The Rise and Fall of Retro Game Prices: What Happened to Physical Games

- We are here at Frank & Son, one of the biggest collectible shows in the world with a very simple question. What happened to physical games? When I was a kid, video games were practically disposable. You'd beat a game, trade it in, and use the store credit to buy another one for like 10 bucks. And I remember I used to go to my local game store and buy Game Boys for $5. Now games, mind you, the consoles for five bucks. Yes, I guess I really am that old. Now go to a show like Frank & Sons, and you'll be paying well over $100 for a copy of Pokemon FireRed, and that's without the box even.

This is a game that sold millions of copies that you could find from 20 bucks at GameStop for literal years. But now you're spending four or five times what it costs brand new just for a scuffed cartridge. And that's not even the expensive stuff. Sealed copies are going for well over $1,000, graded copies, nearly $3,000. So what the hell happened? How do we get from $5 Game Boys, to games that cost more than a brand new Switch? And more importantly, whose fault is it? Well, probably DKOldies, but what else is new? So we ended up talking to Tony who runs his own incredibly impressive booth here at Frank & Son, to get his thoughts.

How did you see that evolution of physical games and hardware going from just old junk that we'd sell at a yard sale, to stuff that is incredibly desirable now? - Yeah, I think it's crazy. I mean just to kind of, to be doing this for that long, and seeing that price point jump. I think it happened to, you know, a lot of grading companies come in, grading sealed consoles and games, complete in box consoles and games, to see people coming in like, man, I used to have that. Wow, that's how much now, you know?

'Cause they remember buying it for pennies or brand new for like, I dunno, way less than half the price. - So what changed? Well, in a lot of ways it was a single moment. 2020, the pandemic supercharged everything in the collectible space. People were stuck at home and nostalgia was at an all time high, especially when you had a stimmy check burning a hole in your pocket. Pokemon cards went from a fun hobby to people literally fighting each other for packs. A friend and I actually went to a Walmart restock once, and we watched guys literally swiping boxes out of the distributor stocking cart.

I mean it's like those Black Friday clips of people stampeding to get a $50 TV. Retro games have followed a similar trajectory. Prices spiked almost overnight, and then they just never came back down. Now I want to be really clear about something. I am absolutely part of this problem. I mean, have you seen the Austin Evans channel before? We make a lot of videos on retro games, but it does go beyond just videos.

I also collect Pokemon cards, and I have a not small amount of money tied up in sealed product. And I also am an investor in Rare Candy, a company who are deep in the card market. But things are so different than they used to be. I mean, when a booster box was a hundred bucks, whatever, crack it open, have a fun time. But when you're paying $400 for a box of Pokemon cards, opening that is a very different decision. Back in 2014, I bought a sealed Pokemon Black DSi bundle from Walmart for $100. I thought it was cool and that's it. That was literally the whole thought process. But today it is worth well over $1,000.

What am I ever going to do with that? I mean, I can't open it. That would be financially insane, but I also just can't sit on a closet full of sealed product forever. Right? Well, maybe I could actually. And here's the thing that's kind of crazy to say out loud. My Pokemon card collection since 2020 has outperformed the stock market by a lot. Now I know, I know that sounds like one of those investor bros and like, I apologize, but like collectibles, they were never meant to be an investment for me.

I was collecting before value was a big deal, and I would still be collecting even if everything went to zero tomorrow. The whole reason I started thinking about making this video is about how different things would be if I started today. If you're 17 right now, you are not finding a $200 Limited Edition Switch just collecting dust on some store shelf. You can't scoop up piles of $3 PS2 games at GameStop. I mean, GameStop barely even exists anymore. And about the only cheap collectible thing you'll find there are clearance Funko pops.

Why do you think that games are starting to see that sort of price appreciation in the same way that a lot of other collectibles have? - For sure, for sure, I think especially in a lot of disc games, you know, you get a lot of not taking care of the disc. Dry rot is very up there, throwing away items, you know, so. - I think there are actually a handful of very specific things that turned retro games from a casual hobby into whatever this is. And some of them are way shadier than you might think.

