I was just pondering this after buying a sealed copy of LeMans 24 Hours for $0.01 off amazon (with $7 shipping). Certain rare games with limited releases like Ikaruga or Cosmic Smash seem to maintain value on the collector front, but with ports of many games for Ps2 and Xbox, re-releases as downloadable games for the current crop of consoles, and with the relatively easy availability of ISOs and being able to boot them easily on a standard DC (to say nothing of emulation) - are the GDRom versions of most games unlikely to see their worth increase from where they are now? Value is of course always reflective of supply and demand, but with the factors listed above, I'm thinking demand is unlikely to increase in the near future for authentic copies of DC games. With the exception of the segment of collectors who would want the authentic product (which I don't think is a huge population), are there simply too many easy alternatives for the rest of people who simply want to play the game by any of the less expensive means (piracy, emulation, buying a port) for the value to increase substantially in say, the next 10 years? On a final note. Is LeMans really that common of a game with no demand for it, that it is being liquidated for 1 cent?
Sports type games are often worthless. The american DC version of LeMans isn't much more valuable sealed either. Then there's overprinted popular titles virtually everyone who'd want one already has. Try to sell Sonic 2 for Genesis these days. Early Saturn and Super Famicom fighters often got huge print runs in Japan. SF2 and VF2 were HOT there for a while.
Probably to avoid paying fees. Beware if the item gets damaged in transit you can only claim $0.01 IIRC.
I doubt the value of DC games will go up. Just look at the libraries of almost any other console, the common games go for almost nothing.
Good point, I got it from a bigtime seller with 100% feedback though so I'll take the risk. This is my fault because I didn't make it clear in my main post - but I was thinking more along the lines of games that did not have a huge print run, but were not of the absurdly rare collectible variety. IE: USA copies of Gigawing 2, Powerstone 2, Tech Romancer, Tokyo Xtreme Racer 2 to name a few (I actually don't know if these were small print runs or rare, I just remember looking for them and rarely seeing them circa 2001-2004, and when I found TXR2 for sale used at a retail store, it was like $39) Do you see copies of these three games increasing in value over the next 10 years? This post reminds me: is there such a thing as a very rare USA released dreamcast game? I imagine that even what was once considered a pretty rare game (MVC2) had a pretty good sized release. And as long as I have you here reading my post, here's another question: Does anyone's USA Virtual On manual look like this? B/c mine sure doesn't.
No that is a mock up of the cover for virtual on, the final maintains the same cover as the japanese one.
I think you were ripped if you paid $40 for Tokyo Xtreme Racer 2. I think I paid like $6 for mine from a local game store. Come to think of it, the most I ever paid for a Dreamcast game was like $25 (for Shenmue II, an additional copy of which I obtained later for $15). Although, admittedly, I bought most of my DC games in the period around 2002-2004. I have 34 boxed games, and probably a handful of loose copies. I think prices have gone up a little since then, but you can still get a lot of DC games for cheap. There's even a good number of Japanese titles that can be had for fairly cheap. Anyway, I don't think a market for DC games will ever disappear (until maybe the discs rot away), because I think most people who buy older games buy them because they want the full experience. They want the physical object, the boxart, etc. Almost everything up to last-gen is pretty well emulated now, and roms and ISOs are easier to get than they ever have been. I think we're not too far off from a day when you can play any game ever made (except maybe really obscure ones), with perfect accuracy, on a single device (computer, game system, phone, whatever). I don't know about you, but I'm not gonna throw away all of my consoles when that day comes. Here's the way I see it: you may have heard people talk about how the way content is conveyed is part of the experience of that content. Film buffs will sometimes tell you that to really experience a 35mm film the way it was intended to be experienced, you have to be able to hear the sound of the projector flicking through the frames. You'll hear similar things about the low hiss and clicks on vinyl records. That's the way I look at videogames. Holding the physical game in your hand, putting the game in the system, turning it on, turning on your tube TV and hearing the electrical buzz as it flickers to life - all of that is part of the experience of playing a game. Realistically, you can still enjoy a game without all those things. It's just an ideal - and probably one that will become difficult or impossible in the future. One day all our vintage electronics will break down, and nobody (or very few) will be able to fix them because there won't be enough of a market for it. Or maybe we'll develop nanomachines that can fix any broken object, so our old consoles (and we, too) will be immortal. Anyway, um, what were we talking about again?
Yay! Dreamcast forever! That was a good look at it - the authentic experience versus an emulation. Speaking about how I paid too much for used DC games back in the day - I definitely did pay more than I should have for a couple DC games back in the day, but I was usually buying them a couple years before most of the retail stores were pushing them out the door as an everything must go type of item. I did pay a lot (like $35 or more) for used copies of TXR2, MVC2, Framegride, Shenmue 2 ($50 or $60 as an import item the week it came out in Europe). Even when games were on sale in retail locations around 2003-2006, I was still seeing a lot of them priced at between $10-$20.
I bought my dreamcast at a use game store in 2009 for 10$... Dreamcast just doesn't have the demand it seems it would. Popular games like Shenmue are the only ones that really seem to hold value but thats because they are game that are wanted... The Most I ever paid for a dreamcast Item was 10$ and that was the console. Most I ever paid for a game was 6$. I have about 7 games though.
I have a pile of duplicate Dreamcast games that a friend of mine was going to throw out. I've tried taking them places for trade-in value, and none of the indy game stores want them. Looks like my friend's instinct to just trash them was dead on the money. For all the reasons Dark points out, Dreamcast demand just isn't there. I'd also observe that there isn't really a collector's market. Like with a lot of collectible toys, the majority of buyers already own all the stuff that they want.
It's dead easy to collect a full PAL or US set of Dreamcast games, so this also shows in the selling price of Dreamcast games nowadays. Only surtain sealed games will fetch an premium, but you wont see any multiple hundred dollar games passing around.
Pondering Think about (something) carefully, esp. before making a decision or reaching a conclusion Pontificating: Express one's opinions in a way considered annoyingly pompous and dogmatic Indeed. Not for a while at least. Given the world another decade or two, in my experience some Dreamcast games seem to have been pressed worse off than others. My HoTD2 disc is about shot post Boss fight 2 for many years and nothing I've done has helped it much to be worthwhile though what I have learned is amusing and an interesting story I suppose. Think laser rot on Laserdiscs. I have a very pristine copy of the Star Wars Definitive Collection. Very nice case, book in perfect shape, discs virtually immaculate. I paid $45 for it and if you check this: http://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/05091/0693-84/Star-Wars-Trilogy:-Definitive-Collection You'll see it has well known and widespread problems with laser rot. Eventually my copy might succumb to laser rot but given the number of copies is going down and demand is likely to go up they will go up in value, slightly. Though to be fair Lucas did put out a Laserdisc transfer to DVD that sells for ~$100 right now. The transfer is a far cry from perfect and hardly anything was done to it to make it worth purchasing over the Laserdisc release but the demand is clearly there. I highly doubt Sonic Adventure will be a triple digits game but D2 might get there sooner or later. Wish I hadn't sold off my copy, cest la vie.
Yes, but in pondering something, one can be pontificating. I'm probably on the wrong forum with the wrong audience for this, but if I were to have this discussion in real life, pondering the price of collectible items a la comic book guy strikes me as pontificating, hence the thread title.
Usually one doesn't desire to be annoying and/or pompous though. Ever notice how the comic book guy is shown something like 95% of the time in his store?
