Arcade game collecting in 2015

hisnice

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Donor 3 years: 2013-2015
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What do think about the longer term future of our collecting? I think a lot of people in this forum are in their 40's and 50's and almost no one is in their teens and 20's.

I'm going to make 2 threads, one for us to pontificate on 2015, and the other on 2050.

My personal guess about 2015 is that things will still be trending upward.

* The top pins will get even more expensive, but more and more of them will have been restored and maintained.
* There will be more fairly obscure games that will create feeding frenzies and some of the ones everyone got excited about will fade (I say warlords cocktails are MORE expensive and Reactor prices will fall).
* The bottom prices of the market will stay stable. $75 will still be a steal for a working vid.
* Minis will still be scarce, but prices won't change.
* Hoarders will finally get crazy high enough prices to sell off their inventories of all of their NOS and NIB stockpiles before they start to degrade to the point that the repros actually become more valuable (since they're 35 years newer).
* MAME and multi-games will continue to evolve and will hammer the retail market for refurbished games (no more sales of $1200 1981 Ms. Pac's)
* More products will come for MAME on the TV and that will hurt the new Multi cabinet sales


What do you think?
What did I miss?
 
I expect 2015 to be more or less a carbon copy of 2012 when it comes to this hobby.
 
I think in the next 10 years more owner ops will retire and we will see a small spike in available inventory (hopefully). I'm 33 and I really don't see keeping my collection past 60 years old. Maybe the current collectors hitting that age may think the same way but who knows.
 
I think in the next 10 years more owner ops will retire and we will see a small spike in available inventory (hopefully). I'm 33 and I really don't see keeping my collection past 60 years old. Maybe the current collectors hitting that age may think the same way but who knows.

I plan on keeping my collection till I am old.

You watch shows like American Pickers and you see the old dudes with their barns filled with oil and gas memorabilia, tin toys, cars... it's all stuff that reminds them of their childhood, or good times in their life.

The video game generation is no different. I'll be on American Pickers: 2030 and it will feature my many barns of arcade games, claw machines, golden age home consoles and games, and an entire barn dedicated to Bolivian Strangulation Pornography.
 
I think finding stuff in the wild so to speak will become less and less likely as time goes on. I'm not as actively searching for stuff like I once was but I do see a decline in my finds off the internet. Prices may drop for a lot of stuff in the next few years as people just want stuff gone and less people want to buy older games.
 
I see a lot of conversion games and even low end classics getting parted and burned for their monitors in 2015.

The fact that you can't buy a new 19" crt monitor anymore is going to have huge implications for our hobby over the next few years, even though most of you never even purchased a new monitor (bought a cruddy $50 game at the last auction that had a vision pro monitor inside that wasn't more than a few years old, so some people were sure buying them).

Sure, you might be a monitor repair wiz (I am not bad myself), but a lot of people aren't. Plenty of people throw broken monitors away. Some people even throw working monitors away (met one 60 in 1 builder who had just been throwing all the original monitors away and using new lcds before I asked him to start saving monitors for me). No new CRTs also means no crts going into grey market gambling games only to end up in real games later on.
 
I see it moving two ways, depending on the economy (not by 2015 necessarily, but in the future...) Most teens/people in their early 20s that I know would kill to have 90s games in their pads but can't afford them since they can't find a decent job. If the economy picks up and ops drop their prices, I can see the whole market shifting, with 90s games becoming the new main attraction and 80s games still being in demand for their significance, but old B&W and early 80s titles being sort of novelty games like EMs are now. Or, alternatively, the economy sucks and it continues being the older members who have steady jobs or some saved up income that collect, so as 90s games aren't in demand for so long (the same way 80s games became worthless after the first crash) they become rarer and wayyy later when the 90s generation is the age of today's 80s collectors, that's when collecting sees a renaissance.
 
I honestly don't ever see a big shift into 90s games or later, simply because the games don't have replay value. They were made to maximize profits for a short lifespan and that's about it. That type of game play just will not translate well into a home environment. I am sure many of you have bought, and then later sold those types of titles.

The 80's games will always be the sweet spot as far as collecting goes. Some earlier games will survive because of novelty, historical significance, or truly good gameplay. The younger generations will figure this out the same way we did.

A list pins will continue to rise in price, as the quality of Stern fall lower and lower and eventually quit making them all together.

Arcade collecting will never become mainstream, there is just too much work involved for the average lazy ass to appreciate.
 
I honestly don't ever see a big shift into 90s games or later, simply because the games don't have replay value. They were made to maximize profits for a short lifespan and that's about it. That type of game play just will not translate well into a home environment. I am sure many of you have bought, and then later sold those types of titles.

The 80's games will always be the sweet spot as far as collecting goes. Some earlier games will survive because of novelty, historical significance, or truly good gameplay. The younger generations will figure this out the same way we did.

A list pins will continue to rise in price, as the quality of Stern fall lower and lower and eventually quit making them all together.

Arcade collecting will never become mainstream, there is just too much work involved for the average lazy ass to appreciate.
I can agree with you about most 90s games, but fighter titles are still highly sought after by people who participated big time in the tournament scenes and want to relive that with their buddies. That's probably why the only 90s titles you see these days for sale that actually sell are the fighters/racers...
 
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I think 2015 is too soon to bother thinking about! That's two and a half years.

20-40 years is more interesting.

This hobby is going to die with the "arcade generation."

What's truly important - the games themselves - has been documented and preserved through emulation, so history/future generations don't have anything to worry about in terms of actually being able to play Pac Man. The games are safe.

But the particular physical configurations for housing and running them (the original cabinets/PCBs etc.)? That's just nostalgia. WE want it, but I'm not sure anybody else does. The coming generations will want to know what Donkey Kong was all about, but they won't demand to do it with the original PCB displaying on a Sanyo 20EZ, any more than they will demand to view Raiders of the Lost Ark only via a decaying film print that requires a large, cumbersome device projecting the image onto a screen. A Blu-ray will be fine.

Trying to keep these things running on their original hardware is masochistic as it is. You have to be personally motivated. The hobby will steadily decline as we get older and that'll be it.
 
I've pondered the future too. I am 35 and will be keeping my stuff and future acquisitions more than likely into my death. I think after we all die, there won't be much interest in this stuff honestly.
 
... nor would you care about this hobby after your death.

It's true with all possessions. I remember about 6 years ago, an older gentleman living down the corridor from my apartment at the time passed away. He had no family. Social services came, and took all his stuff, and put it in the dumpster in the back of the building.
 
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