I buy and sell a lot, and have done so for about 8+ years now. From $10-$15 carts to $1000+ sealed across many platforms. And believe me, when you talk about people buying things on credit, you are talking about a very miniscule amount of collectors. I get more people saying "Hey can I pay on payday" (maybe ~5-10% of people I've dealt with) than people just financing it on credit. So all of those assumptions regarding the crash are flat out wrong.
What you do get are life priorities that take place over collecting. You get married, want to fund a honeymoon. You have kids, need to convert game room to nursery. You buy a house / sports car and need a down payment etc.
Or, as we age, your kid goes to college and you see a $20K+ a year bill coming your way. Or you have to pay for funerals of loved ones. Etc. But those are longer term impacts that shouldn't even be addressed now.
Since the overwhelming majority of this stuff is NOT bought on credit, you won't see an tremendous collapse of people selling stuff for pennies on the dollar. Besides, not sure if you noticed, but if you list a bunch of like items at 0.99 auctions (which firesellers would have to do), they tend to do well and come damn near (or beat) BIN prices anyway.
I do think prices will taper off at some point as our generation ages and collecting shifts behind other life priorities, but expecting a full on collapse is wishful thinking.
Are you administrating their PayPal accounts? How the hell do you know if they using credit? This is a serious question because you refer to it as a certainty and I don't see any way you would know at all. Do you have a storefront? You're making some pretty positive claims here.
In "collector" dominant circles like nintendoage, everyone bragging about being the biggest baller actually believes each other's ego-inflating/insecurity-masking stories. They're all rich and love to post the nerd gamer equivalent of pics of hundred dollar bills and gold jewellery and guns and stupid crap.
This is basically the mentality of omega level collectards:
They always have the same reaction when that stuff doesn't fly here: "you're all just jealous because you can't afford to hang with us
true collectors!".
People like Goldenpp who post a short list of games they're looking for and then pay $3600 at once for a handful of them are not the vast majority of regular North Americans if it's not paid for by going into debt. He even admitted to not being familiar with Turbo games, yet buying ones he hasn't played based only on whims and videos.
I like how he spent $3,600 in one pop and still needs most of the rares.
#collectardfails
Goldenpp offered some insight into the mindset of those driving the market irrationally:
When I first began, things were cheaper, sellers were looser and in general it was a lot easier to deal with, it only took about 5 years for me to begin regretting going for complete titles because of the way pricing was jacking up so much, but when you get that far into something, it becomes difficult for some of us to back away and call it quits, even if it takes out a lot more money than expected. However, the urge for me to complete my various system collections comes from the desire to get it over with in the event the cost continue to rise, I do not want even more games to reach a prohibitive point that I can no longer ever afford to purchase them (as many have)
It's true I spend a lot of time collecting which is a lot less time I can use for the playing aspect, but if I spend too much time playing and not buying, suddenly that game I thought was 30 bucks is now 100 bucks, and that creates a lot of issues for me as i'm not a rich guy, this stuff takes a long time for me to save money for.
That is a vicious cycle that you cannot keep up with.
