuals and a hell of a lot more boxes would get pitched. Gameboy is the one Nintendo system I really bother to occasionally buy something for still you can find freely around as it's not a headache and wallet wrecking to find something nice to do.

The only CIB Gameboy I have is Castlevania Legends. I still remember buying it new.

I don't either. On the original gameboy I've got a CIB copy of Final Fantasy Adventure (square version with the poster), Super Mario Land 2, and Pinball Dreams. I have a few others with manuals though, and one sealed Pokemon Red version. GBC is about as thin too again with a couple complete, some more with the manual or manual and poster. GBA I think I have the most complete for and that amounts still to less than 10 and more titles with the manual still too.

That FFA has just about doubled in price recently. Even a bad cib is going for about $80. I think I paid $56 at a video game store, and I kinda thought I was paying too much. It was a trade though so I did it, only to find out that one just like mine went for about $100. You can get good deals at shops these days if they are going by pricecharting alone. I got Astroboy Omega Factor for $48 recently and could probably get $90 to $100 for it on ebay now. So.