So I guess we all got the news today that Ace Attorney 5 is getting localized - but only digitally. This made me think about collecting retro games as well. I and probably a lot of other people writing in this and the appreciation threads for the various systems, are heavily collecting all video games, and while video games undoubtably will continue its march towards a more or less digital-only future, will this affect our valuation of older physical games as well?
Recently, we all know prices have spiked for Snes-games and a ton of other retro-goodies, and I am inclined to think that this trend will only continue, especially now that we cant spend our money on newer, physical copies of stuff like AA5, but then I consider my CD's, and even though I have a ton of old CD's from before music went all digital, I actually do not value them anything at all anymore. Its just to inconvenient to use and collect, so I was thinking - will this happend to me and other collectors in the future in regards to video games as well? And will this devaluate the prices of these old games we have collected? I dont know, but I thought it was an interesting
ive thought about this a lot too man, and there's some big differences:
with music:
-no fear of losing BC with digital
-audio quality can actually be improved over physical media (lossless flac's, etc)
-no stigma to older stuff necessarily "aging poorly" etc
tons of other differences in budget, scope, market etc - so many revenue streams to be found that tons of scenes can thrive. the way the RIAA doubled-down on prosecution instead of trying to keep up with a changing model should be a cautionary tale to pubs, but it sadly isn't.
to the former bits: absolutely, many people point to aging crowd/nostalgia for the current bubble but i can't see a) an elongated gen & b) the shift you're pointing at towards digital (with few to none of the pluses the format sees on steam/PC) not being big factors as well. the entire concept of ownership is challenged when a title is married to hardware/doesn't migrate like you'd expect it to, moreso when factoring server checks, account problems etc. I just went & hunted down OutRun 2006 because my XBLA copy won't be accessible forever.