Is collecting dead...?

[Max P.]

Anyone else had trouble shifting stuff? Cannot give things away on ebay lately - had a few SFC Japan collectables for sale at silly money and still no takers.

[mezzanine]

You don't mean those Mario cases do you? You'd have to pay me to take those

[Escape-To-88]

Collecting is always up and down mate, but yeah things do seem to have tailed off recently. Sold a couple of SFC titles on Ebay recently myself and although got decent money for them would have gotten a lot more 12 months back. But different systems have dips and lows I guess, this isn't always helped by re-releases of titles on the Wii channel and downloadable content on the newer consoles.

[Max P.]

Come on at 99p brand new sealed. Bargain!

[mezzanine]

Collecting is always up and down mate, but yeah things do seem to have tailed off recently. Sold a couple of SFC titles on Ebay recently myself and although got decent money for them would have gotten a lot more 12 months back. But different systems have dips and lows I guess, this isn't always helped by re-releases of titles on the Wii channel and downloadable content on the newer consoles.

Unless you're listing lots of mint/interesting auctions it can be hard to get your stuff noticed amongst all the hundreds of b-grade 16bit games dumped weekly on ebay by JP resellers.

At least ebays recent greedy fee increases aren't so bad for listing less expensive niche games if you're willing to take your time.

[MikeRox]

think it's as much no one has the money floating about what with fuel/gas/electricity/tax rises etc meaning far less money for picking up retro gaming stuff. Ebay really has died of late, expensive fees on top making it even less appealing.

[mezzanine]

With imports it's more to do with the exchange rate and ebay uk listings not appearing on ebay.com tbh.

[Soundwave]

The other problem is what with the advent of things like Live Arcade, Nintendos Virtual Console & the PS Store people who would have bought the games to play rather than for collecting's sake are more likely to download them instead.

Neil

[Max P.]

Oh well whatever it is nothing changes - trying to buy, nothing about or pricey, trying to sell, no-one wants it.

Seems a retro video game thing - no worries with other (non VG) stuff I sell on ebay.

[Fastware]

The weathers been nice people are not sitting in playing games so much, they are also planning to spend money on holidays and weekends away. The other reason is that collecting has a cycle, when new machines come out intrest in retro drops, towards the end of the generation people take a look at the past before the new generation starts.

[JP]

The market has certainly changed over the past 5 years!

There are now companies who re-release rare games at the standard price and many of the better games will be able to be bought on one of the 3 main consoles sooner or later.

I remember how collectible Suikoden was until a re-release was announced for the first two games on the PSP. It still goes well but it's slowing down quite steadily it seems.

[Tirian]

All the factors mentioned are significant - but I think probably the most pertinent is the increasing availability of the retro games on current gen consoles. It was only really a matter of time before the big companies clicked that there's a healthy interest in retro games out there and that if people are quite willing to flop ?40-?50 for Streets of Rage 3 on a Megadrive, most of them will sure as hell snap it up on a compilation with 20-30 others for ?30 instead to play on their PS3.

Case in point: just look at how much of a dive the price for the Phantasy Star games has taken since they all came out on the GBA and the Playstation Megadrive compilation!

[Shou]

Overall, I'd say that value of games in general has come down quite a bit due to many of points already made as well as general availability of titles. Back when I was in my prime of collecting (a decade ago or so), you were hard pressed to find imports and nowadays, you can just search the net and find many sellers who are trying to hawk their wares for just about any platform.

When I sold off my massive collection a few years ago, I believe around then, the collector's market was already in a downward spiral. Fewer people want to spend big money on games such as AES Metal Slug (if you have 800 quid, I'll sell you one LOL) and there is less sense of discovery as almost every frontier has been explored somewhere by someone. (Although that doesn't mean gems aren't out there...). Almost everything is now easily downloadable and runs on some emulator.