expensive – OfdmFORUM

A boxed copy of the 1990 Mega Man DOS game, on sale on eBay. (Image credit: bnnltd)

Retro game collecting has been a big deal for a while now, but the focus has mainly been on old console games. The record for the most expensive game ever sold is a sealed edition of Super Mario Bros. that was auctioned for $2 million last August, whereas classic “big box” PC games have rarely been priced over $1,000—until recently. PC game collecting is heating up.

“I think the market for console games has hit its peak and attention has turned toward the big box PC games, which is why we’re seeing sealed versions start to go for such high prices,” says Stephen Kick, CEO of Nightdive Studios, which specializes in retro PC remakes and remasters. “Collectors are buying them up and having them graded as investments.”

It’s actually pretty difficult to find PC games that routinely sell for more than a thousand outside the crazy investor bubble.

If you were lucky enough to grow up in a PC gaming household in the ’90s, you probably remember a shelf or two of these big box PC games, which often contained goodies like manuals, guides, cloth maps, figurines, and other collectibles. Those precious little treasures have a way of getting lost, making complete big box editions of PC games tougher and tougher to find. If you happen to have one tucked away somewhere, you may be surprised what someone will pay for it. As much as I wanted this Japanese release of Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, $250 is more than I’m willing to pay—and that’s nothing compared to the sticker shock on this list.

You may not want to start building a collection immediately, though. Joel McCoy, admin of the Big Box PC Game Collectors Facebook group, believes today’s prices are the result of a speculative bubble.

“On value, right now there seems to be actual value, and bubble value. It seems to me that whatever force drives comic book speculation has taken over a segment of console collecting and is starting to creep into PC gaming… It’s actually pretty difficult to find PC games that routinely sell for more than a thousand outside the crazy investor bubble. We did a rundown in our chat when we first heard you were working on this, and we had a hard time coming up with many.”

This certainly raises issues with a definitive list of the rarest and most expensive of these games, and may even lead down a path of philosophical musing on what even is value or collectability in the face of such market fluctuations and speculative manipulation.

For the purpose of this list, we present the highest prices that collectible big boxes have actually sold for, leaving it up to the reader to determine if they are actually worth that much. (Except for the second-to-last entry of section two, which just doesn’t make sense.)

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Want a very good gaming laptop computer? Then you could want to get one now right before price ranges rise, according to a warning from Razer.

The peripheral and notebook manufacturer’s CEO, Min-Liang Tan, warned in a Tweet that the price of gaming laptops was about to get even worse in 2022. “Just had a prolonged conference to evaluation our gaming laptops line for next year – appears like there are major improves in part expenditures and many others and we’ll be observing value increases for subsequent gen gaming laptops throughout the board (together with the Razer Blade) subsequent year,” the Razer CEO mentioned.

Are not gaming laptops — Razer’s incorporated — presently costly?

Most of Razer’s gaming laptops, like the Blade 15 Superior, Blade Stealth 13, and Blade 17, are now some of the pricier offerings in the marketplace. That is in particular the scenario for Razer’s major-of-the-line laptops with RTX 30-collection graphics cards and 360Hz screens, inclusions that are already costly to include into the compressed frame of a gaming laptop.

But many thanks to the ongoing chip lack, people charges are set to increase even much more. The deficiency of GPU availability has made gaming laptops and pre-developed units even extra costly above the previous two several years, and that desire is unlikely to subside for at minimum a different year.

Why are the rates likely up?

The chip scarcity was sparked by the result of the COVID-19 pandemic on the world offer chain, which brought on several factories to shut down, relocate or decrease their manufacturing. The knock-on effects have been enormous as properly. The automotive industry, for occasion, began buying fewer chips at the start out of the pandemic on the assumption that persons would be travelling less — and thus car or truck gross sales would be lower.

But the opposite took place: folks employed their vehicles even much more, wanting to avoid public transport owing to fears all around the pandemic. The impression is predicted to have cost the auto sector on your own about $210 billion in income — so it is comprehensible why motor vehicle makers began generating substantial foreseeable future orders of silicon to ensure potential offer.

Automobile makers have been then forced to make massive orders in advance to account for the substantial shortfall. But the true dilemma is that two-thirds of the planet’s semiconductor are all made in Taiwan, particularly from a organization termed Taiwan Semiconductor Production Co (TSMC). To make matters worse, Taiwan was strike with its worst drought in 50 % a century this yr — which is a significant challenge specified the 170,000 tonnes of drinking water applied every single day by Taiwan’s Hsinchu Science Park, the spot in which most of the country’s semiconductor plants reside. (Officials from Taiwan’s Irrigation Company even went as far as to keep a rain worshipping ceremony in March.)

That critical lack has pushed up the value of gaming components like CPUs and GPUs

Tag: expensive

22 of the rarest and most expensive big box PC games

Gaming laptops are about to get extra expensive, Razer’s CEO warns

Are not gaming laptops — Razer’s incorporated — presently costly?

Why are the rates likely up?