Are video games the next baseball cards?

[dsheinem]

So I recently had the experience that some of you may have already had and that some of you will likely have one day - I dug out my late 80s/early 90s baseball card collection from the attic. I beamed with pride when I saw that I had kept everything in M/NM condition over the years, that the best cards were the best protected cards, that I had a nice selection of high end rookies and HOF player cards, etc. That said, since they have been in an attic for 20+ years and since I don't have much need for them these days, I figured I'd look into selling them...

I had read articles over the years telling me that the value of sports cards had plummeted, I knew first hand that a lot of people were getting out of the hobby around the time that I did (when packs were getting too pricey for kids), but I was still a little surprised at what I found: basically everything was worthless. Cards that would have fetched $20 in 1992 now won't fetch $0.20. Low end sets that I bought for $25 or $50 won't sell on eBay for even $2. High-end stuff from those years just basically doesn't even exist now. I found that I had maybe a dozen or two cards that might fetch enough to, collectively, make a car payment. Even if I included those "better cards" doubt I could sell my 15,000-20,000 sports cards for even $500 today.

In any case, this article captures all the reasons why the cards are worthless very well, and is both a nice walk down memory lane and a swift kick in the teeth. Suffice to say, the card market collapsed due to the basics of supply and demand.

I don't really want to talk about baseball cards, though, in this thread (unless you really want to)- I want to ponder the video game market and debate whether or not video game values might not see a similar trend in the future. There's a couple of reasons I could see the retro gaming market collapse like the baseball card market:

1) Lack of demand for retro games because people move on. Part of my thinking here is that a lot of retro game purchasing is fueled by people in their mid 20s-early 40s, most of whom grew up (at least in part) with a lot of physical hardware/software that is either not well emulated or, if it is emulated well, emulation fails to stoke those nostalgia fires appropriately. Those people are still buying stuff now, but (as we've seen across several threads here) they are also selling stuff at a quicker rate. How long will people in this demographic want to keep buying things? How many will still want big game collections in their 40s and 50s, even if they want them in their 20s? I think a big shift is coming sooner rather than later, and the market will be flooded again with old games sometime in the next decade or so.

2) Lack of demand for retro games because of high prices. I've seen a lot of you complain about the high costs of the best SNES or Saturn games, the cost obstacles to getting into collecting, the money involved in producing proper picture/sound on modern TVs, etc. Like with baseball cards, I have seen more than a few people cite cost as a reason to stop collecting. This has the effect of driving costs down, ultimately...but I am not sure that (given #1) it will happen soon enough to offset things --- to find an equilibrium

3) Disc rot, hardware deaths, etc. - I realize that a lot of old hardware has been working for 30-40 years already and that well kept stuff will last longer than poorly kept stuff - but I find it harder and harder to believe that especially disc-based games will still be in good shape in 20 years or so. I think, again, as people in the hobby age, that they will have less time and interest in soldering and tinkering with old hardware to get it to work when it breaks. I think that these failures will be part of the reason that the retro game market may collapse.

Now, like with baseball cards, I am sure there will always be some games that retain much of their value regardless of the shifts in the market (such as Neo Geo stuff, perhaps). But I think some of these reasons (and others that I'll say more about later when I have the time) mirror pretty closely what happened with baseball cards.

[noiseredux]

yes.

[prfsnl_gmr]

These are all good points, and I think that the video game market will collapse at some point. (I also recently sold all of my baseball cards. I received about $25 for a 24" x 24" x 24" box full of them. Mostly I am just glad to have them out of the house.) Ultimately, I think that the rarest games will hold their value, but I think that prince for the vast majority of them will barely keep up with inflation.

That said, video games were considerably more expensive at the time of their release than baseball cards, and their prices went through a period of extreme deflation before their more recent rise. Accordingly, complaints about their current prices usually focus on how inexpensive they were before there was an active collector's market. (Think of baseball cards in the 1940s or comic books in the 1970s.) That market is now established, and I am not sure that we will see their prices return to that point.

[MrPopo]

There is one major difference between video games and baseball cards: video games have an intrinsic use beyond collecting. I'd say it's actually better to compare video games with Magic. Magic has been around since '93 and has both a collecting and a playing component to it. Additionally, everything prior to 8th edition is only useable in Legacy and Vintage, both of which are extremely niche formats. The secondary prices for those cards (essentially the "retro" cards) demonstrates that many still hold a reasonable value (all the useable cards) and the most powerful ones command extremely high prices. Conversely, all the chaff goes for peanuts. So I'm expecting quality games to hold some value, quality games that are also rare to hold a higher value, and games people don't enjoy playing to drop.

