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Prices going up.


Nall3k

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I've just now noticed the prices of games, even VMUs are going up. Why is that? I understand the items aren't getting any younger, but it seems like too many people (on ebay) think things are worth more than they actually are. Obviously, this can be applied to any console, but the Dreamcast isn't on the level of Saturn or Jaguar where sales were really low initially. It's frustrating that no system can seem to escape this fate.

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Apparently they are going WAY up...

https://www.ebay.com/itm/SEGA-DREAMCAST-GAMES/233849696567?_trkparms=aid%3D111001%26algo%3DREC.SEED%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20160908105057%26meid%3Deba796a1f1b84888abf7bf0d01258f48%26pid%3D100675%26rk%3D4%26rkt%3D15%26mehot%3Dnone%26sd%3D284155317318%26itm%3D233849696567%26pmt%3D1%26noa%3D1%26pg%3D2380057&_trksid=p2380057.c100675.m4236&_trkparms=pageci%3Aa668bce8-6197-11eb-a32c-aadbead31f46|parentrq%3A4a47c0ee1770aaecb06eab14ff89c839|iid%3A1

 

Lol, helpful description! "SELLING THIS LOT OF SEGA DREAMCAST GAMES. ALL USED, SOME ARE CLOSE TO  MINT SHAPE, OTHERS ARE MORE USED WITH SCRATCHES,"

 

Makes me feel a lot better about the quality of some of my auctions!  ?

Had no idea NBA 2k was worth hundreds, did you?

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1 hour ago, Tempest said:

Maybe it's time to sell my DC collection.  I bought a lot of games when they were closing them out.  I think I have more than half of the US set.

In seriousness (unlike my prior link to that crazy person's ebay auction...), they are pretty high right now.  And may drop with the advent of the GDEMU... so I put sold most of my collection.  Some games are going for pretty crazy amounts; Cannon Spike in particular is going for around $300, MvsC2 for well over $100, same for Power Stone 2.  So depending on what you have, I would take a good look at selling.  Even commons are fetching a fair bit right now.

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On 1/28/2021 at 2:29 PM, Tempest said:

Maybe it's time to sell my DC collection.  I bought a lot of games when they were closing them out.  I think I have more than half of the US set.

If you have D2 complete and want to sell it, let me know. Been looking for it.

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  • 4 weeks later...

If you asked me several years ago if Dreamcast prices would go up as high as they have across the board, I would have said you were crazy. It's understandable for some actually-rare and uncommon titles to go up, but the way the entire library has increased in value is disappointing. Yet another console that's getting prohibitively expensive to buy for, for normal enjoyment. An ODE is almost mandatory at this point.

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 2/24/2021 at 8:05 AM, Austin said:

Yet another console that's getting prohibitively expensive to buy for, for normal enjoyment.

Same thing's been happening with the Gamecube. I've seen Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door going for $100 for a copy with the case on epay. I think it's a mixture of both the Dreamcast already being kind of expensive to collect for and the rise of early 2000s nostalgia. After all, nostalgia works in 2 decades. It's a shame too, I was planning on getting back into the Dreamcast.

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18 hours ago, The Mr. Video said:

 and the rise of early 2000s nostalgia. After all, nostalgia works in 2 decades. It's a shame too, I was planning on getting back into the Dreamcast.

I hadn't thought of it, but you know I was in my mid 20s when I started to seriously get back into console gaming and collecting. So those who were born in the mid or late 90s might be betting into it again and the DC for them might have been one of their first gaming consoles.

 

 

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It's the Covid tax.  Prices have rocketed on retro since the pandemic started.  Since many places have been shut down people have resorted to alternative ways to entertain themselves. Retro gaming just happens to be one of those alternatives along with those Pokemon card things.  As for myself, I have stopped buying retro until this silliness ends.  