Every year the total number of working retro consoles and games in the world get smaller. It's tough to repair some of these things too. As disc drives die and parts become harder to track down. Sometimes you just have to give up on old hardware. So some of the price increase is genuine scarcity and honestly that's fair. But this does not explain the game going from 30 bucks to $1,000. For decades, collecting video games was pretty simple. You found a game, you looked at it with your human eyeballs, decided if the condition was good enough, and you bought it.

Pretty easy. Then the grading companies showed up. The idea is the same as graded Pokemon cards or comic books. You send in your game, an expert makes sure it's genuine, evaluates the condition, and seals it in a protective case with a grade. VGA has been doing this since 2008, and for a while, it was a pretty niche service for hardcore collectors who just wanted their sealed copy of Pokemon Gold preserved. Not as a way to get rich. But in 2018, a company called WATA Games showed up and things got, shall we say, complicated. I'll spare you the full story, because Karl Jobst has an excellent deep dive that I'd highly recommend checking out.

But here's the short version. Before WATA existed, the most expensive video game ever sold was about $30,000 for a sealed copy of Super Mario Brothers. Within a couple of years of WATA showing up, that same game was selling for over $2 million. How, you might ask? Well, according to a class action lawsuit filed against WATA Games, there was allegedly some nefarious behavior behind the scenes in pumping up values. Now, to be very clear, no proof of actual fraud has surfaced and WATA has denied wrongdoing. But you don't have to prove fraud to see the effect when a sealed copy of Super Mario Brothers sells for $2 million.

It really changes how everyone thinks about the value of games. Even loose, played copies of common games start creeping up because suddenly the entire market is recalibrated around these ridiculous numbers. Like, yeah, I maybe spent $30 on that Game Boy game when I was nine, but I think it's now worth $30,000. Source, trust me, bro. And someone bought it for $29,000 last week. So there's your comp right there. And you know what ridiculous numbers tend to attract, people who realize that they can cash in by selling nostalgia, by simply buying out the entire market, enforcing prices upward.

Now, if you've watched the channel for a while, we've tested pretty much all of these online retro video game stores, DKOldies, The Video Game Company, GameStop Retro, I mean, it's basically all the same story. These guys scoop up loose consoles for cheap, do a basic cleanup, maybe swap a battery or wipe it down, and they resell it for a major markup as quote unquote refurbished. Now look, there is value in the convenience of a tested working console with some semblance of a warranty that ships to your door. But the market we're talking about here is massive.

A Game Boy Advance SP that goes for well less than $100 on eBay, and is certainly bought or trade into the companies for a whole lot less, gets listed for $175 or more on these sites. And because they show up first in Google search and they run YouTube ads, they've become the actual expectation for what retro video gaming costs. So we've got natural scarcity and that there are fewer and fewer of these games that exist every year. We've got grading companies turning games into financial instruments. We've got refurbishers inflating the baseline. But there's one more element here.

Content creators such as Pierre Luigi ruining it for everyone else. (loud beeping) that guy and his stupid mustache. What do you think is sort of like driving people to go and spend thousands of dollars on these things? - I would say it's more of just kind of like the social media influencers. - Yeah, yeah. - That's gonna be one right there. - Always the problem. - Yeah. - Every I bought consoles at Goodwill video. Every retro game haul, every time someone opens a sealed copy of something on camera, these videos are essentially creating demand by highlighting to you my friends that well,

yeah, maybe you do wanna go out and buy another GameCube like you used to have. Look, I've made tons of these videos, because they're fun and people genuinely love this stuff. Retro game hunting used to be an obscure hobby for nerds. Now people are racing each other to Goodwill in the morning to grab the best stuff to resell for profit. And the feedback loop is gnarly. Prices go up, which makes for more dramatic content, which drives more interest, which then pushes the prices up even more. And here's the part that makes all of this permanent.

