Your games collections future worth

I doubt many of us got into collecting as an investment, more to collect and play the most interesting games. My question is how do you see the retro games collecting scene going in the next say 10-15yrs? What factors do you have to take into consideration (caches of sealed games thought all sold being discovered perhaps). What can the last 10 years tell us? How in the time you have been collecting has it changed what changed it and how did it affect the way you collected? Have you seen the whole catalogue of games for a certain system completely depreciate or devalue?

Your thoughts please.

 

I can't see anything really going down in value for very long. Like I think when Mega Man X Collection came out you would figure the value of Mega Man X2 and Mega Man X3 for SNES went down. However last I checked these games still were worth a good amount. But value is very subjective anyway, since it's only worth what someone will pay you for it. For all you know some guy would be willing to pay a million dollars for some rare never heard of game and he buys it off some guy and then everyone else jumps on getting it and trys selling it for a million bucks.

My guess is that's how games like Radiant Silvergun got so pricey.

 

Hopefully they wont drop in price too much as I got a shit load of stuff I plan on selling soon lol

 

In the long term the value will probably drop as things stop working, repairing them without using complex custom ASICs would be impossible and ROM cartridges finally die.

The haydays of making a fortune on a couple of little know Japanese games has long gone.

With a lot of Neo collectors for example selling their collections and probably getting out while they can still make money has meant the value of the majority of Neo cartridges has fallen quite a bit, take in inflation and it's probably fallen by as much as 40% in the last five years.

If you have say a working FM Towns Marty in 2020 then it will probably be we worth a lot more then it is now, but take inflation into account and it will still have probably lost value...

 

Have you really seen any ROM cartridges die? Let me know when all the Atari 2600 cartridges start to explode, then I'll worry about the rest. ;p

 

Well, in terms of investment, games are terrible. If you bought your retro games at retro prices, you're probably not going to lose too much either way. For the games you bought new though, they will be an 80% loser on average.

 

one of the key question is (what jamex already touched), what happens to the games if they don't work anymore in anytime and ALL of them? everybody knows the day will come when our most feared enemy so called "bitrot" will destroy our beloved media. it already begun.
will the games itself still keep their value even they don't run anymore? is it comparable with a very old and expensive bottle of vine, which isn't enjoably anymore?
of course nothing keeps forever, as well we do not.

 

Even if old consoles/games wouldn't work anymore nowadays I would love to buy them and just have them displayed for me to enjoy once in a while.
It's kinda like my situation now, most rare consoles I own don't really do much and stay boxed, if I want to play old retro games it's off course cool to play them on the original console but for me any emulator that works good on a next gen console is fine with me (so I don't break my rare consoles!) so I think that even though the games and consoles will die eventually they will not loose their sentimental value to me, but it would be a shame not to be able to see them boot anymore! but then again we can enjoy those things later with sites like youtube archiving the whole thing

 

yeah..but to know they all works or not is quite a difference, not? but on the other hand, if all the games on our planet doesn't work anymore and a broken retro game is all you can get, you don't care that much anymore. then it's just like collecting stamps or coffeecreamcaps...

 

Problem I find or think will come up is how many old machines will still be working and games with battery back ups or the chips start to degrade so they then become useless apart from the value of the item as purely display?

 

Collect games because you like them. Collect games because they bring back childhood memories. Collect games because you want a complete collection. Collect games because you will ACTUALLY PLAY THEM.

Yes, it is nice to have rare games sitting sealed on your shelf looking pretty and collecting dust. Nothing wrong with that. However, collecting games purely for profit is something I don't really agree with. If you want to make a profit out of retro games, open a retro games shop.

Games prices will always fluctuate. Some will go up, some down. Games that were highly priced come out of the closet, flood the market, and the price drops. Really piss poor games that were made on a low budget at the end of a console's life *cough*Blast, Phoenix*cough* eventually get scarcer, more sought after, and increase in value. Strange!

And yes, indeed... games that you buy new, or even second hand, for a newish console will drop in price vastly. 10-15 years' time, you say? OK, What was current 10 years ago? N64, Saturn, Playstation. 15 years ago? SNES, Mega Drive and the end of the 8-bit consoles. ALL retro now. SNES games used to be £30-45 new. How many would you pay that for now?

So in 10-15 years time, what is retro going to be? Look at the bigger picture. Xbox 360 will be retro. Playstation 3 will be retro. So let's think about those games... Dead Rising came out at £45. It then got re-released fairly recently on the budget label at £20. Second hand it goes for what? £10-14. However, many PS2 titles are £3-5 second hand, and sold for £15-35 new.