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On 3/18/2021 at 8:42 PM, The Mr. Video said:

Same thing's been happening with the Gamecube. I've seen Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door going for $100 for a copy with the case on epay. I think it's a mixture of both the Dreamcast already being kind of expensive to collect for and the rise of early 2000s nostalgia. After all, nostalgia works in 2 decades. It's a shame too, I was planning on getting back into the Dreamcast.

Terraonion...... go right ahead. For the price of 5-10 games. You can have them all.

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16 hours ago, Lord Innit said:

As for myself, I have stopped buying retro until this silliness ends.  

You'll probably be waiting for a long time. Prices don't really ever go down on stuff like this once they go up to begin with. A lot of stuff is transferring hands now from people who don't want it to people who do. There's no new supply being made. You're making a bet that the people who wanted it enough to pay these prices for it now will somehow not want it anymore and be willing to accept lower prices to sell it later. That's just not a great bet.

 

There was a time when Saturn stuff was cheap. It just isn't anymore. Same is happening with the Dreamcast. Someone earlier said the Dreamcast isn't like the Saturn - it actually is, and in fact sold *less* than the Saturn (both were a little more than 9 million units worldwide). Some Dreamcast games are already through the roof, because they were really rare to begin with and are even rarer now, and a lot of people have figured out posthumously that it is actually a great system. None of that's going to change.

 

In terms of other systems, that could all be happening more or less, but the fact is just that nobody's making more "retro" stuff - whatever's out there is all there is. Reissues, "mini" systems, emulation, multicarts, etc. can all reduce demand a little bit for the real thing, but if someone is a collector (and anyone who's buying 20 year old discs is a collector), they want the real thing. And once it's in the hands of people that want it, it's not going anywhere. (Meanwhile, stuff does just break too. I had a pristine Atari 5200 for many years that I dropped on the floor one day and it physically broke into a bunch of pieces. So that's one less 5200 potentially out there, from a total supply that's only dropping, and another person on the market for a good condition 5200.)

 

Events like Covid have a way of accelerating the inevitable when it comes to stuff in limited supply. This all would have happened with the Dreamcast eventually anyway; it's just happening faster with people stuck at home. But it's probably not going to reverse itself, for the Dreamcast or any other system.

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4 hours ago, Lord Innit said:

I'm 56  and thankfully have more than enough games to see out my days.  

That's where I am these days.  I have enough games that if I played one a week I most likely still wouldn't get through them all before I died.  I also tend to like RPGs which can last from 25-200 hours depending on the title.  I think I'm set for life at this point.  I've been slowly selling off my games and investing in multicarts.  Not only do they take up less room, but I don't need to worry about discs going bad.

 

If Saturn and DC are going up, I wonder when PS2 prices will start going through the roof.  I've still got a ton of those.

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Nostalgia runs in cycles I've noticed. Essentially we reach an age (late 30's / early 40's I reckon) where we become nostalgic for things of our youth right about the same time we usually have a bit of disposable income available in our lives. So demand rises and prices rise with it. However the way the collector mentality is, that just keeps escalating until their collections are to a point where they're happy. The thing is, it's a finite market and when that point is reached, the demand wanes and prices naturally fall. Eventually collectors sell up for whatever reason. At the point they come to sell, if the market has moved on, there's a lot more stuff on the market again but back at sensible prices.

 

The thing is the peak of that wave is constantly moving forwards through generations. We've seen this with the 2600. Prices rose, then fell. Currently you can buy the consoles and games for buttons as the people who are nostalgic about the 2600 are in their 50's and are likely done with it. Then the NES, then the SNES. Currently Dreamcast and GameCube prices are starting to rise as we get to that point. Rarity does add another factor to it though, the PS2 was massive, so only odd titles are going to be big money as they're still easy to get for pennies. Low production run stuff however is already starting to get expensive. The Jaguar, which in it's day wasn't very popular due to a roster of good games you can count on one hand, is super rare so prices are currently being gouged to hell.

