AES / MVS prices

SignOfGoob

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I started purchasing AES in may of 2019.
These are the prices including shipping and fees. Mostly from Japan trough remambo.
I stopped noting down my purchase after a while. It was too confronting.

titleregioconditionprice in yenprice in euro
NEO GEOjaploose29490242.06
Samurai Spiritsjapcib00
World Heroes 2japloose00
Art Of Fightingjapcib555645.6
Fatal Fury Specialjapcib302224.8
World Heroes 2 Jetjapcib614450.34
King of Fighters '94japcib331027.17
Art of Fighting 2japcib276022.65
Fatal Fury 3japcib880171.88
Samurai Spirits 2japcib320526.18
King of Fighters '95japcib858370.1
Samurai Spirits 3japcib1018083.14
Ninja Combateurocib170
Super Spyeurocib170
Ghost PilotsUSAcib169.22


I was selling of some playmobil to a fellow collector and his dad who had collected Tin soldiers and stuff like that from the 40-60 , said that prices are at an all time low. People who cared for those hobbies are now dead or in a retirement home. You shouldn't collect AES for the value but for the love of the games and packaging. Who cares if I paid more for my Last Blade 2 then some bogdweller did in 2005. I've been coveting that game since 1999. And only now have the disposable income (thank you bitcoins) , to purchase such things. Whatever you do with it: play or keep it sealed in plastic the thruth is nobody is going to give a shit in 30 years time. And your children or grand children are gonna dump in the trash or donate it too a thrift store.
Everything has it's time in the sun and then it dies off.
Somebody gets it.
 

Tarma

Old Man
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The only scenario I see for prices going down is when the generation of people nostalgic for these games starts dying off. And by then these will be seriously old antiques, and there may be a big enough next generation to take their place (johnny-come-lately 'retro' gamers, and the children of gamers who inherited the hobby). So it's possible, but especially systems where games sold in lower quantities like the Neo, I kind of doubt there will be a dramatic downturn in price.

But would that have a real impact on values? The problem to me seems to be that people have been collecting AES games not to play them but to simply do just that - collect them. As you would with baseball trading cards, or classic cars etc.

There may be a point in time where consoles like the AES can no longer be used because the technology needed to make it useable has advanced so far that "vintage" gaming consoles are absolete, but that doesn't mean that they will become any less collectable, and therefore, to those trying to piece together a complete series of releases, no less valuable.

If we use a loose analogy of classic cars - pretty much everyone in the automotive world is resigned right now to the combustion engine becoming obsolete within the next two decades (if not sooner), yet with question marks hanging over what petrol availability will look like or whether governments could ban outright combustion engines from being run on publc roads, the collector car market is booming... you'd think people would be bailing out, or at worst being cautious. There are no signs of that.

Prices for some of the rarer / currently saught after AES titles may well drop slighlty over time, but a "market correction"? I don't see it I'm afraid. I only see prices solidifying.
 

SignOfGoob

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But would that have a real impact on values? The problem to me seems to be that people have been collecting AES games not to play them but to simply do just that - collect them. As you would with baseball trading cards, or classic cars etc.

There may be a point in time where consoles like the AES can no longer be used because the technology needed to make it useable has advanced so far that "vintage" gaming consoles are absolete, but that doesn't mean that they will become any less collectable, and therefore, to those trying to piece together a complete series of releases, no less valuable.

If we use a loose analogy of classic cars - pretty much everyone in the automotive world is resigned right now to the combustion engine becoming obsolete within the next two decades (if not sooner), yet with question marks hanging over what petrol availability will look like or whether governments could ban outright combustion engines from being run on publc roads, the collector car market is booming... you'd think people would be bailing out, or at worst being cautious. There are no signs of that.

Prices for some of the rarer / currently saught after AES titles may well drop slighlty over time, but a "market correction"? I don't see it I'm afraid. I only see prices solidifying.
The electronic car will have no negative affect on the appeal of classics. People who buy collector cars can register them as limited use antiques, they can also drive them off-road (ie: race tracks) as much as they want. Also cars are a century old, not cheap in the first place, have competition histories, can be run endlessly on private property, etc etc. I’d buy a 959 for millions without hesitation. Someone will want it. I don’t think the guy paying $3000 for an AES cart should be as confident.
 

