Since the release of Deadpool and Wolverine, I’ve written two separate pieces on the video game adaptation of the “Merc with a Mouth.” One was simply “hey, did you know this even existed, it’s hard to get now though” and the other focused on the increasingly extortionate prices on the used market.
The issue there was licensing, in that even though Microsoft now owns Activision, the makers of the Deadpool game, the license to the character has long since expired. That means no digital sales, and since the physical copies stopped being made a long time ago, what’s out there is literally all we have. Hype from the movie inevitably drove up the price. It’s since happened to the X-Men Origins: Wolverine game, too.
Over the past few days, I’ve been looking through my own collection of older games and checking out what some current prices look like. While I’m not sitting on a gold mine, every single title I’ve picked up for almost nothing in the past is now significantly more expensive to acquire. In the case of the Xbox 360, the death of the digital store is now surely going to start having an impact on the rest of the catalog, too.
Suddenly it hit me. What was once a fun hobby has been spoiled. Game preservation is in tatters, licensing, and servers being turned off means gradually an increased scarcity of great titles from years past. And ultimately, greed. As prices go up, those in possession will naturally cash in, and prices will stay high. It’s like a horrible crypto scam, except for something actually worth owning.
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Games don’t even have to be ‘good’ to start going up in price
There were a few reasons I even bothered to start buying up old Xbox 360 games. One was that I mostly skipped the console, trading in my day one OG model for the shiny, Blu-ray equipped PS3. But I snapped up a bargain on a later model about four years ago and began steadily building out a library.
The other factor was backwards compatibility on the Xbox One, continued onto the Xbox Series X|S. Buying used discs was orders of magnitude cheaper at the time than buying full priced digital copies. There was no shortage of places to snap them up for cheap, with thrift stores, boot sales, markets, nobody seemed to want to hang on to their old Xbox 360 games, and it was a bargain hunter’s paradise.
I also, as a big Marvel fan that hasn’t played most of the games, started buying these up. Spider-Man, X-Men, Iron Man, Thor, whatever had the Marvel badge on. Mostly games that were never really classed as “good” but that I really wanted to play. I paid no more than £10 for any of them, with only The Amazing Spider-Man 2 costing me that. The rest were all less than this, but some are skyrocketing in price.
Captain America: Super Soldier, for example. I once bought it for £6, and to buy from the exact same store in the UK right now would cost me £32. I could sell it back to them for cash for more than double what I paid them in the first place. Thor: God of Thunder cost me £2, and it’s now going for five times that. Still not too bad, but it’s a significant increase. It’s a similar story with the X-Men games, but two of them are at least still cheap. Wolverine, well, that’s going up a lot faster.
And that’s only the Marvel games.
It’s a seller’s market, and normal folks are the ones to suffer
I recently saw an Instagram reel of a British chap who spent over £600 on a rare PS2 game. I’m not remotely suggesting this will become the norm, but as discs dry up, and demand increases, prices will inevitably rise. I’m a huge fan of the Sega Dreamcast, but I ultimately gave up on collecting its games because they’re already in this position. Even ‘common’ games like Crazy Taxi can still cost more than some new releases.
Just like I highlighted around the Deadpool game, it’s those of us normal folks who want to just play old games that will suffer the most. The ‘serious collectors’ with seemingly endless bank accounts won’t bat an eyelid, and those with the funds to buy and sell will laugh all the way to the bank. It’s like sneaker resellers buying up stock of limited releases and then selling them on for vastly inflated prices. The scale might be different, but the idea is the same.
This will end up being a never-ending theme. Game preservation doesn’t really seem to matter to any of the companies making them. If you download a copy to play in an emulator, you’ll be frowned upon (or worse if it’s anything Nintendo made) yet there’s minimal effort made to keep these titles alive for future generations to enjoy.
License holders make their money, the big publishers make their money, and when they’ve done that they lose interest. Copyright protection is valuable, but it’s also infuriating. None of the cars featured in the original Forza Horizon, for example, are even made anymore. Yet that game was withdrawn from sale because of licensing. It’s happened since with other Forza Horizon games. We’re always the ones who lose out.
The entire system is geared against us, the regular gamers. My only recommendation is that if you see an old game you like the look of, and you’re happy with the price, buy it. Don’t hesitate, get it while you can. There will come a day you might regret it, else. I’m in that exact position with Spider-Man: Web of Shadows because I outright refuse to pay nearly £100 for it. If you see an opportunity, take it.
