Understandable of you're not into it. Its a niche market. I personally like buying new games for older consoles. Like Project Blue & Full Quiet. I use that example because even though Retrobits games are also sold out online it's crazy to see the lines for that stuff in person. I think they do like 3-5 k production runs on there releases.
I like conventions they are fun. I tell people to bring trades. Everyone ive met is fine doing value for value. The prices people happily pay are stupid now a day. The only thing in the Retro gaming market that has cooled way down is the whole grading thing. I always thought that was stupid. Those things have come way down.
I got the majority of my games in the early 2000's so I didn't pay much for anything. I use Gameye app to catalog my games, which uses priceharting. My collection has gone up in value. Random that Rhythm Heaven Fever shot up to over $300 recently. I paid $5 new for it from a tip on this site years ago. Lol!
I did like buying homebrews and what not for NES early on (15 years ago, god I'm old but then again, we all are here...), because it was like NEW GAMES FOR NES HOLY SHIT, but it became a cash grab as opposed to anything worthwhile or special very quickly. The fact most of them keep the ROM for these hobbyist made games to themselves shows where their priorities are and it ain't the hobby itself.
Cons were a lot better before they got YT disease and all these worthless
heads like John Hancock and Steven Wright started mugging the camera so to speak. It's kind of mindblowing that people want to listen to these airheads, and cons don't even bother anymore having people come who, you know, worked on the games they're cherishing. I do have a lot of good memories of PhillyClassic, MGC and CGE. Those days are gone imo.
Speaking of things being long gone, I think we're both not alone here in that the bulk of collecting we did was pre 2008 before the first real spike. Better times, when people didn't care lol. Viva Funco, forums and Web 1.0. We purged about 40% of our collection in 2014 and between that, and the game mentioned below, we are break even with ALL games purchases over the past 20+ years, plus everything that's still in the gameroom is gravy. It's insane. I can't imagine starting to collect in 2020.
You should feel lucky you didn't buy into the graded hype... some YTer did a vid on how many of those games that sold for 6/7 figures during 2020-2022 recently are going for MUCH less, sometimes what looks like the same exact copies. And yeah, true many of those games are worth much more than they were pre-COVID but a lot of the newer stuff... I really wish I had gotten to dump.
I can speak from personal experience that I sold something very expensive "raw" (something that was featured prominently in the Jobst video you're talking about) to one of these people and the value of it now slabbed is less than what I made selling it. I lol'd.
It's debatable if the utter tumbling of the graded market helped the overall suppression of value in game collecting but both are way down. Better for us, really. Sure, our collection values took a hit but us old farts here are beyond ahead of the game. I say, let it crash.
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