Home Page Forums MAME MAME Do you know about the Bandai Playdia?

People charge high prices because collectors actually pay those prices, otherwise they wouldn't go up. It's simple economy, demand vs offer.

That's true, but unfortunately there's still a lot of stuff that needs to be preserved and with most collectors having a hoarder attitude it's getting harder and harder to get things done unless you have really deep pockets. I think community donation pools towards specific items should probably be the way to go in the future otherwise preservation will struggle.

"simple economy", fuck that shit, just put collectors accountable for their greedy attitude or something.
we don't have to rely on community-made crowdfunding scams effortsso we can "preserve" old hardware that's going to die out anyway, especially at the mercy of these fucking assholes.
the only way to do it soon would be to put them at an uncomfortable position where they have to be selfless so the emulation and preservation scene can thrive.
remind them of their and other countries' economical situation and ask them if pursuing a selfish attitude for the sake of "having everything" is a healthy one in the long turn.
that way, they will be forced to offer cheaper prices with the aim to make them realize that there won't be any one buyer willing to deal with their bullshit.

I've been doing this for near 25 years. At this point I'm at the point I'd rather just see things lost than give in to the ridiculous market demands.

It's not even *fair* to ask for donations at this point, which is why I've refused when people have asked me to do donation drives recently.

Chucked Team Europe something like £100 of my own money, but with all that's going on in the world the last thing I feel comfortable with is asking anybody for money.

I'm with Haze on this.
I gave up collecting arcade boards for MAME a long time ago, fundamentally because of diminishing returns.

Financially, it's not worth it, but your efforts did get boards preserved and into Mame. I donate or buy things when I can just for Mame. I think I'm more interesting now though in handhelds and obscure consoles being preserved than arcade boards.

then you should be more than careful about it.
the retro gaming market is about to get pricier and i'm all in for seeing the consequences of having that market dry up due to all the bullshit that comes with it.
in fact i'm more than looking forward to seeing it happen.
the people involved deserve a lot of scrutiny for their actions.
have their actions bite them back in the ass, to put it in layman's terms.

just like what happened within one week of Elon Musk having full control of twitter.

Nope. Often on eBay I see e.g. moonpriced 1980th home music keyboards rot for over a year without being sold. Beside hoping that an idiot with too much money (or band that immediately needs an intact one because theirs broke) buys them, the real reason often is that outside eBay they then sell other specimen (e.g. in a used goods shop) by only refering to that eBay offer while claiming that it would be the regular price, and selling theirs slightly cheaper but still severely moonpriced. So the customer thinks that a Casio VL-1 for 150€ from a local vendor would have been a bargain, after being shown one for 600€ on eBay and the scammer reduces his one from "only" 400€ to 300€ and finally ends at 150. Often they may even produce staged sales on eBay to make eBay record those events to later pretend a proof that they do sell for such a price.

With other collectables there may be people those pay extreme prices (typically singletons or prototypes or objects by manufacturers those later turned into luxury companies), but it takes only 2 fools to bid a price to any height, and nothing proofs that the item regularly sells for that. Hence an Apple 1 prototype for 1 mio € is not really comparable with other stuff.

While most of your conspiracy theories are ridiculous, yeah, that does happen, I've lurked in a few channels where they've been involved in that, getting others to bid on items they have no intention to buy just to drive the prices up etc. too.

The common knowledge that shops will try to match eBay prices is being used to manipulate sales all over the place. All the news about a copy of Mario being "worth" over a million etc. caused a lot of places to increase their own prices 3-4x and still claim you're getting a bargain.

The grading bullshit that's going on should be illegal IMHO, and anybody involved in it, even slightly needs locking up. The prices being thrown around, in no way reflect the value of the game to the regular market, not even a brand new copy frozen in time is worth close to that - the games making the news aren't even rare, it's just artificial market manipulation.

Yeah, I agree with both you and =CO=Windler. It's refreshing for something to be so cut-and-dried terrible that even people who I occasionally disagree with are aligned on the topic.

The ironic thing to me is the claims by collectors - hoarders, really - that emulating a system brings down the value of the physical hardware. Even 10 years ago there was ample evidence that that was a falsehood, and it's only been thrown into sharper relief over the past 5-10 years seeing the extortionate rise in prices the instant MAME even starts to take a sideways look at something.

The reality seems to be that emulating something objectively raises the value of a physical artifact, as the act of emulating it inherently means that more people become aware of it, and inevitably a subset of those people who become aware of it are going to end up having a desire for the physically tangible version of it.

For anyone without non-fatal craniofecal disorder (AKA shit for brains), simple supply/demand economics indicates that if the supply of a product is fixed (which it always is for retro hardware, if not actively decreasing due to hardware failure over time), then increased demand will lead to increased prices. It's such an obvious conclusion that I sometimes wonder if the collectors screeching like an angry sow about emulation devaluing "my preciousssss" aren't instead some hologram conjured up by a vindictive AI running out of a broom closet in Meta's data center.

In addition to grading games just being dumb in general, WATA has also graded Pokemon ROM hacks that someone put on real carts, and printed up fake boxes for. People are trying to sell those for hundreds to thousands now.