[dsheinem]

There is one major difference between video games and baseball cards: video games have an intrinsic use beyond collecting.

That's a very good point! I think the Magic comparison is appropos in many ways, but I don't think there's ever been a gigantic market for those cards the way there were for baseball cards from roughly 85-95 and the way that there is for video games now. I see roughly the same amount of tabletop/card game stores now as I did in the 90s, but independent video game stores that focus on retro games have already started to go the way of baseball card stores from a decade or so ago. I do think finding a fair comparison would be interesting, though! Beanie babies? Action figures? Pogs? I dunno...

[ElkinFencer10]

I don't thing retro games will collapse as hard as baseball cards did, but I think as time goes on and compilations and rereleases get more common and more affordable, that there will definitely be a major crash.

[dsheinem]

That said, video games were considerably more expensive at the time of their release than baseball cards, and their prices went through a period of extreme deflation before their more recent rise. Accordingly, complaints about their current prices usually focus on how inexpensive they were before there was an active collector's market. (Think of baseball cards in the 1940s or comic books in the 1970s.) That market is now established, and I am not sure that we will see their prices return to that point.

I think games made from the late 70s to early 90s are experiencing a value boom like pre-1970s baseball cards did in the 1980s and early 90s. I think that you are right that all the value won't be lost for these games down the road, but like with baseball cards the values of those games will return to more normative/lower prices fairly soon (maybe before the decade is out). By contrast, I don't think very many games made from 2005 or so on will ever see a spike in value the way that games of past decades are currently enjoying. I can't ever see a good percentage of the best/most interesting PS3 games selling loose or CIB for $30+ in 10-20 years from now.

Unlike cards, games also get regularly re-released (often in "enhanced" editions). We've seen this impact values of stuff like Ico and Shadow of the Collossus, for example...and I think those kinds of trends will continue...

[BoneSnapDeez]

Personally, I doubt I'll have these games 10+ years from now. Eventually I'll need to downsize for space reasons, and when/if hardware/software issues become prevalent I won't hesitate to purge this collection. Thankfully, given the excellent state of emulation, it will always be possible to at least play retro video games. I await an all-digital gaming future ("start today!" says noiseredux).

Funny you mention baseball cards...... A few years ago I attempted to sell my Marvel comics cards from the early 90s. These things are worth approximately jack shit. And I had TONS of them. Many full sets. Eventually sold everything for $80, which I then used to buy a copy of Lunar 2.

[Exhuminator]

As far as prices, who knows? Nintendo produced games tend to maintain their value (relative to other platforms), as do obscure JRPGs. Other than that, it all seems to plummet fairly quickly. This is why I have a problem paying $60 a pop for a new game.

The space thing is really what gets me. I didn't realize how much stuff I'd really accumulated until recently in preparation of a move. I'm sitting there looking a shelf of PS2 games that easily could fit (data size wise) on an external flashdrive. It starts to make you feel silly. That's what gets me about fourth gen and back, you can fit every 4th gen game and its accompanying emulator on one large MicroSD card. Thousands of games held on a card the size of your thumbnail.

On the other hand, I can understand the joy of collecting and having the real physical thing. I'm not knocking that. It's just as I get older, I find myself valuing simplicity and utilitarianism more. Thus avoiding hoarding stuff becomes more appealing. But I certainly wouldn't advocate hoarding games in the hope of making a big profit off them someday. The market is so volatile and temperamental, there's just no safe bet there.

[isiolia]

I'd probably look more at something like the home video market rather than baseball cards. As mentioned, baseball cards basically don't do anything. They're a pure collector's item. Video game hardware and software does more than sit there.

Personally, I think mainstream big-name stuff is largely going to decline as I expect a lot of it will continue to be made available over and over. Whether people get priced out, or just never had the original stuff to get nostalgic about, emulated or remastered versions of a lot of games are perfectly suitable to keeping them available to play. Maybe GOG.com will expand to console emulation or something.

At the same time, I think there's always going to be content that slips through the cracks and is all but forgotten about. Old movies that never got put on TV or VHS, VHS that never made it to DVD, and so on. There's going to be chunks of any system's library that never get repackaged, and remain desirable for niche audiences.
While unofficial emulation covers quite a bit, there are still systems from 6th gen and on (offhand) that aren't available.

So while I do think there will be an enduring market collector's market for video games, my suspicion is that it'll eventually shift towards things with murkier copyright/licensing that prevents it from being made available on newer hardware.