@Paleo_OrcaThat 6 bucks was a pretty good deal. According to my little pricing guide (which, as I said, isn't super reliable or anything) it's worth about 15 in the box. The cart alone goes for 8. I dunno. Ebay shows
some freaky pricing on it, too. That looks like shenanigans to me, though. Still, if I were you, I'd probably have picked it up just because it'd be a cool thing to have. I usually cite that as my favorite game of all time.
Yeah, pricing on cartridges is really weird and we could've talked about that for the whole segment (except it would've been boring). As in most collecting hobbies, rarity is a big part of the prices you see, of course. But it's also odd that games that shouldn't be rare go for high prices, too. Something like Castlevania or Contra - games that were ubiquitous in their time - are priced almost like new games. A lot of times I think this is just wishful thinking on the part of the seller. At Game Over here in Austin, they're even trying to unload Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt for 10 bucks. That's nuts. If they've sold a single copy at that price, then I'd like to know who they sold it too. That guy has more money than sense.
But the other weird thing is that horrific, terrible games go for exorbitant prices, too. People pay hundreds of dollars for Action 52 - that strikes me as unusual. To my knowledge, comic collectors don't pay huge prices for bad comic books no one cares about, even if they are rare.
I guess the obvious reason is because the NES library is finite and completionists want to collect every single game (whereas comic collectors are less likely to try to collect every single comic). So that drives up demand for games no one would want, otherwise. Fair enough. But I think if I was hovering over my Pay Pal account, about to punch in a bid for
569 dollars just so I could play Cheetahmen, I'd probably ask myself whether I picked the right hobby or not.
I do understand how games like Earthbound and Super Mario RPG end up priced so high, though. They're popular classics that are pretty rare to spot out in the wild. High Quality + High Rarity = High Price makes sense to me. But high prices when either quality or rarity isn't high seems a bit unusual.
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on: 10/06/11, 23:57 |