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"Rare" games

Entry posted by atari2600land April 1, 2018

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Why are some games so much more expensive than others? Take, for example, Jack Bros. for Virtual Boy. There's multiple copies on eBay, yet they're all about $500. So it can't possibly be rare if there's so many of them.

When I got my TurboGrafx-16 years ago from the used video game store, I didn't ever imagine how much money the games would be worth and be so hard to buy. I have a decent-sized collection, but it cost money to do so. I have 2 dozen games for the game system. Last night I plugged it in for the first time in a while and huzzah it still works, but it's kind of repetitive playing the same games over and over again.

So I went online to eBay to try to find some new games that were affordable. Best I could do is about $40 for games I don't have. So why? There's hundreds of games for the TG-16 on eBay, yet they're all very expensive. So if there's hundreds of games, they can't all be that rare. But geez, if I sold my 2 dozen games I have for it, I'd probably get at least $500 for them all. So what's the big deal? Or perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see the logic here.

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Skippy B. Coyote 7,809

Posted April 1, 2018

I think it's less about the quantity of any given game produced or how many copies are available in the wild and more about people's perceived value of the games. When one person pays $50 for a commonly available game that 99.999998% of people will never care about it's an anomaly, but once two or three people do it that suddenly becomes the game's new market value.

With all the hype around retro gaming and collecting that we've been seeing among the general public over the last half a decade or so we're starting to see more and more people who are willing to overpay for games just to get them right now, and sometimes that trend drives up prices of entire system libraries to absurd levels. I feel the same way about the Sega CD's game library as you do about the TG-16.