The Retrogame Bubble Thread - "that's worth HOW MUCH now?!"

[Kazin]

I thought it was inevitable, but even if it is entirely down to manufacturing error... We have no idea which batches or manufacturing locations have the error, so better to err on the side of caution, no?

I'm pretty sure you can find pretty good looking repro boxes of the Pokemon games and their manuals. A quick etsy search found this. So just try to get your hands on an authentic cart?

I don't want repros, though. I mean, it's cool that they're available, but the real thing is what I'm after. I dunno why, it just seems cooler.

 

[Ludendorkk]

I thought it was inevitable, but even if it is entirely down to manufacturing error... We have no idea which batches or manufacturing locations have the error, so better to err on the side of caution, no?

It's actually a fairly well cataloged issue depending on the medium, though you are right that there is no guarantee any particular disc will not rot at some point in the future. The likelihood though that someone's entire collection in is on the verge of rot is extremely unlikely, and EO getting undersold because they were fed some bullshit about how his extremely in-demand games might be a net loss possibly was underhanded. It's alarmist nonsense and the equivalent of saying "my shop could burn down in the future, gotta account for that". People can ditch their discs if they want but I hope they do it on a realistic appraisal of the risks and not alarmism.

Does anyone into collecting outside video games have any perspective on price bubbles eventually bursting for specific items? I'd like to have the Pokemon GBA games complete in box, but I am not paying $300+ for them. I can't help but think they'll come down in price substantially eventually, since they sold millions of each version (with the possible exception of Emerald, which still sold very well, mind). Does this happen for stuff like comic books? Will it take decades to occur? Or is Pokemon just a unique case where stuff they sold piles of never depreciates in value?

Unfortunately I suspect the demand for Pokemon carts is completely organic and thus unlikely to decline in any reasonable timeframe. When people talk about bubbles in other fields its because demand was driven by speculation instead of actual desire, but outside of the grading claptrap most gaming prices seem to be driven by people actually wanting to own games in their own right and thus aren't really a "bubble" in the same sense. The only time I ever see prices decline is when rereleases of rare titles bleeds off some of that demand (The price of both Misadventures of Tron Bonne and Metroid Prime Trilogy both dropped when they got digital rereleases, though they both eventually recovered over a period of years).

 

[Kazin]

I don't think it's alarmist nonsense considering the page you linked says right at the top "impossible to forecast, useless to fight, it can happen anytime during the lifetime of a disc." I'm not sure how accurate that page is, but that list seems to indicate it's just under 1% of all Laserdiscs that suffer from rot, which is kind of a huge percentage - 1 in 100 is high. Unlikely to affect an entire collection, sure, and the fact that Exposition Owl's shop was in Manhattan of all places makes me think it's BS that the guy couldn't sell his games quickly too, I don't think it's unreasonable to be hesitant to want to invest too heavily in disc-based games, be they Gamecube or something else. I'm not saying all your games are going to rot tomorrow, but I am saying, like the page you linked says, there's not a damn thing you can do about it, no matter how well you store and take care of them.

 

[Falselogic]

I don't know how much people care if the discs work. honestly. Big Box PC game collecting is a thing and a lot of that media is 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 floppies most of which are well past their use by date. Most sales include the disclaimer that the disks were not checked. That does not seem to be a hindrance to sales. The object itself seems to hold value whether it works or not.

 

[Kazin]

True. Hard for me to wrap my head around, but true, people probably do just want the discs for their shelves or whatnot. I hadn't thought about that since I like to play on original hardware using original carts a lot, so I forget about that.

 

[Sarge]

I think we're going to see this with Switch cart collections as well, and I actually think that discs are going to outlive those. (For those that don't know, Switch carts don't use Mask ROM, they use a longer-term form of flash memory. Just a question of when bit rot will set in.)

 

[RT-55J]

I mean, aren't DS game cards the same way? I've heard some (alleged) reports of some of them not working any more.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

I console myself with the fact that Nintendo will have coerced me into buying 4k updates to all the Switch cartridges I own before that day inevitably arrives.

 

[Sarge]

Yeah, I think some DS and 3DS cards are like that, too. It's a mix - I do think some are still traditional Mask ROM.

If memory serves, some of the failing 3DS carts were due to bad solder joints, not really the flash memory. At least according to some testing by Voultar.

Given that it *is* flash memory, though, I hope there's eventually a way to restore the bits on said carts if they start failing.

 

[Kazin]

Is flash rom cheaper to produce than mask rom? I genuinely have no idea. I wonder why they went that route.

 

[RT-55J]

The conventional (old) wisdom is that the relative cost is a matter of scale. Flash ROM (and other writable memories) is a commodity, where you can order [x] amount of generic chips with no upfront cost, and write your game to it. Mask ROMs are basically bespoke chips made from a template (which the information being etched into the silicon directly), which translates to a higher up front cost, but (supposedly) a lower per-unit cost.

I have no idea how the economics of this translate to the modern era, where cartridges are 100s to 1000s of megabytes large, and given whatever the failure rates in modern semiconductor processes are.

 

[Ludendorkk]

I don't think it's alarmist nonsense considering the page you linked says right at the top "impossible to forecast, useless to fight, it can happen anytime during the lifetime of a disc." I'm not sure how accurate that page is, but that list seems to indicate it's just under 1% of all Laserdiscs that suffer from rot, which is kind of a huge percentage - 1 in 100 is high. Unlikely to affect an entire collection, sure, and the fact that Exposition Owl's shop was in Manhattan of all places makes me think it's BS that the guy couldn't sell his games quickly too, I don't think it's unreasonable to be hesitant to want to invest too heavily in disc-based games, be they Gamecube or something else. I'm not saying all your games are going to rot tomorrow, but I am saying, like the page you linked says, there's not a damn thing you can do about it, no matter how well you store and take care of them.

I do again have to caution that this is for Laserdisc specifically because of an industry-wide manufacturing defect in the glue of the discs, causing them to have a failure rate orders of magnitude greater than any other form of optical media. The same page also notes that the 8" single discs, which do not use glue, do not have single reported case of rot. Anyways I don't want to keep belaboring this point, collecting any form of physical media involves risk of failure. Hell, people still collect tapes and vinyl, which do inevitably fail if you keep using them. Just gotta keep it all in perspective.