Tarma

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The electronic car will have no negative affect on the appeal of classics. People who buy collector cars can register them as limited use antiques, they can also drive them off-road (ie: race tracks) as much as they want. Also cars are a century old, not cheap in the first place, have competition histories, can be run endlessly on private property, etc etc. I’d buy a 959 for millions without hesitation. Someone will want it. I don’t think the guy paying $3000 for an AES cart should be as confident.
You've missed part of my point. There are plenty of people who buy classic cars with no intention of ever using them, and the same principle is being applied to videogames. The fact that one market is more mature than the other is by and large irrelevent - the classic car market is just a susceptible to a crash in values as any other, and indeed suffered badly at the start of the 90s.

I'd agree the classic car market is safer than the videogame one, but the AES market is considerably smaller than the classic car market is, and if a collector is desperate for a certain piece to add to their collection then they will pay top dollar for it - whether it is a car, an AES cart or a baseball card.
 

Neo Alec

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But would that have a real impact on values? The problem to me seems to be that people have been collecting AES games not to play them but to simply do just that - collect them. As you would with baseball trading cards, or classic cars etc.

There may be a point in time where consoles like the AES can no longer be used because the technology needed to make it useable has advanced so far that "vintage" gaming consoles are absolete, but that doesn't mean that they will become any less collectable, and therefore, to those trying to piece together a complete series of releases, no less valuable.

If we use a loose analogy of classic cars - pretty much everyone in the automotive world is resigned right now to the combustion engine becoming obsolete within the next two decades (if not sooner), yet with question marks hanging over what petrol availability will look like or whether governments could ban outright combustion engines from being run on publc roads, the collector car market is booming... you'd think people would be bailing out, or at worst being cautious. There are no signs of that.

Prices for some of the rarer / currently saught after AES titles may well drop slighlty over time, but a "market correction"? I don't see it I'm afraid. I only see prices solidifying.
I never said people were buying them to play them.
Who cares if I paid more for my Last Blade 2 then some bogdweller did in 2005.
Well, if it were me I would care because I can't afford it anymore.
 

SignOfGoob

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You've missed part of my point. There are plenty of people who buy classic cars with no intention of ever using them, and the same principle is being applied to videogames. The fact that one market is more mature than the other is by and large irrelevent - the classic car market is just a susceptible to a crash in values as any other, and indeed suffered badly at the start of the 90s.

I'd agree the classic car market is safer than the videogame one, but the AES market is considerably smaller than the classic car market is, and if a collector is desperate for a certain piece to add to their collection then they will pay top dollar for it - whether it is a car, an AES cart or a baseball card.

You're the one who brought up the idea of using the stuff/not being able to use the stuff, as if electric cars had something do with it, as if the PS5 makes the Neo useless or something, so I explained that being able to legally run the cars is not an issue. There is no law stopping you. Cars at race tracks don't pass state inspections, they have no airbags, emissions gear, etc. I know families who have been racing the same damned MG chassis since the late 50s (!), they will keep doing it.

Now, cars that don't run on the other hand are still quite appealing. If it won an important race...that's always going to be a true statement, and that race is probably on video making new fans every year. The car may very well be extremely impractical or impossible to actually drive without direct support from the original team that ran it, which may not exist anymore...it doesn't matter. The fat old men who buy them don't fit inside anyway. If I were a billionaire I would have a Lotus 72D for sure, I'd have to pay someone to fit in it probably. When it wins a vintage event, hey, its my car, I won. :)

Here I'm talking about cars that are truly special, sports prototypes, open wheelers, or more famous touring and rally cars, things that are historically significant or made in super low numbers or were made in large numbers but were too cheap to ever be preserved and then became something as good as rare, like the Honda CR-X for example (once a $12k car, then a $100 car, and now a $25k car, strange how that works...). The millions of later day limited edition Mustangs in garages, convertible Vettes, Chevy SSR, Plymouth Prowler, that shit is for sure useless in the long run. There are simply too many of them sitting around in excellent condition.

I don't think running Neo carts on something is really ever going to be an issue, also as you said most collectards don't want insertion marks, etc so they are just boxes. In that case its hard to imagine it being worth all that much once kids born in the 70s/80s are dead. If you can't/won't play it then its literally just a plastic box with a sticker on it. Its not something with any inherent worth, it has to be learned and who's going to teach that? While I'm absolutely not in the market, there are many classic cars that excite me even if they originally came and went before I was born. Simply being told that a video game used to be good when it ran...I don't know if that's going to keep AES prices up.

The next ten years will be interesting.
 
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gameofyou

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It isn’t just Neo Geo games. Games for almost all systems have dramatically increased in price.
 

SignOfGoob

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It isn’t just Neo Geo games. Games for almost all systems have dramatically increased in price.

