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"The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it."
— Adam Smith
People put a very high value on things that are considered precious or important to them. I'm not just talking about obvious valuables with high price tags like expensive jewelry or fancy sports cars, or even the priceless things like family photos or old heirlooms passed down through the generations -- those things are obviously high in personal and financial value. Instead, I'm discussing how items like a child's drawing can be so precious to a parent years later, or the class ring that a husband gave to his wife years before they married. People naturally attach value to some things that in and of themselves are far less valuable. That's human nature after all.
So where does this lead us to, in this world of video games, and -- specifically -- roleplaying games? Well, for that I'd like to take a moment and direct your attention elsewhere, to that monster of all auction sites, eBay.com (seriously, keep reading - if you go away now, I might lose what little patience my bosses still have with me). The reason I bring eBay into our discussion is simply because it's the only example I have, and the only place, to my knowledge, that you can easily find the items I'll be discussing.
Our first item up for sale? Suikoden II for the first PlayStation, supposed by some to be the greatest of the entire series. If we take a gander and look around for a few minutes, we'll find several auctions for the game itself pushing over $100 USD. Several more which include a strategy guide are pushing $200 USD (after shipping, of course), and one more which claims to have a mint condition guide and a sealed, brand-new copy of the game is asking for $400 USD before they'll part with this rarest of all gaming gems.
Have I whetted your appetite yet? Let's keep moving.
Up next on the auction block? We have Panzer Dragoon Saga, a lesser-played (though not lesser-known) game for Sega's Saturn. With auctions pushing $225 USD and people bidding as much as $175 USD, some are obviously willing to pay a high price for the chance to play the game. While it's no Suikoden II in terms of pricing, it still appears that gamers will part with some serious cash in order to play one very hard to find game.
And last, but certainly not least, we finish with Valkyrie Profile, also for the PlayStation. The game is getting a makeover for the PlayStation Portable in the coming months and even has a sequel in the works for the PlayStation 2, but this title still seems to be highly sought by some buyers. The auctions aren't nearly so steep here, asking anywhere (at a glance) from $60 to $150 USD, but it's still a good deal of money to part with just for one game. Valkyrie Profile has been in high demand for a while now since it appears that Enix made just enough copies to outnumber the copies of the last Milli Vanilli album.
Now then, what was the point of this little exercise? By the time you read this article, all of these auctions I've just listed at random will be over and done with, and if both the gaming gods and the appropriate, country-specific postal systems are kind enough, those who paid as exorbitant a price as they did will have their precious gems in their possession. All I've done is pluck a few names from a hat, and attached a subjective price point to each - eBay, while being one of the few (or only) places you can find these games, doesn't exactly set the standard when it comes to official prices on games.
But, I do have a question to ask: why would people pay what might seem like a literal mint just to get their hands on these games? They aren't new, state of the art, or especially impressive-looking to some modern standards. Both of the systems I listed were released over a decade ago, and both saw successors to take up their mantle and carry on with games that were superior in visuals, sound, and other such nuances that make up a "next generation" system. And yet, not only will people pay an astounding price for these technologically "inferior" games, they've been doing it ever since these games disappeared from store shelves and reached the fabled status of "very rare."
So, what makes these games so valuable? As I stated, it can't be their presentation or visual superiority (although that's obviously a matter of personal opinion). Is it in the stories they tell, lasting forever as testaments of gripping storytelling? Is it the music they play, taking hold of the soul and shaking it to the core? Or is it something I can't even mention here - some nameless quality that has to be experienced to truly be understood? In truth, I'm not sure that it's any of those things.
Now, some RPGs hold their resale value surprisingly well when compared to non-RPGs because of their rarity, but I don't believe that to be the only reason they're worth the high prices they command today. If rarity was the only factor, then another glance through the echoing halls of eBay could find an original Pac-Man cabinet game for $500 USD, or one collection of over four hundred Nintendo games going for $1,225 USD. However, on the other hand, this isn't truly a fair comparison: Pac-Man is famous simply by being Pac-Man, and a single lot of so many different games doesn't truly compare to a copy of one game. The titles that I listed are quite rare which does explain some of the rise in cost, but certainly not all of it.
My theory is this: I believe that old, hard-to-find RPGs are so "valuable" today not just because of rarity, but also because of something as shallow as popular opinion. A game like Suikoden II, Panzer Dragoon Saga, or Valkyrie Profile is so highly sought because every RPGamer seems to want one. Those who haven't played the originals hear again and again about how unbelievably good they are, and so the desire to play them grows even more, until they're finally able to look past the price. Anyone who can afford the steep cost for these games has such an urge to play that they're willing to ignore the possible 800% profit the original owner might be making, if they paid the original $50 for that copy of Suikoden II. It doesn't matter if the game is actually good or not -- for some, all it takes is hearing the endless chorus enough and then they're just another one of the faithful.
Speaking bluntly now, those who think that these games I listed weren't worth the original $50 paid for them now have to watch gamers pay an unbelievable amount of money for sub-par games. It's all in the eye of the beholder, of course, but if Panzer Dragoon Saga wasn't any fun to play when it was available in the stores, then it's a sad state of affairs to watch rabid gamers pay so much more for it today.
Am I against people making the amounts of money that these older games make today? No, certainly not. I'm as much of a capitalist as they come, and if some are willing to pay a high price for these highly sought items, then sellers should be able to ask whatever they want for them. I don't believe this to be "price gouging" of any sort, because of the simple fact that if older games had a limit of how much they could cost, eventually all of the available copies would disappear into the hands of collectors, perhaps for good.
But I wonder what this might bode for the games we play today, and for the RPGamers of tomorrow. What will be the hard to find games ten years from now? Will it be that first-edition copy of Disgaea: Hour of Darkness that I was lucky enough to find on a store shelf when it was released... or will it be that copy of Legend of Dragoon or maybe Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth which hasn't been out of its sleeve in years?
Think about that one for awhile.
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