Physical games on new consoles are basically on life support. I mean, I know I personally made the switch away from buying physical Xbox and PlayStation games back when the Xbox One came out, and I think a lot of people have done the same. It does make sense. I mean, there's no disc to swap, no waiting for shipping. Your library is always there. I mean, there's a reason why PC gaming ditch physical media a solid decade ago. And there are real reasons physical media is going away beyond just the pure convenience. As fewer manufacturers make disc drives, it's becoming harder for consoles to justify supporting disks at all. And besides, many games ship incomplete on the disc anyway, I mean, day one patches can be bigger than

the actual data on the disc itself. And in a lot of cases, the disc is genuinely useless without a server connection. I mean, we own Concord on disc, we bought the physical copy. It is now a very cool looking coaster and at least Sony did refund people for this one. But it's a very obvious reminder that just because you have the disc doesn't guarantee you own anything. Now, the Stop Killing Games movement has actually done a lot to try to address this. So they've actually made real progress in the European Union with over a million signatures to help encourage companies to not kill off games,

or at least give some level of preservation in the future. And California has also pushed a bill to committee along these same lines. And here's the thing, I do still buy physical Nintendo games, partially because I don't really trust the eShop, but also because Nintendo physical games actually really hold their value pretty well. But even this isn't safe. A lot of Switch 2 physical releases are Game Key Cards, which are cartridges with download codes built in. It's technically physical media, but if those servers ever go down, which they almost certainly will, then that cart is useless. So what does all this mean?

Physical games are slowly but surely disappearing. Every disc that gets scratched beyond repair, every console that dies, isn't valuable enough to spend serious money on the repair, that is one less working game or console in the world forever. And that is, I think why I don't believe we're in a bubble. The same way you could kind of argue Pokemon cards are. They can always print more cards, but no one is setting up an assembly line to build Xbox 360s, or to make new Super Nintendo cartridges. To be very fair, I actually don't think that this is all bad. What's really happening is that the gaming market has split into two very different things. On one side you've got loose games.

This is stuff that people buy to actually play. Yeah, these are a bit more expensive than they used to be, but the increases are honestly kind of gradual. I mean, a lot of these games were legitimately undervalued for decades. A cartridge of Super Mario Land going for three bucks was never going to last forever. Especially now that devices like the Analogue Pocket are giving people a real reason to dig out their old games. The other side though is the sealed and graded market.

This is where things start to look a whole lot more like Pokemon cards, or honestly, the stock market. Sealed copies of games selling for 10, 50, 100 times what a loose copy goes for. These are people buying games that they will never, ever open. They're speculating on the value. I mean, there's nothing wrong with this. There's some stuff wrong with it, but it a very, very different market than gamers who just wanna get a copy of their favorite old title, and play it because they miss it.

Now look, if you just wanna play old games in 2026, you do have options, honestly, more than ever. Nintendo did they just re-release FireRed and LeafGreen on the Switch eShop for 20 bucks. Yeah, you better believe I complained about it, but then I caved and bought it anyway. Now is $20 kind of steep for a 22-year-old Game Boy game? Yeah, I mean, I think 10 bucks would've been more fair, but compared to paying over $100 for an original cartridge, that might be counterfeit. And of course, emulation exists and it has gotten incredibly good.

Now, the decision to download ROMs of games you don't own is, well up to you. But there are more options than ever here between mini consoles and emulators, as well as subscription services like Nintendo Switch Online. The access to old games has arguably never been better. You just gotta be okay with not owning them. And that's the thing, right? There is a difference between playing a game and owning a game. If you want the cartridge, the box, the manual, the feeling of putting something up on your shelf, that's the part that is getting further and further out of reach for a lot of people.

I keep thinking about that 17-year-old me who had so much fun beginning a collection. It was an extension of the games themselves in a lot of ways. I mean, sure you can collect achievements or in-game items, but you could also put that energy into a collection of the physical games themselves. But if I started today, the games are still there, kind of. But the barrier to entry that used to be next to nothing, it is real now. And I don't think the good old days are ever coming back. So download games away my friends, but you'll owe nothing, and you'll like it, mostly, because you don't have a choice.

Now if you wanna see what happens when we buy from some of these retro video game stores, we've got a whole series on that. If you enjoyed this one, make sure to subscribe to the channel, and ring-a-ling that ding-a-ling button. Now if you excuse me, I've got a closet full of sealed product to go stare at and feel conflicted about.