For sure. I walked into a used shop and bought a copy of Bloodlines for $25 in like…2011 maybe. When I sold it on eBay a while back (realized I never actually liked it) some European paid $200+ for it after shipping. I wasn’t gaming the system or anything. I had a much lower reserve than that but dipshits kept bidding.

At one point it almost seemed like noobs were bragging about how much they overpaid. That may be over now that the in thing is to complain about prices but one way or another, bargain hunting is not popular, to say the least. Nobody is saying, “He wanted $10 for Nintendo Ice Hockey! I told him to fuck off!”, they just pay whatever outrageous price is being asked without realizing the extremely common sense notion that the only way to make prices go down is to NOT buy it at the new/high price.

If Bloodlines, a common game on an ULTRA common system is over $200…well you have to expect Neo to beat that what with its games usually sold in the hundreds if not dozens. When it comes to high initial cost and low print runs Neo is king of all. Even MVS versions are 1/10 as common as almost every other 16-bit game. Of course piracy, not just boots but boots pretending to be real, is probably worse on Neo than any other system as well so…it’ll be an interesting next ten years. :)

All I know is that, like the other bogdwellers, I’ll scoop up all the shit when and if the prices tank again. :) Some of my most valuable ota shit was purchased for almost nothing when everyone else was overpaying for whatever was new.
 

heihachi

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I don’t really see the good NG games plummeting in price any time soon.

I think some people underestimate how being live IP with new products coming out that helps keep newer generations interested. New Samsho, KOF, Terry Bogard in Smash, Metal Slug Tactics…all this helps keep the brands and original games relevant and occupy mindshare. This is the most important thing for value.

I don’t think ease of access makes any difference otherwise SNES games that have been easily emulatable for 20 years wouldn’t sell for what they do. If anything, being able to easily play the games is good because the more that play and like them the more that might want the real thing.
 

madmanjock

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I don’t think ease of access makes any difference otherwise SNES games that have been easily emulatable for 20 years wouldn’t sell for what they do. If anything, being able to easily play the games is good because the more that play and like them the more that might want the real thing.

Yup, vinyl sales actually went up after Spotify entered the market. Some people like having ‘stuff’ to collect and look at on their shelves, even if easier/cheaper/digital methods work just as well
 

Neo Alec

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Yup, vinyl sales actually went up after Spotify entered the market. Some people like having ‘stuff’ to collect and look at on their shelves, even if easier/cheaper/digital methods work just as well
The question is, will anyone still care when all the generations who grew up with physical media have died off? For generations that have no nostalgia for owning a shelf of stuff it may just seem impractical and pointless for someone who only remembers digital.

Personally, I only care about having my games because it's an extension of what I did growing up. If I grew up caring about something else, then it would be different.
 

madmanjock

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The question is, will anyone still care when all the generations who grew up with physical media have died off? For generations that have no nostalgia for owning a shelf of stuff it may just seem impractical and pointless for someone who only remembers digital.

Personally, I only care about having my games because it's an extension of what I did growing up. If I grew up caring about something else, then it would be different.

Really hard to guess what our grand kids and great grand kids will make of this.

Antique furniture and vases are largely impartial useless shite but people still pay good money for it. It depends on if early video games become regarded as works of art or not in the years to come.
 
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traveno

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I don't think our grandkids and great grandkids are going to be collecting piles of worthless crap in adulthood. It's more likely they'll be mining spice for Lord Bezos IV.
You jest... but it's certainly within the realm of possibilities.
 

RAZO

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This is a interesting conversation. Alot of good points being made on both sides. I honestly have no clue what 80-90's videogame collecting will be like 20 years from now.

I agree with Tarma that there are alot of people interested in collecting vs playing. You are starting to see alot of sealed graded games sitting in acrylic cases just for show and people are actually paying hefty prices for them.

Classic cars are interesting because although most people who buy classic cars want them for show. A functional fully restored classic car or a classic car that has been well maintained in it's original state is going to be worth alot more then a beat up barn find. Will non working Neo-Geo games with failed roms still be worth the same? Maybe.

The resurgence in vinyl records is also a interesting point. Something that was pretty dead in the 90's when cd's were hot is now the opposite. Cd's are now dirt cheap and alot of people are buying records because of the big box art and collectible factor. Also alot of brand new turntables are being manufactured. They even brought back the Technics. So many great options now.

Old baseball cards still hold value but you are limited on how many people will fork down crazy money for a Mickey Mantle rookie card. As older generations die off, newer generations will become less interested and only select few will fork down a shit load of cash for a old collectible item.

80's and 90's videogames still have much more room to grow in value. I don't know what's going to happen. Maybe by the time I'm 60 Neo-Geo games will go for crazy money, maybe they won't. I guess we have to wait and see.
 
