RetroGaming

Some of it is just them getting hard to find for things that were made in smaller numbers. As time goes on there are less of them floating around.

But also: grading and internet hype has drawn the eyes of a certain class of investor that want to sit on these "assets." Then everyone that sees a graded copy of a game sell for a high dollar amount assumes their grungy copy with no box and their name written on the cartridge is worth the same amount. You see the same thing across a lot of collectibles hobbies, unfortunately.

If I had a ps1 I wanted to use then I would look at FreePSXBoot and UniROM - https://github.com/brad-lin/FreePSXBoot

Get an Everdrive or blank CD and flash ROMs to them to play on your original systems.

Everdrives and hacking systems are your friends

GoG while they are still selling the license you can download it and save it for the future. All games have no DRM.

Videogame publishers not caring about their backcatalogs. If they'd care about preservation and actual long term gain, they'd make old games available.

It took EA so long to make Sims 1 and 2 available. It felt like they actively hate money. And there are plenty of other games that people would love to buy and that are just not made available.

If owning the physical retro game is the only way to play the game (legally) that will help drive up prices.

This is of course but one of the reasons.

You can make many backup copies of your rom collection. Not so with old discs that are not reading, or carts suffering from bitrot or physical damage.

With retro gaming; emulation IS the way forward. Physical media is more of a display piece for nostalgia maniacs, or an investment for speculators.

Not expensive when you live in the Indian ocean

On every retrogaming forum I’ve ever been on, this has been a topic and it’s been a topic for at least 15 years. A few practical bits of advice:

1. The cheapest games will always be last generations games
2. Anything not deemed “retro” yet is cheap
3. Nintendo is always super expensive unless it’s Wii or handheld
4. Anything Xbox is cheap
5. PC is cheap, unless it’s big box, but even then sellers will sell big box for cheap because they often don’t know what they have
6. There’s nothing wrong with buying from GOG, burning to disc, and making your own labels and box art—which is easy to do because it’s DRM-free
7. Except for PS1, Sony is cheap. But even then PS1 is cheaper than N64 or Saturn.
8. Nothing wrong with an Everdrive, especially since that’s the best way to play aftermarket games

Emulators are your friend. Hoarders, graders, and scalpers can go suck a railroad spike.

Scarcity and some artificial scarcity called grading. Take for example Pokémon vintage trading card game packs. Base set has a bunch of print differences but even buying a normal unlimited version pack is $300-400. The value of a Charizard, if you pull it out of that pack, is ~$200-400 raw. However, if you grade it and it comes back a 10, it’s suddenly “worth” $1000+.

This is not quite as prevalent in video games but it is happening. The price of popular Pokémon games that are complete in box are sky high because someone somewhere wants to buy it and submit it for the chance it’s “worth” 10x the price.

Pricecharting.com is your friend. Patience is a virtue.

Supply and demand, since they're all collectors items now.

Scarcity. Those games are no longer in print so there is no new units to bring the price down.

Good luck with that.