Ebay: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

[AppleQueso]

I imagine if there's way to measure overall traffic to a site like say, nintendoage, atariage, digitalpress, etc over time, that might give us some clues.

Can someone dig up site stats for Racketboy? How have the number of visitors changed over time?

At the very least the assertion that prices, overall, have increased is supported by VGPC. They have price charts for average cost of a game per individual system going back to 2008, and on the majority of consoles that we'd consider "retro" there is a definite overall upward trend.

[AppleQueso]

In any case, the strategies employed by many today (constant hunting, buying big lots and reselling what you don't need for profit and using that profit to fund other purchases, for example) are almost necessary if you want to amass a collection and have it still be affordable. The days of easily stumbling onto occasional cheap SNES games at a pawn shop for example are done, and that happened a long time go.

The strategic side of collecting is just something I do not find fun anymore. I'm not sure I ever found it fun to begin with. I don't want to go out and hunt. I don't want to constantly manage trade piles, and I don't want to have to keep up with 'the market'.

I can enjoy retro gaming without doing these things.

[dsheinem]

The strategic side of collecting is just something I do not find fun anymore. I'm not sure I ever found it fun to begin with. I don't want to go out and hunt. I don't want to constantly manage trade piles, and I don't want to have to keep up with 'the market'.

I can enjoy retro gaming without doing these things.

Sure, that I understand. I just don't think that retro collecting is really any more or less affordable today than it was a decade or five years ago, especially if you account for inflation.

[Jmustang1968]

The strategic side of collecting is just something I do not find fun anymore. I'm not sure I ever found it fun to begin with. I don't want to go out and hunt. I don't want to constantly manage trade piles, and I don't want to have to keep up with 'the market'.

I can enjoy retro gaming without doing these things.

Sure, that I understand. I just don't think that retro collecting is really any more or less affordable today than it was a decade or five years ago, especially if you account for inflation.

Cart based games have definitely gone up as well as Saturn and you can start to see a climb in Gamecube. Most Sony stuff has gone down.

[alienjesus]

The strategic side of collecting is just something I do not find fun anymore. I'm not sure I ever found it fun to begin with. I don't want to go out and hunt. I don't want to constantly manage trade piles, and I don't want to have to keep up with 'the market'.

I can enjoy retro gaming without doing these things.

Sure, that I understand. I just don't think that retro collecting is really any more or less affordable today than it was a decade or five years ago, especially if you account for inflation.

Depends on what you're buying. It's certainly possible to buy retro games on the cheap, particularly if you don't want most of the cult classics and aren't buying games for oldNintendo consoles (which generally hold the most value)

Generally though, I think most of the games people ar elikely to be looking for have increased a LOT since I started collecting 6 years ago. Inflation is a thing, yes, but I;m talking games that were £10 going for double, triple or quadruple that price now.