 

The thing is that this might be the last generation this happens with as the PS3 and Xbox 360 are firmly into the online age where their consoles and games are starting to become reliant on patches. It's not too bad at this point, but by the time we get to the nostalgia hump for the PS4 and Xbox One, and the servers are gone, a boxed game is likely to be a broken mess of a thing without a patch. Fine if it's just sitting on a shelf, but without piracy and preservation of the actual fixed games, I honestly think games from that point onward will be lost in time.

Edited by juansolo
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On 3/21/2021 at 12:03 PM, Tempest said:

That's where I am these days.  I have enough games that if I played one a week I most likely still wouldn't get through them all before I died.  I also tend to like RPGs which can last from 25-200 hours depending on the title.  I think I'm set for life at this point.  I've been slowly selling off my games and investing in multicarts.  Not only do they take up less room, but I don't need to worry about discs going bad.

Exactly where I am too. I've been gradually getting flash carts and modding consoles to get all my collections on to SD or HDD. I sold all of my Nintendo games recently up to and including the Wii U (I have two SNES carts left, that's it). That was started by a worry that GameCube games have started showing up with disc rot. I've got all those on my Wii now. The last one I did was fitting a GDEMU to the Dreamcast, that was mainly driven by the Atomiswave games. All my PS1 games are on a memory stick on my PS2, and I'm currently going through my PS2 games to get them onto HDD, then I'll move them on. The pile on the right are on the HDD, the piles on the left are to do...

 

PS2.thumb.jpg.9dd6b147b251406f2ed8ac0dde8aaa5a.jpg

 

I've been looking into hacking the PS3 after news that the store is closing. I've stuck the HEN mod on there but am finding it a little bit flakey as I've been loading the discs on. I may need to pick up an older PS3 as there are better mods out there now.

Edited by juansolo
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I don't think nostalgia matters that much in that market anymore. People simply wised up to the fact that retro gaming can be either a good long term investment or that you can turn a quick buck by flipping/scalping. Unlike before the internet, when you would have to make a considerable effort to obtain something, now anybody can be a retro-mogul from the comfort of their home, even outsiders who do not have strong sentimental connection to this stuff. For that reason I doubt there are going to be any wavy dips in prices, which will just keep on rising. Even 100+ years from now, since these early generations were so iconic, and the later ones are turning digital.  Eg, PS3 store is about to be turned off, how are you going to collect complete versions of games which required day-one patches?

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2 hours ago, youxia said:

PS3 store is about to be turned off, how are you going to collect complete versions of games which required day-one patches?

I wonder about that.  I guess I'll have to load up each of my PS3 games before the store goes down and see if it downloads a patch.  Unless they're going to keep the patch servers up (assuming they're two different things).  I already did this with my Wii U because some games like Xenoblade X absolutely require the optional downloads to play properly.

 

3 hours ago, juansolo said:

Exactly where I am too. I've been gradually getting flash carts and modding consoles to get all my collections on to SD or HDD. I sold all of my Nintendo games recently up to and including the Wii U (I have two SNES carts left, that's it). That was started by a worry that GameCube games have started showing up with disc rot. I've got all those on my Wii now. The last one I did was fitting a GDEMU to the Dreamcast, that was mainly driven by the Atomiswave games. All my PS1 games are on a memory stick on my PS2, and I'm currently going through my PS2 games to get them onto HDD, then I'll move them on. The pile on the right are on the HDD, the piles on the left are to do...

I just did my Wii U (Haxchi), DC, and my GC this year (those little SD adapters are so nice and my GBP never looked better).  My PS2 has a regular IDE drive in it but I think I'll invest in one of those SATA adapters and get a nice solid state drive eventually.  I'll have to look into the PS1 memory stick thing though, that's a new one to me (I just have a modded PS1).  I'm on the Satiator waiting list for my Saturn as well since it's already modded and I don't want to muck with the drive.

 

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