The answer is that we can't predict the trend in the future - and from a true collector's point of view, THAT makes collecting all the more exciting. You bought a game because you liked it, you kept hold of it, and you are surprised to learn that 10 years later, it is worth almost as much as it was new. A rare occurence, but it happens!

 

I also think games are a really bad investment from a economic point of view. Some stuff will - of course - be worth a lot of money in the future but I think those who hoarding hundreds/thousands of more or less random games and hope to sell it as gold in the future will be really disapointed...

When it comes to the issue of the fact that the games will stop working, here is my try to play Nostradamus with a little "prophecy" (sorry for my sometimes weak english:

Games (at least some of them...) will have economic value in the future. But maybe we must see it all in a very long time. We all know there are lots of example of collect items without (or with lost, as stamps, coins etc) use value. But during the time the games stop working (and all Atari 2600-games etc. will of course not do it the same day, I think there will be a long process...) the ones who doesn’t will be more or less worthless. No collectors (and absolutely no gamers...) will aim for not-working games when there are examples on the market that actually work. Probably most of the non-working games will be wasted during this process. That should (capitalism 101) mean that the working games will raise in value. But since the awareness of the games use-value-destiny spread lesser and lesser gamers/collectors/investors will dare to buy working games for high prices and that means that the market, or at least some parts of it, will be smaller.

But people will still love to play games, even the old classics (in my prophecy the word "retro" in the gaming context till stop be used 18:e of September 2011;-) so they will - in the form of emulation, re-releases, downloading services etc - still be a part of our cultural heritage. Meanwhile lots of people will both keep their collecting mind set and longing for a feel of autencity in their gaming artefacts. In other words a lot of people will want to own original stuff in the future as well as today (even if they maybe play the games in other forms).

And the day all games from a certain era/time/generation have stopped working there are no longer any distinction between working and non-working (=useless/worthless), which means collectors from 2032 and forward will struggle over the games that actually has survived the "big winter of game collecting" in the second decade of 2000. But then many of the poorer games will be even lesser interesting than today and completeness is even more important. Not so many will aim for complete sets of non-working games (and absolutely not for sets of loose carts), but will try to collect the classics in the "canon" and other games that in some way or another "stick out" from the big grey past.

But, as it seems in my crystal ball here on the table, during the hole "big winter" (=the time when more and more games stop working and more and more people leave the pure game collecting scene) other kinds of game stuff will be even more attractive than today. Paper will not stop working (or rather, it take much longer time...) so game magazines, guides, posters, adds etc. will rise in value since many gamers/collectors still have a collecting mind set and longing for autencity/originality. Also other kinds of merchandise and memorabilia will raise in value. Even if people play Sonic 2 emulated, or in some other "new" incarnation, they can actually get their "autencity dose" in form of a nice T-shirt, a poster and maybe some good old magazines. And they will!

End of story, up to the future to show what it have to offer;-)

 

I was under the impression that only cartridge games with an EPROM were subject to bitrot because they can eventually be erased by UV lights (among other things) and were made to be re-programmable, not to hold data forever.

 

Hell, even xrays, cosmic rays, etc. can cause anything on a silicon insulator to go bad.

 

When games start to deteriorate over time it would add another reason for some to open their sealed games just to know they were or werent working. Kind of a schrodingers cat type situation would arise.

 

Mass-produced ROM cartridges won't die anytime soon. The binary 1's and 0's are permanently embedded in the silicon wafer.

EPROMs /Flash are vulnerable to bit-rot though. It takes 15-20 years and then they are noticeably corrupted. You can just read the cart several times with a chip programmer, verify, and burn the image back, and you're set for another 15 years.

 

But what to do in the event of a massive nuclear war? How will we preserve the history? That's what really boggles my mind as such a war looks inevitable.

 

I think for me my collection / collecting is not for profit and I think in 10-15 years if someone wanted to offer me an insane amount of money for it i would turn it down.

I mainly collect for fun and for the memories, any game i buy to give me fun and if its good enough i will try and complete it and many games i buy because i used to play them when i was younger and its good to remeber the fun i had when they 1st came out.

If i was to buy a retro game now and it was to be only worth half the price in a few years it would be of any bother to me.

 

Two words: disc rot.

 

yeah. disc rot is a very serious problem. they assume a total life time of about 30~35 years. then it als depends how the discs are stored over the years. it even matters if vertically or horizontally stored. humide places also have a negative impact to discs.
concerning the bitrot on ROMs, there is also a process going on over the years for sure. different environmental issues could have an impact to accelerate or slowing the bitrot. an exact lifetime is difficult to predict, or at least it's very variable.