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Link,
You bring up some very interesting points in this section. As someone who sells a lot on ebay (and also runs a huge flea market game exchange every Sunday in Fredericton for the past few years) I have seen and felt firsthand how re-releases can affect market value.
What strikes me a most important for sellers to keep in mind is that the retro game market is not static. In fact, it is quite dynamic. When the Mega Man collections came out we experienced a drastic drop in interest and prices. It is important to point out that the local market and the ebay market are two separate things, and that many people do not have the patience to wait for an item to arrive in the mail. This said, new copies of the Mega Man collections have dried up in town and now there is renewed interest in the game by local collectors (and average games: not everyone is a collector).
Supply and Demand is the most important factor in pricing and sometimes this can have a bizarre effect. Take the original Super Mario Bros. that was re-released for the GBA. It still fetches a high amount for a game that I can’t give away for the regular NES.
I personally believe that what is happening with collectors now is that they are focusing more and more on complete, mint, boxed games for their cartridge based systems. Therefore, if you have a complete Chrono Trigger the price should not fluctuate. But then again, Chrono Trigger is one of the most popular games of all time amongst many of my customers and I doubt that we will see a price drop that is truly significant. Re-releases do two things: they increase the supply, and simultaneously, rejuvenate interest and creates new interest among people unfamiliar.
This is not true for all games, but I think that games that have become “nostalgia classics” will always be coveted to a certain amount.
What I am seeing now with the SNES, however, is the same thing that has happened with the NES. Many truely rare games are becoming more and more sought after (like Aerofighters and Chavez II) and speculators may want to invest in some of these games.
But if you are a collector, buy what you want to play and have fun: at the end of the day a video game collection is useless if it isn’t being used.
Cheers,
jointhiway
The same kind of boost has happened with FF VII and Silent Hill thanks to weird releases. FF VII started its upward climb thanks to Advent Children, got a further slap on the back thanks to Crisis Core and its now running $50+ for a game that had somewhere in the range of 2 million units produced.
Silent Hill/Silent Hill 2 also blew up with the release of the movie, they came down, but their prices were a fair bit higher than they were pre-movie.
The re-release of DragonBall GT: Final Bout absolutely KILLED the market for the original version of the game. The game was bad, but its rarity kept its value high. Post re-release (not a re-print because it was published this time by Atari, not BanDai, even though Atari reused the code 100%, hell the game still boots as BanDai when you play it) the games value plumited. I got my copy in 2006 (2 years after re-release) and I paid 36 bucks shipped for it.
I think what the re-releases/re-prints do is really dependant on the rarity of the original and how good/bad that is. X2/X3 wern’t common and are good games, so when it re-released people were happy to get it on their current system, dropping the price of it. DBGT:Final Bout re-released and people could actually play the shittyness that it was and they moved on from the fact that it wasn’t worth what they’d been spendig before, despite its ‘fanservice’.