Vintage gaming community.
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I have quite a large game collection 8200 games (6600 physical games) and the cutoff for me was Covid. The prices all went crazy high. The only reason I have such a huge collection is because I love to find bargains like $1 per game. Another thing is most people now have smart phones and look up prices at yard sales and thrift stores. This means less people selling for cheap but also more flippers hunting for deals to resell.
I still buy games, but it’s way less often than before 2020.
I don't have a hard cut-off but I also haven't bought a physical game in some years now because of the price increases. I would love to continue my Dreamcast collection but it's not worth the risk spending so much anymore.
I just sold my Dreamcast for that very reason. Well that and to focus more on Nintendo hardware since it's what I grew up with. I know optical drive emulators exist, but for whatever reason I don't like them as much as a flash cart type situation. Says the guy who has two picoboot GameCubes :)
I used to collect a lot more in the last 20 so years but sold anything not Dreamcast related. That was mostly because of space saving though.
I did manage to get a clone GDEMU before they were in high demand but playing roms loses the nostalgic charm that having something physical has.
I did picoboot instead of an ODE specifically so I could still play my admittedly small GameCube collection.
About $50-70 for me depending on the game. I am interested in playing the games more than collecting so I have zero interest in paying more for a game than it would have cost new at retail.
That's a great way to put it and is why my limit is around $60ish. But even then I'm not paying that for a fun but basic platformer on a retro console. But RPGs tend to get a higher spending allowance from me.
The price of the console, any modern quality of life upgrades (RBG out, in game reset, etc), the price of the best flash cart and an SD card loaded with ROMs.
That adds up quick, doesn't it? I had my Sony Trinitron RGB modded and now have SNES, Sega Genesis/Master system, and a self modded N64 all connected to a SCART RGB switch and have already ordered the parts to get the treatment done on my NES. Looks incredible though!
For me, Retro gaming has always been the budget option. And outside of a few rare example where the value of the game was about to sky rocket (see Pokemon XD), I usually wait for the price to make sense to me.
For me that price is between $5 and $30 depending on the game, system, and how good that game is.
When I see Cars for the PS2 for $3.99 at a thrift store, I'm not going to say no. But $300 for the SNES version of Chrono Trigger, and the sellers, and the ~~idiots~~ influencers that buy from them, are out to lunch.
For these games with hyper inflated price points like Chrono Trigger, or Conkers Bad Furday, what I usually look at is re-releases or ROM collections. For a game like Conkers, you can literally buy an Xbox One and Rare Replay for less than what the cart is selling for. If you get lucky you might even get OEM controllers.
With most retro games outside of license titles getting remakes, and re-releases you should look at remakes before the original. You can probably build a sizable retro game library from the various ROM collections on steam alone. But if you want to play on the original hardware, I do advocate for Piracy of Hyper Inflated games like Pokemon Emerald. Especially since those scalped prices are not going back to the developers who made it, and Nintendo appears to have no desire to ever re-release them. So in my books they are as good as abandon ware, and one foot in the door to the public domain.
100% agree on ROMs for the super expensive stuff. I do like to play on original hardware whenever possible. And I definitely see more Everdrives in my future for those and the translated games we never got in the US. I was officially looking at repro SNES carts, for example and did buy one for Terranigma. But you quickly run into Everdrive price if you buy several repros.
The most I've spent on a retro game is Parasite Eve for about $60. I think any game that I would spend more than that on, I already own.
PAL/R4 PS1/2/3 & PSP collector here; there’s no hard & fast cut-off rule.
But I would need to have a deep and personal connection to the title, and it would need to meet a number of requirements (case type, game variant, CIB, disc scratches etc.).
Even then, I’m still going to struggle to part with >$1,000 dollarydoos for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night Special Edition!
Tough one - I don't have a hard cutoff, but I've certainly started to slow down on buying retro games. I've spent over $200 CAD on a single game in recent memory (2022?), nowadays I wouldn't really want to go over $100 CAD.
I've also been reevaluating and selling off some of my collection whenever I can buy ports / digital versions of some games (eg: Chrono Trigger, bought on Steam and sold my loose SNES cart, Xenogears bought on PS3 and sold my CIB copy, etc).
I only focus on two retro systems - SNES and PS1 - and I don't really play on OG hardware anyways (Super Nt / Pocket for SNES, PS3 / Vita for PS1), so I don't mind "owning" digital and ultimately downloading roms if necessary.
It would really depend on the individual game itself as to what I would pay, but I suppose if I had to give a hard upper price limit, I would probably say $100. Don't care what the game is, I'm not spending triple digits on it, old or new.
$60