Quote Originally Posted by Buyatari View Post
No it doesn't mean all those kids will grow up to be collectors but I suspect there are more potential videogame collectors than there are for comicbooks and baseball cards. I would guess that more kids play Marvel Alliance than read Xmen combic books and do kids even buy baseball cards anymore?

A few of the NES black box games are common to find. Pinball and Golf for example could easily crash but some of those others with 1st pressings are insanely rare to find sealed. Any blackbox with a flagship character like Mario or Donkey Kong should be just fine no matter what the price is currently.

Check ebay right now and count how many copies of Amazing Spiderman #1 are for sale right now. It is fairly common with multiple copies for sale at any given moment. Still a top graded copy can break 100k and even lower graded copies do pretty well from year after year. An item doesn't have to be insanely rare if it is a desired item esp if in is in top condition.
I don't know about that. My five year old nephew plays video games now, but everything he has ever played has been on an iPad and has never come on physical media. He also could care less about Mario since most of his TV watching involves stuff on various Disney channels and who knows if he will ever get a 3DS or WiiU. With mobile devices rapidly becoming equal in capabilities to dedicated portables, I suspect within one more generation Nintendo and other companies will simply be in the software business if they even exist at all. I also think the next generation of gamers is going to be far less into collecting physical "stuff" the same way current consumers have significantly cut back on buying new release DVDs and PC gamers have largely adopted digital downloading for new game purchases. I mean how many people collect CDs or records today? It's a lot less than five or ten years ago and considering most people are music fans of one sort or another, it would seem like the population of music collectors would be growing, but as a vinyl collector myself, I can tell you for certain that's not the case at all.

Sealed games are something that won't continue to appreciate long term simply because they decay over time. Have you ever seen old records or even toys with shrink wrap older than a few decades? They have a yellow or brown tinge and the paper and colors start to discolor. It's just not a permanent thing no matter how carefully you try to protect it. I myself am guilty of being a sealed collector, but I would never pay a premium for sealed stuff simply because I know it can't last over the long haul. People spending thousands for graded games are in for a sad reality 20 years from now when their plastic cases are filled with brown and sticky wrap and boxes that have begun to cave in. There's a reason libraries and museums which house software collections insist on removing the wrap. Plastic is very volatile because ultimately it's a petroleum product and it reacts with paper, glue, dyes, metal, etc...all of which are used in the printing and manufacturing processes for cartridge and disc based video games.