As I am a bit of a gamer, I am somewhat familiar with the collector’s market. No, I am not a collector myself but I know that some classic video games go for pretty inflated prices. There are plenty of people on YouTube who show off their game rooms, sometimes with thousands of games. You can bet that these people play at best only a small portion of their library. In essence, they own the real-world equivalent to your library of Steam games of which you may not even have played half the titles because you got many for free or heavily reduced prices during a sales event.

The drive to collect items for its own sake is probably an evolutionary maladaption. These people sink ridiculous amounts of money into an expensive hobby. Of course, some people consider classic video games an investment and, unsurprisingly, there have been pump-and-dump scams in which unscrupulous people manipulated the market price (not value) of games in order to profit handsomely from it. In the end, though, there will be plenty of bagholders left because there will eventually be a shrinking market to sell these games to.

When I was a kid, there were some people who really enjoyed collecting stamps. Perhaps you had an uncle or a grandfather who was a stamp-collector, er, philatelist. Some people had collections with a particular focus, such as motives, countries, or years. There was quite a cotton industry built around this hobby. Today, though, there is little to no interest in his hobby. People have a hard time getting rid of their dead grandfather’s stamp collection, despite some stamps still having their nominal value, i.e. you could take those fifteen-year or twenty-year old stamps and put them on a postcard or letter.

I think what we have seen with stamps we will inevitably also see in gaming. There already is only very limited interest in classic games but this view is distorted because of a few people on YouTube with relatively large audiences, and a small group of well-off collectors who bid up prices in online auctions. However, there is no natural inflow into these communities. You have older collectors who are willing to spend money, and people who did not grow up with these systems will not have any attachment to them. The image below shows how interest in a number of classic gaming systems has been waning over decades. Note that the Super Nintendo had a spike a few years ago due to the release of the Super Nintendo mini console.

I grew up with the Super Nintendo and I even bought a Super Nintendo mini at release. Then I never even unpacked it, and about a year later I no longer wanted it to collect dust, so I sold it for a good price. I actually find it quite difficult to go back to a lot of Super Nintendo games. Sure, Super Mario World and a few other classics hold up fine, but the same cannot be said about many other games on this system. Super Nintendo games cost a lot of money, though, with some cartridges going for well over $100.

At some point, the bottom will fall out in the collectors market. If you have no attachment to the Super Nintendo and ended up with a cardboard box full of games, left behind by someone in your family, you would probably consider it junk. In fact, there is little intrinsic money in these games, arguably less than there is in a stamp, which you can still use. Quite likely, the earliest video game system you grew fond of is the one you grew up with. My first gaming console was the Super Nintendo. One of my cousins had its predecessor, the NES. I do not like the NES a lot. On that note, about a decade or so ago, online sentiment was that the NES game Super Mario Bros. 3 was a better game than its sequel Super Mario World on the Super Nintendo. This view seems to be getting less and less common, probably because the NES crowd is growing old if not literally dying off one by one.

In addition to the NES, also care little about any of the older systems like the Atari 2600. There are plenty of collectors left for this system, and the prices they pay for the games make collecting Super Nintendo games look like a hobby for paupers. Still, there is a seemingly very active collectors market for this console. Yet, in absolute terms interest in this console is so low that you cannot even properly draw it in the plot above. Google tells you that the relative interest to the Super Nintendo at peak is “less than 1”, i.e. effectively zero.

I find it quite plausible that today’s gamers will develop little nostalgia for the games they play. One big reason is that the majority of gaming time is spent on live-service titles. There are people out there who have been playing World of Warcraft for two decades. Many have dropped off, but they dropped off because they got tired of it after years and years of playing it. There are also no physical trinkets you can put in your shelf, so there is little to collect except the first few releases that were not distributed exclusively online. Then there are big titles like Fortnite, League of Legends, or Grand Theft Auto Online. If you play these games every day for years you are not going to one day wake up and think back to your childhood when you were cozying up in front of a TV, playing some game you put away months later. Today’s video game consumption patterns are very different from the past. Of course, I can foresee that people will collect Nintendo Switch games in the year 2044. I have a much harder time imagining the PlayStation 5 or the current Xbox becoming targets for collectors. People will just collect something else instead.