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I remember getting most of my SNES games about 4 years ago and the prices being bad, but that's just insane. I mean, WTF, it's not like any of the games above are even remotely rare. Hell, I've actually had those games from when I got my SNES from my cousin, and he wasn't any big video game collector.
Yeah, SNES stuff has gotten really expensive. Here is an interesting site for tracking prices:
https://www.pricecharting.com/console/super-nintendoNES game prices have also been increasing.
https://www.pricecharting.com/console/nes
1. You can blame hipsters partially (~75%) for this. It was like this for NES/Famicom titles for several years, as those were the "hot thing" with hipsters. Now it's SNES/SFC. When you consider hipsters commonly being in SF and NYC, regions where salaries start at about US$120K/year... do the math. TL;DR -- The prices are high because people are willing to pay it.
2. The price of Super Mario Kart (and Pilotwings) historically has always been slightly inflated because it contains a
DSP-1. DKC3 and Mega Man X contain no such things, so those prices are just purely based off of what people will pay.
Honestly I was expecting to see more like $70-$80, that seems to be the overall trend on eBay for old games. Collectors are starting to treat them like museum pieces so I doubt games will ever get cheaper any time soon.
Of course you'll have a much better time if you don't mind looking for loose copies or even those bootlegs cartridges that got spread around over the world (which in some cases are the only reasonable way to find an otherwise actually rare game, even).
Looked for Pokemon Red and Blue, nostalgia-triggered by the Go thing. They used to go for 10-15 loose, now it's 25-90. Damn collectors pushing up prices for players
You can even get a used White/Black for less money, even though there's way less of those in circulation.
The prices are even more ridiculous here in Sweden, and typical IT salaries here are no way near $120k/year (I'd say more in the $40-80k range, depending on your role/experience and the city/company you work in/for). I just checked a swedish auction site and saw Megaman X loose for about $90, and SMK for about $55. I suppose these are PAL games for the scandinavian region, which would be less common than their american NTSC counterparts, but there's no way in hell I'd be buying from these people.
I do a bit of collecting, though I wouldn't buy any "NEW/Unopened/VGA85+++/blahblah" games since I actually play the games that I buy - some more than others obviously, I don't have time to play all of them all of the time. For various reasons I tend to buy the japanese versions of games (mainly FC and SFC), which still can be found at semi-decent prices occasionally, but I suspect that will change soon enough.
I blame the people who are buying games just to re-sell them at a profit. <expletive> them.
Count it a blessing. High prices come from high demand. High demand can only be good for game developers.
I checked the same game but Japanese one, loose cart, and was expecting some of them would be high but I was surprised.
Mario kart was 718 yen (8$, with box 14$)
http://www.suruga-ya.jp/product/detail/267000170001Megaman X was 1410 yen (15$, with box 70$ could find for less in Junk store)
http://www.suruga-ya.jp/product/detail/267000479001Donkey kong contry 3 was.. 364 yen (4$, with box 8$, maybe was not popular in japan)
http://www.suruga-ya.jp/product/detail/267001387001Sometime price are cheap but for many popular games the trends is up. What I could find for a few dollar at akihabara 10 years ago cost now an arm and a leg.
I don't recommend this store, just happened to find it while searching the picture of an old game to ask if my coworker knew it and we ended up on that site. (the game was gun dec, aka Vice project doom).
dougeff wrote:
High prices come from high demand. High demand can only be good for game developers.
Unless there's also "high demand" for donor boards and cases. This goes double if a game needs a feature not present in current CPLD mappers, such as ExGrafix on NES, or Super FX on that bullet curtain shmup 93143 was working on.
dougeff wrote:
Count it a blessing. High prices come from high demand. High demand can only be good for game developers.
Er, except these games are not sold on that form anymore? (these are all resales)
Also the fact that in many cases copies are hoarded to drive prices up from scarcity then sold all together to make a quick buck from it.
Sik wrote:
Also the fact that in many cases copies are hoarded to drive prices up from scarcity then sold all together to make a quick buck from it.
This is exactly what happens with arcade PCBs as well. Most of the shmups.system11.org folks can tell horror stories about this.
Until money stops being the #1 focal point in many people's minds, this kind of thing will continue until the end of time.
Rarity is the last thing that crosses my mind when I'm buying cartridges. The first thing I take into consideration is how much I like to play the game, then the hardware (mappers, coprocessors, etc.) and programming feats (3D on a 16-bit game?!). I also don't care about boxes and manuals, I just don't want the cartridges to look like complete crap (I might still get the crappy looking ones if the price is good, though). I guess I'm much more of a gamer and a developer than I am a collector.
Today's prices are very prohibitive, though. It's been a couple of years since I completely stopped buying cartridges. I own Flash carts for all of my favorite systems, so it's not like I can't play the games I like on hardware, but I refuse to pay these ridiculous prices just because every single game is considered rare nowadays.