I think for me it’s retro games, specifically. I used to have been in the used video games market for 5 years from 2008 to 2012. My goal was to construct a personal video game collection, physical copies of games I personally enjoyed growing up.
I was registered on a game trading site which served as the base of my business, I’ve made rounds of thrift store hopping and any used games market I could find locally. I’ve struck amazingly good deals and I might’ve had luck on my side a few times (for example, a guy on that game trading site gave me a free copy of Super Metroid that I got to choose for a minor mistake he felt he needed to honor.)
And I felt like I was incredibly close to completing my personal collection until 2012, I ran into some dumb drama with my sister and ex girlfriend back then. They racked up the cable bill in my name that I was trying to cancel and they wouldn’t let me cancel it until I turned in all equipment. And I was jobless at the time too, having lost my job. So I needed to sell some things and sure enough, had to sacrifice my entire collection at the time that I spent 5 long years building.
I never recovered since and this was during the golden period where it was still fairly fun to collect and everybody wasn’t pretending to be a pawn shop.
I would try continuing what collection of games I’ve tried to build, through Steam but it wasn’t the same. Nowadays, the used video games market has turned into just a platform full of resellers, pawn brokers and stingy greedy collectors.
I find it very cheapening that people treat games like they’re just tools of trade. They mean nothing and they’re treated like nothing except to make a quick buck, however possible.
It’s only worsened thanks to Goodwill and similar thrift stores, getting in on it where everyone pays too much attention as to what the prices go for on EBay and VGPC.
And we have WATA involved that hasn’t made things better. Thanks for shitting on an honest hobby, assholes.
It kind of sounds like OP morphed from hobbyist to investor, then lost interest when his investment lost value.
There’s a lot of hobbies that offer a path to professional, and I’ve watched friends go down that path. It’s rarely a good experience - there’s all kind of things you have to do as a professional to make a living that you can blow off as a hobbyist/volunteer. There’s a lot more stress when success or failure is tied to whether you eat or not. You lose a lot of freedom to tell dickheads to fuck off.
Never been into collectibles, myself, but the investment pressure seems insidious. Like, it’s one thing to trade cards among friends because you got doubles of something your buddy’s missing, but buying a rare card because it’s “underpriced” to hold until its price recovers is very different. The money is pressure to change from looking at your collection as good, fun, or complete and to looking at its presumptive cash value. Then you’ve stopped being a collector and started being a businessman.
You should take a look at game prices for anything older than PS2/GameCube (and even some games from that era are obscenely expensive). For a long time, LSD: Dream Emulator was one of the most expensive games you could get at around $200 for a pristine copy. Nowadays, there are a ton of games that are >$200 for a junk, beat-up copy. The price skyrocketed thanks to WATA/Heritage Auctions doing a lot of suspected pump and dumping that, as a couple examples, got an LoZ copy sold for nearly $900,000 and a copy of Super Mario Bros sold for nearly $700,000. Afaik the only known copy Chu-Teng didn’t sell for that much, and that was considered to be lost media.
Even if all you want is to have a copy of Banjo-Kazooie then have fun forking over $20ish for a loose cartridge or >$100 if you want the box and manual. That’s not how it used to be. Used to be that you could get a loose cartridge for like, $2 in a bundle of 10 of them.
Fuck WATA.
Edit: this also applies to old computers. Remember when you could get a beige CRT by the side of the road for free? Have fun paying >$50 for a shitty CRT, >$200 for a decent one, and >$1000 for a good one. It’s not just CRTs either; basically anything to do with old PCs is becoming obscenely expensive as well.
For the CRTs at least that makes sense, because they used to be mass manufactured, everybody had one, and then new tech came out so nobody wanted them anymore. They threw them out or sold them for cheap. Now that that glut of CRTs has cleared out, they’re probably relatively rare, and people aren’t manufacturing much of them anymore.
I think that probably applies to lots of things.
I didn’t know making a personal collection constituted as being an ‘investor’. Learn something new everyday. /s
I mean it’s in the word - personal. When you’re making personal collections, you aren’t in it for the money or what ways you can flip what you get for an investment.
Making huge leaps of assumption, you are. Christ.
