If you’re familiar with the refined generational theory discussed on this and other counterculture blogs, you know that Generation Y is clearly differentiated from the Millennials by the latter’s gullibility and loathing of the past in contrast to the former’s tractability and morbid nostalgia.
Of all the pop culture stories that have crossed my desk, none illustrates Gen Y nostalgia’s detrimental effects on themselves and others better than the breaking retro video game speculation scandal.
The story is still developing, but we have pretty solid eyewitness and statistical evidence that a major game grading site colluded with a leading auction house to inflate retro game prices. The alleged shenanigans included issuing bogus grades in general, inflating the grades of company officers’ games in particular, and planting shill bidders to drive up prices at auction.
Whether deliberate or not, the result of this relatively recent phenomenon was a retro game bubble that only benefited a small cadre of rich, well-placed speculators. Meanwhile, ordinary gamers who collect and play games for fun were frozen out.
If that scenario reminds you of events in another market from earlier this year, it should. Wata Games and Heritage Auctions suspected hijinks echo the hedge funds’ and Wall Street bankers’ wagon-circling during GameStonk.
Karl Jobst, a guy who’s a big deal in the speed running scene, put together a video making a solid case that a massive scam is being run on retro gamers. It’s well worth a watch. If you check it out at work, do your best not to yell at the screen or pound your desk.
And don’t give money to speculators looking to exploit you.
Support artists who entertain you.
Nintendo should modernize the SNES with Internet access and a digital storefront. Nintendo’s price-gouging would be more tolerable than the auction houses’, and the obsolescence of plastic cartridges would appeal to the eco freaks.
I’ve been saying for a while that the future of console gaming is re-released old consoles with new features and games along with reissues. It’s the most practical way to own an entire market that is currently a money sink.
The biggest concern will be forced updates to digital games. As soon as SJWs finish converging Japan, the Super Mario Bros. will become the Super Maria Sisters.
Imagine playing with a grossly obese 8-bit female Mario sprite that has shaved hair, then imagine an unoptimized engine update that stresses the console’s 16 bit capabilities. That’s the real future of retro consoles.
This Jobst fellow is doing actual journalism and investigation. Schreier and his ilk should be ashamed of themselves, though I doubt such detestable cretins are even capable of feeling it.
I stopped expecting anything of games journalists years ago.
As I was listening to the dentist talk, I was struck by his repeated use of the word “time machine.” The wall- or room-displays of old stuff we see elsewhere in the video have the same intention. They become shrines to childhood.
It’s striking how many of them look like unironic copies of RLM’s Nerd Crew set.
My other reaction was pity. It’s clear, from those massive and carefully arranged displays, that these folks have made idols of what’s on those walls. All idols are small and unworthy, in the end, but these seem particularly worthless. God save them from their idolaltry.
From my observations, this sort of thing is getting worse. Not just youth worship, but idol worship in general. I constantly get in touch with people who were once sane now tumbling down a primrose path of destruction, believing 180 degrees the opposite of what they did when they actually were younger, and are constantly filled with anxiety and dread.
Overheard the radio man yesterday talking about dehumanizing unvaxxed people and giving them less rights in order to force them to take it. Of course this is a moral and just thing to do, and you have cowards of all stripes (including supposedly not on their side) backing them up and doing the same on places like social media between taking prayer requests. And yes I have seen priests and pastors getting in on this too.
Short of divine intervention, these people are going to explode, and we live in a culture that will pat them on the back for doing so. After all, there are no wrong actions: just wrong targets.
Unless the targets of that slavering hatred grow a spine, and fast, they will lose what few rights they have. And they’ll deserve it for being too lazy and cowardly to to stand up for themselves when it still mattered.
There’s a bit of that going on with Pokemon TCG prices at the moment, too. It’s pretty crazy. Nostalgia is a beast of a drug.
Loss of social trust turns every market into a fire sale.
