eBay is the best place to find sealed games for collecting. Game fan forums like this have too many people who are reluctant to sell games to people who intend to keep someone else from having a chance to play a game.
But, if someone here had a sealed copy in their possession to start with, wouldn't they be guilty of keeping someone else from playing it? Not that I particularly care either way. I fully agree that eBay is a much better place for collectors to find complete/sealed games. Hopefully Gonderfire will stick around and contribute to the community discussions regardless of his intentions as a colletor.
I was only giving advice about how to obtain sealed games and some of the roadblocks people face. I did not say that "things should be like this".
There are so many other reasons to possess a sealed game than as a second or third copy which you intend to never open. I thought that it would go without saying in a forum like this.
I'm not advicating any kind of preference, but an obvious example is how I have a very large stack of sealed PCE/Turbo games. I don't think of them as "sealed" though, I think of them as "mint", but not in the collectible grading way. Almost all of them are my lone copies. I had many more until I traded a bunch in this forum. I explained in my ad how I was looking for a list of titles and that aside from other items for trade, I'd be willing to part with some of my lone sealed copies in trades involving less complete and/or poorer condition copies of the same titles. I am not one of the people who will refuse to deal with sealed collectors.
I plan on documenting each variant of packaging and their contents and shooting videos when I open them. Part of it will be for an expanded guide to spotting bootlegs. The few sealed copies which I already own will be opened to become my complete/good condition copies, to accompany old worn and incomplete copies that I've picked up over the past 23 years which have sentimental value, some of which don't function 100%.
The anti-sealed collector types I refered to earlier aren't so concerned with people hording multiple copies of common games so much as harder to find ones. It's no secret that there are more non-Turbo fans in possession of Turbo goods nowadays than actual Turbo fans. This makes it hard for people who love the games, packaging and all, to get a hold of many titles. Meanwhile there are many people who either feel nothing towards the TurboGrafx-16 or even dislike everything about it, who jacked up collector prices piecing together quick "sets" as bragging rights to other possessionists.
It's just like the stupid horse armor. Everyone was warned about setting a precident and now today some of the most basic terrible games cost hundreds of dollars to piece together as separate digital downloads and in the end you have nothing tangible in your hand and the game can expire at any time. Some people in forums like this choose instead to part with some of their "investments" at a "loss" in order to keep them from falling into the hands of "the Sharks".
