As someone who never sells games, inflated prices piss me off. A video game (the worth of which is in the digital media) should never be worth more than it cost when it was a new release (e.g., $60). Of course, as long as the game is circulating in some form at a reasonable price, I don’t care what the limited editions are going for.
Heh, still ?55K then, nothing at which to sneer! As much as I want this game, there’s no way in The Wired I shell over ?20K for a game!!!
Once again, lucky you. Still looking for a good price for this game… and it being sold, of course! 
Yeah, I think ???, ??? and ??? are in that price range. ??? goes for a bit cheaper IIRC, mayhap $200-150, whereas I don’t think I’ve seen many copies of ???.. The more infuriating is that several of their games (namely ???, ??? and ???), I wanted to buy when they were released (and even talked with Uni or mayhap Spec about the demo) but eventually didn’t, not knowing how hard it was to get Softhouse Chara’s games afterwards. T_T
Note: looks like many of us are looking for such old games~
That could be said for everything, but that would destroy the basics of collectability our society has come to depend upon. Why should a painting be worth more than what it originally sold for, FE?
Furthermore, you also forget the fundamentals of monetary inflation and how that affects price. Then there is of course the who supply/demand issue.
And if you look at what most of those that are in near mint+ condition sell for it’s generally no less than 40k Yen.
It’s kind of like how you can always see a English copies of Panzer Dragoon Saga on ebay. Just cuz they’re always there and people buy them doesn’t mean they’re cheap.
- I’m talking digital media here, which can be infinitely reproduced / restored at perfect fidelity with no additional cost. I think collectability is crap in the painting situation as well, but for different reasons.
- Value adjusted for inflation of course.
- This is of course the reason why digital items do inflate occasionally, though thankfully not to the same degree as physical items. The problem the collectability phenomenon causes is that you have people that buy the item not to enjoy it, but to sell it at a higher price. That sort of sounds like scalping (e.g., football tickets), doesn’t it? Games become collectibles necessarily because they’re no longer in production or retail sale, and therefore the original developer is no longer receiving royalties from the game–buying the game no longer supports the developer, either directly or indirectly. At that point, I don’t see any moral problem in using our powers of perfect reproduction to avoid being scalped.
@Dark_Shiki: True digital media can be subject to perfect reproduction… but there in lies the biggest reason as to why games can generally get hyperinflated - the value of “originals” over “copies” and “reprints”. True at this day and age we can reasonably expect to reproduce most materials perfectly… but the “value” of such copies will always be much smaller to an original. Just to make an obvious example - Bootleg CD’s, yes their available everywhere and definitely cheaper and are always as good if not the same as originals… but to most people/collectors their value is even lower than the CD its printed on. An original copy is always worth much more than a copy… supply and demand adding to this factor as well.
Then again thats me speaking from the point of view as a collector. I mean its an opinion… from what I gather your not really fussed about copies either way… but I’m just explaining why such hyperinflation occurs xD
@olf_le_fol: I did see Level Justice for 100-150 range on Palet Web before… but for some reason my account was deactivated/banned or something or something so i couldn’t place proper orders… kinda annoying actually as I have no clue why the account got that… as I managed to order the Fifth Box Collection before >.< I still need to e-mail them about that…
As for collecting… well I guess a fair few of us have been fans of eroge fer ages now and I do prefer to have the originals to some of the older games i had =3 I have been meaning to get the newer Studio Chara games (their going for 3.5K-5KY at Yahoo Jp =D) but I always find myself using the money for other older games (just grabbed some older ZONE RPG’s =D)
Bootleg CDs (e.g., illegitimate copies for sale) are a whole different can of worms. Whether it’s in production or not, you should never profit illegitimately off someone else’s intellectual property. Regarding abandonware, “bootleg” copies should never sell for more than the cost of the CD; and really, they shouldn’t be sold at all. I also disagree that bootlegs are always or almost always of the same quality as the originals. That’s just not true. Regarding anime DVDs, bootlegs are often distorted or lower resolution. I discovered why myself–burning an .avi, for example, to a DVD in a format recognized by DVD players requires a conversion, resulting in distortion / loss of quality. That aside, note that bootlegs are a moral and legal issue.
The differing value between originals and reprints (legitimate reproductions for sale) is entirely a collector phenomenon, though. But as long as the reprint is available at uninflated prices, I don’t really care about hyperinflation of the originals. Notably, this is neither a moral nor legal issue.
What I was arguing (free distribution of “abandonware”) is potentially a moral issue, but probably not a legal issue–if it’s truly abandonware, no one will care to prosecute it. I choose to dismiss the moral arguments in this case, because I don’t think they’re well grounded when the harm principle is applied.
If your talking just about pure digitial media, that is generally held up well. The items that usually sell for a lot tend to in and of themselves very rare print runs and even with those very few are worth much without the various physical media that comes with it. The few exceptions generally are quite old and considered vintage items.
In the strict sense, that doesn’t mean it’s not a legal issue. It may not, practically speaking, be an issue (because you’re right, probably nobody would bother to actually sue), but it’s still illegal. Just like installing DVD software for Linux is technically illegal because it’s not sanctioned.
The furor over what to do about so-called orphan works (of which true abandonware falls under) has just recently even been recognized as a significant problem, and it will take years for anything to actually be done about it (this IS the legal system, after all), but it’s very much a live issue: the law significantly deviates from what most people agree it should be. Which is a moral argument over what the legal lanscape should look like.
So trying to seperate the two of them out is particularly thorny in this specific example: the legal argument is over how the law should reflect the moral argument. The whole abandonware issue is actually an enormous can of worms.
(In the past, anyone who wanted copyright protection had to go thru annoying hoops to get it. The hoops were removed because they were annoying. Now anything is automatically copyrighted. Said change is recent, only a few decades old. At the time, nobody realized the new problem: works copyrighted by persons unknown and untraceable. This never happened when it took real effort to get and keep copyrights: because of the paper trail, identifying the owner was simple.)
My point was more about how “At least, you’re easily able to find copies!”.