Price Rise Predictions for Currently Available Games

[SpendTooMuchOnAtari]

Hi, which games do you think will go out of production and be the best long-term investment? I've been concentrated on Wii games for a few years and made some good decisions. I bought a few each of these for $20 each: Pikmin 2, Fishing Resort, GTI Club, Rune Factory Frontier and for $12 each, I got a few Ivy The Kiwi. I have a Best Buy game rewards account and get 20% off any new game which is a great deal. I know they don't have some games but overall, it's been a great investment to join their club. I also buy DS and 3DS games as I find Nintendo to be easier to "predict" than other platforms. I'd like to save many of these for my kids.

 

I'm thinking of getting a couple of Shovel Knight for the PS Vita, I don't think it will be available in stores and it's only $25 plus shipping which I think is $4. I bought a few of that title for the 3DS awhile back too.

[AceHart]

Sports games! Sports games always skyrocket in value!

[bojay1997]

Trying to predict the modern game market is foolish. There are so many collectors and sealed collectors that have massive collections with lots of duplicates, you are likely to lose money in the long term as they will all eventually dump them. Obviously, if you had done this same thing in the 8 bit or 16 bit era, you'd probably be sitting on a goldmine now.

[Shawn]

Whatever the most common game is. That is the one to bank on for profits. Buy as many as you can.

[spacecadet]

I don't think it's really possible to predict. You can look at recent games (like Dreamcast onward) and see what's become expensive and what those games have in common, but the problem is there are a lot of other games that have the same things in common that have gone in the opposite direction. A lot of it just comes down to what develops a cult following, and that could be down to one guy mentioning a game on some forum or YouTube channel sometime, and things snowballing from there.

 

It also makes a huge difference whether or not games end up being available on later systems, and you have no way to predict that. For example, there was a time when Rez, Ikaruga and Sin & Punishment were all very expensive on their original systems. These days, all three of them are worth less than they were when new, mostly because they've been re-released on modern systems. They still seem expensive compared to other games from that time, but if you bought them new hoping to make money, you'd have still lost it instead. You'd just have lost less than on some other games. You'd have done better not buying anything.

[ianoid]

Speculating with modern games is super tough. I think it's a zero sum game.

 

It works best if you have a large amount of storage space. Even then, some games would be considered very valuable if they simply held their value. In fact, most games of any value have barely done that, inflation adjusted.

 

If you know print runs, then you could make some better guesses.

 

Nowadays the best speculators are the ones who are most in touch with video game culture, paying attention to what the youtubers are playing and what they are talking about, since they are highly influential.

[+save2600]

I sure hope PS3 games take off some day! Nearly 1/3rd of my collection, haven't even bothered to open. 1st time in my life that I just don't care to play what I purchased but don't mind hanging on to them either. In fact, they and my two PS3's are all boxed up and in storage TFN. Might be several years before I care to set one of them up - if ever.

[spacecadet]

One other thing that's just generally anti-speculative when it comes to gaming. You really have to either be right a *lot* of the time, or buy many, many copies of a single game and get really lucky, to make more money than you'd make with a real investment, like stocks or even bonds. A new game costs $50, and even if you do fantastically well, you might make $100 off that game 20 years in the future. Is it worth waiting 20 years for $50?

 

Let's say you have $1,000 to "invest" in whatever. You can either buy 20 copies of that game and hope to get lucky in 20 years (which by nature you probably won't), or you can try to find 20 other games that you think will do well (which they also probably won't), *or* you can just take that $1,000 and buy AMD stock, and if you'd have done that earlier this year you'd already have $5,000.

 

So yeah, buy games to play and invest in something else...