What is with prices these days?!

[Pemdawg]

Got bored, went looking for Contra for Famicom on ebay. Worst loose copy was almost USD$40! Complete copies were all near or over $100! Gimmick I get. Yeah, its rare, and awesome as heck. But, Contra?! Its a big seller,a ND not uncommon. Seems to me like asking $20 for Super Mario 3. *rant over*

[JessicaWolf]

It's a combination of people thinking "hurhur, it's from Japan so it must be worth it's weight in gold" and the fact that many US and EU collectors have caught on to the fact that you can get Famicom/Super Famicom copies of games for far cheaper than copies of the same game put out in their local region.

[Pemdawg]

If only it were cheap to get things from Yahoo auctions Japan. Proxies are a hassle :-(

[XiTaU]

im not sure how rare contra really is but it has been $30 or up for the last 2 years or so its not really a new thing.
Im pretty sure i snagged my copy for around $20 off ebay maybe a year ago if u check completed u can see some went around that value.
If ur patient u will find a reasonable price copy its just the BIN's are always crazy high.

[Raverrevolution]

FYI I bought mine in a little shop in Akihabara this past Sept for 1800 yen.  It was so tough to find a copy of it.  Even Super Potato was out.  It was pretty annoying to find and the one I bought was a little bit sun faded too.

Personally I think it's expensive because of how sought after it is.  It was so popular in the USA and we pretty much got screwed out of all the extra little things in the game hence why there's a demand probably.

I would think it was much more common here in the USA than it ever was in Japan.

Holy crap, I just checked eBay and even the US version is expensive.  $27 was the cheapest BIN.  Crazy given how common it was.

[L___E___T]

General rule - prices are determined by Supply AND Demand.  Contra is one of those games eveyone played, or everyone wants.  When you have games like Gimmick!  with low supply and super high demand, the price goes through the roof.  

Recent Super Famicom price hike is just a boost in demand, while of course the supply only ever gets lower.  When I first got into collecting, NES was not exactly cool and very niche, while SNES even less cool and more niche.  

Now both have this whole hipster cool thing going on and there are big communities that like retro games in general, it wasn't anything like it is now when I first got into it around 8 years ago.  I bought a brand new Zelda Game and Watch for $50.  Now that's a $500 game easy.  

It saddens me a bit, but I try and collect hardware mostly and it hasn't had the same effect with hardware, it's the games people care about it seems.

[zmaster18]

It may seem like a high price today, but just imagine getting these games in 10 years from now? I wonder how rare retro games will get in the future?

It's definitely cheaper to invest now then to buy it later on!    Do you think there would be any system where the games wouldn't get more expensive over time? All I can think of is Wii and original DS games, since those just became last generation and those games are getting easy to pick up.

[L___E___T]

With every system there's a sweet spot for collecting prices where they are at lowest demand.  That's probably not far off for Wii and about now for Xbox 1 and PS2 games.  I think Gamecube games have already seen that trough and are slowly, on the up.

[nerdynebraskan]

I agree with LET about "sweet spots." It seems to me that happens about two generations after the platform is fresh.

When the platform is current, its prices stay consistently high (even on used items). When it slips one generation behind, the stuff depreciates considerably but remains moderately valuable because there are a lot of wannabe-current gamers who just play everything five years later to do it on the cheap.

But it's generally when a platform falls two generations behind that its hardware and games hit rock-bottom pricewise. The supplies are still relatively strong on the most-common 90% of stuff for the platform, while demand tends to hit its all-time low. It's too obsolete to be of interest to modern gamers' interest in cutting-edge technology, but it isn't yet old enough to have a nostaligic or historical significance for retro gamers. I know I built a decent NES collection in my early-to-mid teens; even though I didn't have a job, I was still getting a lot of good games for $2-5 apiece around town because it was the N64/PS1 era and no one gave a damn about 8-bit gaming.

The trend starts to reverse when you get three and four generations removed from the platform's heyday. At that point, kids who were raised on that system start hitting early adulthood and getting more disposable income. And boom! A new generation of collectors start driving up demand for that now-retro goodness.

Although the Nintendo situation is a little more complicated than the general game collecting scene, and most of that has to do with the power of its brand. When the SNES kids became the new SNES collectors three or four years ago, that predictably led to skyrocketing prices on top SNES items. But they were also so in love with Nintendo that they started gobbling up NES stuff, too, and that's when NES prices went from expensive to insane. That demand is so red-hot right now that even typically niche areas like import collecting have seen a tremendous price bump as well. Even if there's no interest in finding exclusive gems, many are still interested in buying cheaper Japanese alternatives to American grails like Little Samson and Gun Nac. But once any of us start picking up any FC/SFC games, we can get hooked and start seriously collecting them too. Collecting is definitely a compulsion for many (if not most) of us...

I think we're also seeing Nintendo's brand loyalty in action with N64 and GC stuff reaching "collectible" status faster than the NES and SNES did. (That also has to do with the key games of these latter generations being less common to begin with, since Nintendo's systems of that era were overshadowed by the new competition from the Sony's Playstations.) So, we're already seeing games from obvious franchises on those systems selling in game stores for $30-50 apiece, with rares creeping toward $100. And we're only now at a point where the older N64 kids are starting to reach adulthood...

I think the big question now is where this will end. How will this scene look in ten years? Are these games going to continue to increase for the next several years, or is this a bubble waiting to burst?

[Nightstar699]

Holy crap, I just checked eBay and even the US version is expensive.  $27 was the cheapest BIN.  Crazy given how common it was.

I remember Contra being like this for a long time. Back around 2005 when I started getting a lot of NES games on eBay, I recall getting a lot of the more popular titles (the Marios, Ninja Gaiden, Castlevania, etc.) for just a few dollars a piece, always under $10, but I specifically remember Contra always being over $20 no matter where I looked. It's just always been a bit more expensive than its fellow big-name titles.