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SignOfGoob

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I don’t really see the good NG games plummeting in price any time soon.

I think some people underestimate how being live IP with new products coming out that helps keep newer generations interested. New Samsho, KOF, Terry Bogard in Smash, Metal Slug Tactics…all this helps keep the brands and original games relevant and occupy mindshare. This is the most important thing for value.

I don’t think ease of access makes any difference otherwise SNES games that have been easily emulatable for 20 years wouldn’t sell for what they do. If anything, being able to easily play the games is good because the more that play and like them the more that might want the real thing.
Yeah…I’m not so sure KOF XV or whatever is going to be enough to keep Neo prices high. Maybe, it’s possible, that would be pretty funny. Like the 1989 Pontiac LeMans driving values of the 1969 Pontiac LeMans. :D
 

vincewy

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It isn’t just Neo Geo games. Games for almost all systems have dramatically increased in price.

Yes I have amassed many sealed GameCube and all Dreamcast games and some are worth over $1000 (Go Go Hypergrind ie) along with Laseractive LDs, maybe I should sell them now.
Personally, I only care about having my games because it's an extension of what I did growing up. If I grew up caring about something else, then it would be different.

If SNK ever decides to reprint some of the AES titles the values of my collection will drop but I'll be delighted as I'll be able to upgrade some of my games (not all of mine are in top pristine conditions) and/or double up with either English or Japanese titles.

The current state of SNK is just sad, gaming wise nothing but rehash of KOF, Samurai, and Metal Slug along with trying to milk those franchises further with all accessories.
 

madmanjock

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The current state of SNK is just sad, gaming wise nothing but rehash of KOF, Samurai, and Metal Slug along with trying to milk those franchises further with all accessories.
Sega is not doing much better tbh
 

Tarma

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If SNK ever decides to reprint some of the AES titles the values of my collection will drop but I'll be delighted as I'll be able to upgrade some of my games (not all of mine are in top pristine conditions) and/or double up with either English or Japanese titles.
Now, once upon-a-time, I would have treated such a suggestion with some derision, but now it doesn't seem like a bad idea. I don't think it would help bring down AES prices by any great margin, (there would be the "original run" factor), but it seems like an easy way for SNK to make money.

Hell, if you look at their online store, over the last few years, they've pretty much rung every last ounce out of their IPs with collectible crap. Given that they've re-produced the AES clam shells to put t-shirts inside them, re-manufacturing the carts isn't going to be the biggest hurdle in the world for them and I'm sure there are plenty of independent distributors who would take stock.

Given that original AES runs were not that great, re-releasing runs of a few thousand carts of some of their most popular games seems like a no-brainer to me.
 

Neo Alec

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See if the Pixelheart reprints of Visco games impact the price at all. Perhaps reprints actually from SNK would be a bit different, but I agree that any reprints wouldn't really impact the value of original carts.
 

Tarma

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See if the Pixelheart reprints of Visco games impact the price at all. Perhaps reprints actually from SNK would be a bit different, but I agree that any reprints wouldn't really impact the value of original carts.
Of course the real irony would be that the same collectards that have fucked the system for those of us who want to actually enjoy the games for what they are would still purchase any re-releases as well...
 

madmanjock

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Of course the real irony would be that the same collectards that have fucked the system for those of us who want to actually enjoy the games for what they are would still purchase any re-releases as well...
I can see it!

HAAAR HAAAR MY ORIGINAL CART SMELLS BETTER THAN YOURS! WELL WORTH THE EXTRA $3000

But honestly, rereleasing these carts is a great ideal. Sell them for like 300 notes a pop, 1000 cart runs at a time for the most famous games. If you can buy a AES multicart for $100 or less on Aliexpress, it must cost at most $60 to $80 to make a case, cart, insert and manual these days. (Figures picked out my ass)
 

smokey

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Check the AES release of xenocrisis they originally priced their game £200 but had to raise the price due to cost.
 

Tarma

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Check the AES release of xenocrisis they originally priced their game £200 but had to raise the price due to cost.
Perhaps, but they would not have the buying power, nor economies of scale, that SNK have.

Additionally, back in the day, the average cost of a new AES games in the UK in the mid-late 90s was £300... that's roughly £540 in todays money.

So, if MMJ got his wish of official re-releases at £300 each, he would actually be paying less for them than in the 1990s.

Either way you slice it, it's easy money for SNK and I don't see why they would not want to pursue it... arguably the carts would be an easier sell now, than they were back in the 90s as awareness around the IPs is much greater thanks to the maturity of the tinterwebs.
 
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