how much do you spend on your gaming addiction a month?

[chupon]

Maybe this should be in the gamerooms section - feel free to move it.

Almost every day another member posts pics of their gameroom. Every time I'm blown away. I have a collection that I'm proud of with 13 systems and about 100 games but what I see boggles my mind. I've never posted pics cause my collections pales compared to others here. Here's what I would like to know. For those who have serious game collections: like 200 ~300 games - limited editions everywhere, and arcade cabs a plenty -

I want to know how much money you think you've spent on your collections?

I've been gaming for almost 20 years now and sure my parents bought me my first NES and SNES cause I was real young. In recent years though I can't say that I even spend $50.00 a month on games. I want to but can't.

This is my actual question and I know it boils down to how much money you have / make.

How much money do you spend on your gaming addiction a month?

[Thierry Henry]

I would say for me it averages somewhere around R2000. So that would probably work out to near at $250 per month.
This is more or less my gaming budget, but some of that sometimes also goes into buying movie related stuff like dvd's/blu-ray's etc.

[h8b1llg8ts]

That depends on who you ask. If you ask me I would say not that much but the wife would say completly different.

My avid collecting didn't start until about three years ago. At the time PS1, oXbox, Dreamcast, and the first release PS2 games were a dime a dozen. I would honestly spend about $5 or $6 on a game each day. Either with a quick stop at my local GS or Ebay. I figure, if I drank coffee, this is what I would spend a day. At this point I would spend about $150 a month.

But now that I have collected all the cheap games I'm down to the $20 - $50 game level. My rational is I'm not buying any new games unless they are less then $20 used or deals like the one BB had over last weekend. My spending is about the same but I don't receive as much mail as I used too.

[fast]

It probably evens out to $75 a month. I buy alot at Goodwill, Thriftstores, and other second hand shops. Last month I got 90 something PC games ($15), a couple cube games ($20), FFCC Echoes of Time DS ($40), and a couple NES games ($10). So not the best month for me, but a good one. I usually just spend the money I make from fixing computers on gaming, but if something big comes around (console launch or good deal on a cab) I will cave.

[onemanfilmcrew]

Back in my employed days I'd drop $100-$200 a month on vintage games. I traveled a lot, so I got the chance to hit a ton of places that I would never ever get to hit, so I would take every opportunity to buy everything I could (and I got everything from a complete copy of Tengen Tetris for $30 in Philly, to a boxed copy of Dragon Quest 3 for the Famicom for $15 in Portland, to a boxed copy of Dragon Force for the Saturn for $3 in Austin).

Now that I'm unemployed I have to watch what I pick up, so I typically only buy from goodwill. I'm lucky enough to have a goodwill computer center near me, so 2-3 times a week they restock their games (it's pretty much a hub for the city for all the goodwill stores, so all the computer/game stuff goes there). I've gotten everything from boxed Coleco games to Master System and Genesis games to even a trio of Atari 2600 prototypes. Depending on what I find there I'll still spend $10-$20 a week (because really, who's going to pass up a complete copy of Herzog Zwei for the Genesis for $3?)

[J T]

It's funny, for awhile, I would only want a few games here and there. I would rent mostly and if a game was good, I would buy it. I would get excited about new releases and pay full price. I didn't buy many games then, but I spent a lot of money. Lately, I've been more obsessed with gaming and I walk into a store knowing something about almost every game on the shelf because I've spent time trawling through metacritic and reading lots of reviews, then checking out amazon and ebay for pricing. I'm like an encyclopedia now. When I look at a game now, I know something about what it's like, I know if it has been favorably reviewed by critics or gamers, I've probably seen some footage of the graphics on youtube or gametrailers, and I know what is a good bargain price on the game. This has lead me to spending more time buying games, but I'm not spending a terrible lot more money because I search out for little low cost hidden gems (special thanks to this site for bringing a lot of them to my attentino).

I'm not sure exactly how much I spend on games in a month, but it's probably around $50-$100 lately, though I've bought so many that this will probably go down some because I have found most of the games I was looking for and I have a huge backlog of games that need to be played.

[MrPopo]

Me, I spend approximately $200-250 a month. I've finally got my collection pretty well pimped out, so there aren't too many old titles that I'm still interested in. There's a few for each of the old platforms, but I'm basically out of shelving space (and no real room for more) so I can hold myself to saving those games until I get a new place. So the only games I pick up these days are the new releases on the current gen.

When I was building up the collection, though, it was more like $500-600 a month.,

[otaku]

I have no idea honestly but I don't hold on to things for long either I'll collect for a system then trade/sell it off for another. Limited space and cash demands this I'm mostly in it to play to so I don't mind getting rid of stuff. But yeah I easily spend a few grand a year

[Jayson]

I would say that I spend on average about $50-60/month. I might go more than 2 months without buying anything, but then I will spend $100 or so 2 months in a row.

I try not to think about it too much, though I'm sure my Wife keeps track...

Last month for me was some Wii stuff, a Saturn USB pad, GTA:Chinatown wars, and the GTA PSX pack. $105.

[Mozgus]

Very rarely over $50 a month. I stick to games on sale, and maybe get a used Dreamcast game off amazon or something.