mhg83

I was looking at Amazon yesterday for Parasite Eve. A sealed copy goes for $130.00 the second PE game can go for $200.00!

I've never kept a game sealed before but after seeing all the value some of these old games can become i was thinking about doing this. A game like The world ends with you or Final Fantasy 3 and 4 would probably be worth more than the original price ten years from now. I would most likely end up buying two copies. One for myself and leave the other sealed.

Have an of you done this before? Is it a wise investment?

fumanstan

I don't care to, i'm playing games to play games, not to really make money. I can see why some would though, as some old games certainly sell for a pretty penny. I remember the big fuss over Final Fantasy VII.

slop101

How would you even know what game to keep sealed? Who's gonna buy 2 copies of every game? This is a horrible investment idea.

tonyc3742

Agreed. For every Parasite Eve or Final Fantasy Tactics, there are dozens of Halo 3 Limited Editions.
I keep games sealed until I play them. That way I can return them or sell them on Amazon as "sealed". However, I usually want to play a game pretty soon after buying it. (The aforementioned FFT, I opened that in the mall before even getting home; I read the manual while my wife went shoe shopping.) I don't keep them sealed as "investments". The only game I currently have sealed is Open Season for X360 (surely not an investment), because I got a deal on the ESA Holiday Pack and just haven't gotten around to playing OS yet.
You'd do much better investment-wise simply buying one fewer game a year or a month or whatever and sticking that money in virtually any investment.

fujishig

Not to mention that we live in a time when not only is emulation readily available, but reissues are all over the place. I wonder how many true collectors there are, and how many just want to play the game? Like if Parasite Eve was released on the VC, what the price would be?

cartman

Old NES and SNES games go for ridiculous prices sealed. Here's a Chrono Trigger on eBay whose reserve isn't even met... I got some good money from import Saturn and Dreamcast games a couple years ago, but not in the 4 figures per game range. I'd never purposefully keep sealed games hoping for a rise in value, but I'm certainly glad to be surprised with some of my old games value from time to time .

Michael Corvin

Just keep your games in great shape and it won't matter if they're sealed. I mentioned it before but I had Mega Man 1-3 MIB since I owned them as a kid. I offloaded them in 2001 on ebay. Got $100 each and used the money on the Gamecube launch. With Mega Man 9 around the corner I can't imagine what those would fetch today. Oh well, I still have all three SNES Star Wars games MIB as well as another dozen or so NES/SNES titles. I doubt I'll sell those though.

If it ends up being a classic it will still hold value whether or not the shrink-wrap is on it. It would be silly to buy games as an investment.

shumway

The problem I have with the sealed crap is this: Only a few games in the distant and not-so-distant past had shrinkwrap that was anything but clear plastic, no watermarking/studio logoing, etc. I worked retail when I was a youngin and we had a shrinkwrap machine and 'heatgun.' It would be simple and perfectly feasible to take say a Corvin MIB game and produce a 'sealed' copy.

Larry C.

LOL I thought this was another "I hate Gamestop" thread.

Mordred

Yeah, I was about to wonder if that Chronotrigger is factory sealed or aftermarket sealed

shumway

I mean, what are truly the odds today of a real sealed copy of Chronotrigger? There was no ebay when that was released and though there are collectors in every field, I harbor serious doubts that this copy was legitimately sealed.

boredsilly

Damn, that is ridiculous. I wonder if the DS release will hurt that at all. I doubt it since that has to be collectors buying that and not just people who want to play the game, for they would just get the game through "other means" before using this month's rent on it.

All told, if you want to invest in something do so properly. Max out your 401k or something. Banking on games to jump up in value seems like a fool's errand to me. You could get lucky, but chances are you won't.

Fanboy

There has been fair discussion of this, as well as outing of some more nefarious ebay resealers, on the various classic game collector forums (like DigitalPress, etc).

Nothing new, and most experienced collectors (ie. the ones who would pay $200 for a sealed CT) can spot a reseal.

gimmepilotwings

I like to keep games sealed until I play them. If I buy something, and then decide to sell it later, the price that I can get for it goes up at least a couple bucks.

Michael Corvin

Having kept sealed dvds only to find out a disc is missing or contains the wrong disc, I tend to open all mine shortly after purchase.

slop101

See, MGS3Subsistence was a game I bought new and played the shit out of immediately. And while I still have it in mint condition, it's not sealed, since I played it. And since it was released as a budget title (I think), there's no way I could've known it would increase in value. But even though it seems like I could still get around $100 for my copy, I'm still not interested in selling - this is not why I buy videogames - my Roth-IRA is a much better investment.

orangecrush

I understand your not wanting to sell it. However, if you didn't have the game and could buy it for $100 would you?

fujishig

I think I have a copy of that somewhere, unopened just because I never got around to playing it. I'm curious, why does it go for so much? Do they actually sell at that price?

I still say it's a bad investment. Rare games rarely make it to clearance (though this is not always true), so how much did you pay for those 30 or 40 games, compared with how much you could potentially get for the few that did go up in value? And if it was that easy to tell which games would be rare, don't you think there'd be a lot of people "saving" the games, increasing the supply?

I've seen this in toys and comics, both of which I also collect. People see the vintage star wars toys and vintage comics with insane value, mainly because people back then bought them to open and play with or read, so the actual number of mint condition items is pretty low. When the collector community gets bigger and a lot of people start getting extra items just to collect, you have stuff like Spawn #1 and Star Wars Episode 1 toys, which pretty much every "collector" has.

This is aside from truly limited items, like that first Metal Gear Saga exclusive.

slop101

For me, that's quite a hypothetical, because if I didn't have it, it would mean I didn't want it when it came out, so why would I want it now? But even in some weird universe where I missed out on the release of a game I wanted, I'm not sure if I'd buy it now - with MGS3, it's now an older last-gen game eclipsed by MGS4, so I probably wouldn't. Not that I couldn't afford it, but it's just a dumb way to spend money, and I like to think I'm good with money. But if it's some timeless sort of awesome game that I totally missed out on (like, say Chrono Trigger, which I also happen to have a mint copy of), then I'd probably pony up the cash. But after 30 years of gaming, I've yet to be in that situation, mostly because I've been on the ground floor for most of the games that I would want.

mhg83

What about RPGS? The final fantasy games seem to increase in value. The only games i would consider buying an extra copy would be FF3, FF4 and The World Ends with you.

GreenMonkey

I certainly don't open a game until I'm going to play it. I did pretty well on a few sealed PS1/PS2/GC games that I just never got around to playing.

I buy a lot less games these days though so I'm not likely to have that happening.

I do notice than even unsealed DS and PSP games can escalate in value pretty quickly. I did pretty well on a complete copy of the first Advance Wars for DS...I got like $55 for it last year.

msdmoney

It's certainly a much riskier investment though. With the move to digital distribution, compilation discs, and also reprints done by companies like gamequestdirect, there is no guarantee that the value will hold for games in the future. A lot of rare games, have suddenly lost value at just the announcement of a rerelease. I think it's a bad investment in the long term, I just keep games sealed until I get around to playing them.