The New Rare & Valuable Treasures Series

Post by **Curlypaul** » Thu Jan 17, 2008 9:51 am

Great article Racket, good reference point for buying with the view to sell as well.

Post by **tdinc-Paul** » Thu Jan 17, 2008 5:15 pm

Great Articles, the reason I joined the forum, Nice work RB!

Post by **ott0bot** » Thu Jan 17, 2008 6:38 pm

Yes i agree competely, great acticle! I'd like to see one on PS1 games! Although the prices seem a bit steep on some of the titles, (Ogre Battle 64 and Smash Bros) i agree with your post about colectability depends on the collector. If it's a specific item you really want, the price isn't always your first thought.

Post by **Gamerforlife** » Thu Jan 17, 2008 7:03 pm

racketboy wrote:
Gamerforlife wrote:I like the idea, but there are some games on there that are not rare at all. Valuable content-wise yes, but not rare and collectible.
that's where the "valuable" comes in. Ultimately, the list was based on aftermarket values.
And I realize not that many N64 games are "valuable" by many standards, but I wanted it to be a way of skimming a list to see if you had something that might be worth more to someone else that it is to you sitting on your shelf.

I agree. I know that Sin and Punishment and Conker's Bad Fur Day are not hard to come by, yet I still am proud to have complete copies of them in my collection. I just thought the article was a little unclear on its definition of value. I do consider those games and some of the others as the best the system has to offer, even if they are just a bit obscure to the average gamer. Personally, and I know this is blasphemy, I like CBFD better than Mario 64. I also think Sin and Punishment is just as good as the more well known Starfox 64.

I definitely like this idea. Hope to see more articles like this.

Post by **racketboy** » Thu Jan 17, 2008 7:09 pm

like I said, it's all based on the prices. We didn't make them up.
It's based off of actual sales on eBay and some Amazon and Half.com prices from the last month.
I'm not saying they are all hard to find or impossible to find cheap.

Post by **RadarScope1** » Thu Jan 17, 2008 9:04 pm

I like it. Glad to see you're still coming up with good topics that can be applied to many different pieces of hardware.

Post by **Jubal** » Thu Jan 17, 2008 10:48 pm

racketboy wrote:like I said, it's all based on the prices. We didn't make them up.
It's based off of actual sales on eBay and some Amazon and Half.com prices from the last month.
I'm not saying they are all hard to find or impossible to find cheap.

not sure if everybody is aware, but retro videogames do have a seasonal cycle on their prices. beginning of summer school break is a high point, also right after christmas prolly due to christmas cash burning holes in pockets.

low point in prices seem to be right before christmas, like the last 2 weeks of december (people who want retro games buy them for themselves?)

at least thats been my experience from selling used games on half/amazon

Post by **jjgames** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 11:32 am

I wanted to start off by saying hello to everyone. I helped write this article with racketboy and my site provided all the pricing data. I'm glad everyone has liked it so much. I also wanted to add my two cents to the discussion.

It seems like the biggest confusion was over what is "rare" and "valuable" and how our list was ranked. There are ways to get the rarest games for a ranking, but the problem is a game might be rare but nobody wants to buy it so it is really cheap. It might be rare because it sold really poorly when it was released because it was crap. We figured ranking based upon price is showing relative rarity to the demand. Smash Bros isn't rare as in there aren't many copies but it is very expensive because lots of people want it. That was our logic.

Jubal wrote:not sure if everybody is aware, but retro videogames do have a seasonal cycle on their prices. beginning of summer school break is a high point, also right after christmas prolly due to christmas cash burning holes in pockets.

low point in prices seem to be right before christmas, like the last 2 weeks of december (people who want retro games buy them for themselves?)

at least thats been my experience from selling used games on half/amazon

I just posted an article about this on my blog. It shows the average price for most major consoles during 2007.

What you said isn't quite true from the actual data, but very close. The prices drop from the 1st of the year until about the start of summer. Then they are relatively steady. Then there is another round of drops after summer until Novemeber. Then the prices shoot way up until the end of Decemeber and are actually at their highest at the end of December and beginning of January.

Post by **racketboy** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 11:38 am

Wow -- very cool

Gives you a good idea of when to sell of your spare games!

Post by **RadarScope1** » Sat Jan 19, 2008 12:12 pm

Wow. That's quite thorough. So it looks like if you want to buy, the best time is right after Halloween. I just got a SNES2 on eBay. Hope I didn't get ripped off....

One thing I didn't understand about your chart was that while the "all games" graph was the same line in every chart, it seems to begin in different places. It's $13 in a couple of them and closer to $17 and $10 in two others.

Interesting that PS1 games were so much higher than the average. I wouldn't have expected that. Is it a few of the rarer RPGs bumping up the overall average??