Magic: The Gathering has been repeatedly doubling down on high priced cards for a while now. Some of this has been done by Wizards (alternate art, collectors packs, buy-a-box promos!) while some of it has been done by speculators on the secondary market. It’s gotten so ridiculous that standard decks can cost thousands and some of my uncommons from older (but high print volume) sets now sell for over ten bucks a card.
However M:TG is interesting in that they’ve almost completely killed off their nostalgia component. Everything about the game barely resembles its original incarnation, the great players have moved onto other things, and anecdotally I don’t know anyone (even people who played at Grand Prix tournaments and spent thousands on the game) who still cares about new sets. They’re entirely committed to a newbie audience, though lately they’ve started to do crossovers with other properties in order to try to get the interest of people who’ve never cared about Magic.
There were some leaks a year or so ago that said that management was in a full “this game’s going to die anyone, so let’s bleed out the whales!” mode. Not verified at all, but I’d believe it. As expected in such a situation the creative teams have focused on showing their woke cred and writing bad Harry Potter fanfics.
That’s not to mention the garbage like running limited-time limited-edition releases with special content. I had known for years that MTG was woke, but I ignored it for a bit. Then they banned a bunch of old cards for “racism” (none of which were actually racist except in the minds of demented racists, but we all know that’s what they are) in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Then their dropping of MORE limited-edition licensed stuff (a set themed around giant monsters that had alternate-art versions depicting Godzilla characters, and infamously the limited-time-offer Walking Dead tie-in cards, which were mechanically unique and NOT reskins of existing cards, and which WERE legal in Standard and tournament play (albeit I don’t think any of them would be good enough to see regular play, but still, it’s ridiculous). Then again, Magic is now pretty much split between the newbies who only play on their new online platform, and the whales and/or diehards who’ve been at it for 15 years and have painstakingly built their collections IRL or on the old, late 90s web client. It’s ludicrously difficult to get into competitive Magic, especially in the older formats. A “budget” deck will probably still cost $60-100 and is going to either be a one trick pony or an extremely downgraded version of a normal deck, that you’ll get bored of playing quickly. Magic is, and honestly always has been, a total racket, and their monetization model only survives scrutiny because the playerbase has gotten used to the abuse and developed Stockholm Syndrome.
Magic has been a long history of realizing that they could yank more money out of the customer’s pocket than they previously thought.
In the beginning it was somewhat of a racket, but on a limited scale. Yes, the very nature of the game meant that you would need to spend more money to get decent decks than buying a complete card game. But Richard Garfield expected that most play groups would only buy enough cards for 2-8 decks and then stop, just playing with their existing collections from that point forward (This actually describes exactly how I have purchased and played Hecatomb and Force of Will.) This is the reason behind the ante rules: the idea was with a static card pool among all players things would be more interesting if there was a mechanic to have cards at least transfer between players to open up new deck options. The fact that most players continually bought new cards every expansion completely caught them off guard.
Since that point they’ve found many ways to dig into the pocketbooks of players, many of which can be justified beyond the profit motive (such as the standard format or draft tournaments.) But it’s went into overdrive in the last four years or so.
One place you can see this is the banned and restricted list for standard. Some missteps in the beginning, stabilizing into some bans of cards which were accidentally too good every five years ago… until 2017 when they start happening practically every set rotation (but somehow problem cards have a tendency to remain unbanned until after everyone’s had a chance to buy them.)
“the creative teams have focused on showing their woke cred and writing bad Harry Potter fanfics.”
That’s a company-wide infection; it’s hitting the D&D side of things as well. 🙂
As a Boomer I know all too well how dangerous a drug nostalgia can be. The yearning to get back to a place that is long gone can be overwhelming. Logic would tell you that in no known universe is a plastic cartridge that retailed for 30$ would somehow be worth 30,000$ today. Add the magic of nostalgia though, and it suddenly becomes believable. I guess that’s what the speculators were counting on.
It’s an old impulse. I forget the original context, but Chesterton referred once to the price of some antique or other depending on “the waves of madness that flow over the world of collectors”.