I collect retro games because I love to play them
vs.
so if something were to happen I could always get a return on my investment.
And? It's not like I'm hunting down boxed copies of valuable yet shitty games just to flip them on Ebay. It's just nice to know that my collection has a significant monetary value in case of an emergency and I had to come up with some cash fast.
Video games aren't exactly an asset with high liquidity. While in an individual crisis, you may be able to convert the assets to cash, if the crisis is more wide spread, such as an economic downturn, you won't be able to convert them back into cash, without taking substantial losses.
In reality, the reason most people ask "Are video games a good investment?" is not because they want to build up a 401k built out of Magical Chases, which is what most people assume. It is more that they want to internally justify spending large sums of money on what boils down to toys.
Spending $100+ on a single video game that is over a decade old would be impossible to justify to your internal conscience if the game were to lose all value immediately. However, if you tell yourself "Hey, in 10 years, I can sell it for $200, and I'll have made money!" All of the sudden you've justified a reason to spend $100 on something that isn't the best decision for your personal financial stability. I would say the majority of the video game market, especially the VGA-graded market, falls under the greater fool theory of economics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory
The problem is, just with baseball cards and comic books, the market WILL dry up. Liquidity on anything other than the rarest of the rare will disappear. So, if you purchase a game for $100+, you are better off assuming you will NEVER get that money back. If you still feel justified with the purchase, then do it. But don't use a false assumption of a perpetually growing market to justify a purchase.
I don't know if the comic book analogy is the best reference, as a lot of really old comic books are worth a ton of money. The reason this analogy comes up again and again is because in the late 80's and into the 90's the value on much older comics became really high, and suddenly every comic was trying to do collector's editions, and the market was booming and production numbers were high. I'm pretty sure about the same thing happened to baseball cards as well.
But with games, most of the $100+ games had low print runs, and there's no changing that fact. We've also seen that remakes & ports, and especially download versions don't seem to have much if any impact on the value of the originals. Sure, maybe some $40 games might end up worth almost nothing some day, but I'd say the $100+ games will always be worth some decent coin.
