Does collecting make sense?
Hey there,
I had a tech talk about retrogaming on OG Hardware. We ended up with the point that discs, some GBA,(3ds) and Switch games just die and cannot be used anymore.
So i question what is the use in collecting then. Its basically dead money. Its not really a cheap Hobby.
What do you think about it?
Cartridges tend to be reliable in the long run as long as you avoid physical damage. Leaking save state batteries can be a problem there.
Optical discs do go bad just by aging in the box.
There's another angle to this. A while back, Metal Jesus Rocks had a video about a Switch game that had an incorrect cover, and it was going to be corrected after the first production run was sold through. Which means it would be a collectors item.
He bought it, but had a "wtf am I doing?" moment afterwards. He didn't care about the game beforehand. Its only value to him is that a manufacturer mistake would make it valuable to other collectors. Which is somewhat circular logic.
Edit: to clarify, I don't think it's just about rare things, either. Having a collection at all, where you have tons of games that you don't really care about and they just sit on a shelf, is kinda insane. I don't have any moral compunction about pirating old games, so why bother? In many cases, I can even play on original hardware with SD card mods, and especially on optical disc systems, the experience is better.
Makes sense. But what are the odds getting such?
I added this in an edit, but I don't think it's just about rare things. Having a collection of games that just sit on your shelf is silly. Which goes for a lot of other types of collecting, too.
In the age of emulators, original games are no better then NFTs. They are just a pretty thing to look at, and a store of value for however long other people value them.
I'm mostly being sarcastic, but only mostly. I personally see no value in game collecting. Obviously some people like to hold real games and stick them into real consoles. Me, I just want to play the games.
I think having ROM's on FPGA devices will be preferred way of having 'collections' in the future.
That was actually the Initial discussion. It cant die so easily on that..
I personally like having my small collection of games. No idea when any of them will die, but it's at least nice to have them. For price, I'm lucky enough that the vast majority of games I want aren't super expensive at a local game store I like to visit.
That, or are cheap enough at a pawnshop near me. Ty the Tasmanian Tiger for PS2 for under $20 (possibly under $10/I don't remember)? Sign me up! Almost bought it, but decided against it since I wasn't sure how tight the rest of my college financial aid money would be after all my Christmas shopping.
Edit:
I am also skeptical about things like disc rot because I have heard countless times about it but have never met a single person who has ever had it happen to them.
At my first job at an ad agency we stored everything on DVD-Rs. A regular task for me was to copy old discs to new discs because they would rot after a while. It was all very stupid.
But those were rewritable discs. Regular ones will live for a long time before showing any signs of rot, if stored properly.
Just on the issue of disc rot, I feel like I have something to add to the conversation that's more than a personal anecdote.
For many years I worked as a game developer and I did tons of multimedia software, it would not be an exaggeration to say that in my career I personally oversaw the burning of over 100,000 discs, and that's not counting manufacturing or high-run final product.
There's actually a pretty high failure rate, even on new disks. Most that are about 7 years have a 50% failure rate, anything after 10 years if you're lucky you can use software.
In the above examples I'm talking about discs that the consumer grade hardware can burn. It doesn't matter that we used the highest quality equipment, it really doesn't change the formula. Commercially made ones have a much higher durability, somewhere around double.
So basically any disk you own, regardless of where and when it was made, you've got 15 to 20 years at best and then it's nothing but a crap shoot.
Well. Look for older games like Metal Gear Solid or FF7. They still work.
Could it be that you speak about an expected failure rate?
Why would it just...die?
Write-once ROMs tend to be pretty reliable for a long time as long as there's no physical damage. Leaking save state batteries can do that.
There are some old rewritable ROMs that work by shining UV light on them to erase them, and then you can write to them again. Those can go bad, especially if the sticker falls off and they're exposed to light. They aren't common in cartridges, but you'll see them in arcade motherboards.
Magnetic media will lose its magnetic domains over time. A lot depends on the quality of the disk and the environment it's stored in. Commercially released floppy disks tend to be pretty reliable, but retail blank disks were increasingly cost-optimized into hot garbage as time went on. The new-old-stock disks we get these days are terrible. That said, quality stuff properly stored can last a long, long time.
Optical discs will inevitably get scratched when you use them. Commercial pressed discs can last a long time in storage, though. Burned discs, not so much.
Modern flash memory may lose its cell charge with time without any read/write cycles being involved. AFAIK, there's not much out there about using flash for long term archiving. Most people who are interested in archiving, especially for large corporations, use quality magnetic tape stored in a controlled environment. They aren't interested in flash, so there's not much info out there.
carts also have the added bonus that if there is a failed chip or PCB, you can generally find replacements to repair it with.
and if parts ceased to become available, someone inevitably creates some kind of adapter for a more modern technology that seemlessly installs and works in place of the original.
I think you can, from scratch, make a 100% functional and compatible SNES cart, for example.. with exception for the handful of games that used special chips like SuperFX
but yeahl optical disks are a ticking time bomb. Even if you take care of them and don't scratch them, eventually the bitrot will eat them.
Flash memories don't last forever, and some of the 3DS cartridge batches in particular were rather shit and age quite poorly, a lot faster than DS cartridges for example.
Optical discs are subject to "disc rot", damage from UVs apparently. Some are more vulnerable to it than others. For some reason Wii U discs are quite bad and often have that problem. Sounds very much like Nintendo cheaped out a lot on their media around that time.
I dont know how to explain. I'm not that big of a techie. But yeah. They do somewhen.
I don't collect anymore. I do still have a small amount of stuff that I enjoy but overall it's too expensive, not enough space, unreliable media etc...
I own a lot of systems and games and, well, you have a point. Gaming on an original device is really nice, but everybody should really think hard about just buying some flash drives for their favorite systems. Games are mass produced. Nothing artsy there. Just mass produced entertainment. A CD-Rom with some nice prints on there. A plastic shell with a sticker. A box. Nice to look at and if you can get them cheap, buy them. But there is no reason to spend hundreds of dollars to buy that one game from some scalper.
Yeah. Another thing is using Everdrives for each unit. I know a lot of people do that
I like collecting games for 2 reasons
Thats one Argument for keeping the stuff OG. I really have mixed Feelings :/
It amuses me that something so modern as video games already has the problem of fading into oblivion. Maybe that's why it's so compelling, because the foundations are still in living memory?
Anyway in the museum, a disk that cannot be read is an artifact just as the plane that cannot fly.
I got rid of most of my physical games, and built a lovely GameBoy & N64 collection. I consider those as goodies, expose them on shelves. Of course, I also use them and would be sad if they do not work anymore, but their value is not only linked to that. I don’t consider the monetary value the games have. I will never buy a game because it’s rare and expensive. I only collect games I love, and sometimes yes, I have to pay a high price, but it’s just because I have to deal with the system.