I parted with a major chunk of my gaming collection just before Christmas.
The swag for McVan’s, the local retro gaming establishment, included a copy of Chrono Trigger with the original box and all contents therein including a cartridge still in plastic wrap, Secret of Mana, and Super Mario RPG along with a copy of Super Smash Bros. Melee and the original NES Castlevania. These were all games that I’ve accumulated since my late teenage years when I was able to snap up good games that I missed the first time around due to the severe income shortage that comes with being a kid.
Other games and systems that I’ve collected have met a similar fate in the last year or so. My original Xbox, Sega Saturn mint in box, copies of Final Fantasies 2 and 3 for the SNES, and other former treasures have all gone to the local retro store.
In the past you could make a case that getting rid of old video games like that was simply a natural offshoot of growing up, moving out, getting married, and all the changes that come along with it. But the plain truth is that all of that old gaming stuff was just so much clutter taking up closet space and I had no need to hang on to them anymore.
There was a time, starting about ten years ago and extending until about two years ago, when it was impossible to find the greats for the 16-bit consoles through legitimate channels. Emulators were available at the time, but only if you were willing to spend hours circulating through page after page of advertisements to get to a file that may or may not contain a Trojan or some other computer-devouring virus. Then there were issues with the emulation not being spot-on, games ending abruptly, or some other bug rendering your favorite 16-bit memories totally unplayable. Spending $30 on eBay for a copy of Final Fantasy or picking up a used copy of Chrono Trigger for $40 at Gamestop was worth it just to avoid the headaches associated with the emulation scene, to say nothing of the moral underpinnings.
So I snapped up all of the games that I didn’t get to play on release as well as some other games that came highly recommended and ended up accumulating quite a gaming collection. I regularly checked at the local used game store where they had evidently never heard of eBay to see what old gems were being sold for pennies on the dollar that week. I even went to a few garage sales trying to find deals on great old games, though that was time consuming and usually didn’t provide much reward.
But now I think that the video game collector is poised to very quickly go the way of the dodo thanks to digital downloads.
Game collecting was a lot like collecting old records once upon a time. People held onto items because they were rare and good, the recipe for a true collectible. Scarcity went to work as great games that didn’t get a wide release went into the secondhand market and the prices skyrocketed. People who wanted to play the sleeper hits of past gaming generations either had to put up the money or go without. I’m sure there were people out there who collected just because they thought the games were valuable, but for the most part the gaming collector was driven by nostalgia and a desire to play good games.
Which is exactly why I think the secondhand collector’s market is about to collapse. Every game that I had in my collection is now available on Nintendo’s Virtual Console or in some other re-release or repackaging. The scarcity that once fueled the market is gone now that companies have realized digital distribution is a veritable cash cow that allows them to use nostalgia to efficiently exploit the long tail of their back catalogs in a way that just wasn’t possible or profitable a few years ago. And now that I have the option of playing everything conveniently from my Wii, PS2, or PSP without having extra old equipment cluttering up my entertainment center there’s just no need for hanging onto physical copies of the old games.
The effect of digital distribution is already showing on the secondhand market. Just five short years ago a copy of Chrono Trigger mint in box with all the original accessories would regularly go for $120-$150. Final Fantasies IV and VI for the SNES as well as classics like Secret of Mana and Super Mario RPG regularly fetched in the range of $30-50 for the cartridge alone. Paper Mario, a sleeper hit that came at the end of the N64’s lifecycle and was only picked up by a few gamers with fond memories for Mario RPG, could fetch upwards of $60-$70. The original Final Fantasy Tactics for the Playstation could fetch someone upwards of $70 in the two year period between its initial release and the Greatest Hits line re-release.
Just look at the market rate for these games today, paying special attention to the price sellers are expecting to get for the games versus what they are actually selling for on auctions with bids. A glance at those auctions shows an interesting trend. Collectors and resellers haven’t quite figured out that the market just isn’t supporting the same prices that it did a few years ago. Buyouts on former rare games are still set at the ridiculous prices people paid five years ago, but people just aren’t paying anymore.
Some stores that deal in used gaming are starting to get wise to this fact. At the local shop I frequent a clerk mentioned that they’re going to be dropping the payout for a lot of old games very soon, particularly games that have seen re-releases in recent years.
Of course this does mean that it’s something of a seller’s market if you have a local store that still takes vintage games. You can still get a good price for your old games, though nothing that comes close to what they were going for in the mid ’00s, at stores where they haven’t figured out that there’s a fundamental change going on in the vintage used gaming market. So if you’re like me and you’ve been hoarding all of your old video games deep in your lair until your entire soft underbelly is coated with an armor of old Super NES and Genesis cartridges then it might be time to part with your old treasures while they still retain some value in a world increasingly dominated by digital distribution.
