My deal is that I'm a big free market believer.
Yeah, that's pretty much the problem right there. Living in America we are indoctrinated from birth believe in the sacred infallible free market and ignore the obvious fact that a) there has never been such a thing and that b) it wouldn't regulate itself anyway.
Relating to point a): A free market, a truly free market, would allow for slavery, forced prostitution, nuclear arms sales, assassinations, and other such stuff. The market is regulated very heavily to make these things almost non-existent. It would also open the boarder between, for example, Mexico and the US eliminating what is essentially an economic apartheid and equalizing wages between the two countries. People actually being paid a fair wage? Brown people? We can't have that.
Related to point b) The "free market" of the 90s saw a huge explosion in popularity of 15MPG SUVs with the carbon footprint of a burning WalMart. In the end, that shit is going to cost us sums of money currently unimagined. A GMC Envoy was only $40,000 in 1997, but that's because they didn't include the cost of building dykes around New York City 50 years from now, the trillion dollars we spent failing to steel Iraq's oil, the ecological damaged caused by drilling, and dozens of other factors. And frankly, cars are barely even a problem compared to something the beef industry which causes ecological damage on a nearly Tolkien-esque scale just so Americans can stay fat for less money.
When I was in high school they told us that home ownership was so f*cking important and that you are better off having a house because property values will always go up. ALWAYS. Like f*cking
magic people repeated that axiom. Economists want to believe so badly that their field is a science, but they are the least scientifically minded of all people because they work from the solution (ie: greed is good) and work backward from there to fill in the theory.
Well, I bought a house in 2009 for %50 less than it was worth in 1990, as did about a million other people. How's that magic money school of thought going now, eh?
When I hear someone who isn't worth at least a few hundred million dollars repeating the beliefs and "laws" of economics I don't know if I should laugh or cry. The system is only there so you won't question the truly well off. If they can make a single mother living in a trailer park working three jobs believe that she too could be as rich as Mitt Romney if only she worked harder, then their position is secure.
More on topic: I recently sold something on eBay for the first time in ages to discover that there are no longer insertion fees. That little thing ALONE is going to drive the prices up on this kind of shit enormously. This works great for eBay since now you (and everyone else) can ask whatever outrageous price you want for shit. Since eBay takes a fixed percentage, that just means more money for them. This isn't too different from what happened to the housing market. The price of housing is totally unrelated to the value of housing since only %2 of the US can actually buy a house with cash. Most people are limited by how much they can borrow. The banks decide what you can afford to borrow, but they also take a fixed percentage. Therefore, if they loan you more money, they get more money. It doesn't matter what you actually spend the money on.
I don't know if the 16-bit market will actually "crash" exactly, but it will reach a limit. The imminent disappearance of any form of physical media is right around the corner. That alone will be enough to make people fond of being able to actually own a physical copy of a game. At the same time, Magical Chase isn't going to increase at the same rate that it recently has. There just isn't enough money out there to keep the value that high.
Collectors are a hard group to understand or predict. One thing I collect besides games is Laserdisc. I'm constantly surprised to see "hardcore" collectors who never even had the stuff when it was current. What draws them to the format? One of the most hardcore collectors on LDDB.com has only been hoarding for 7 years. Its been about 10 years since the format died so...what on Earth led him to collect so many high priced discs so quickly?
