I'm relatively certain that most people who pay the current prices for games don't even bother playing them. Maybe for five minutes to get enough footage of intro cinematics and gameplay for their youtube video where they brag about their collection but not through to the end to see what the game is actually about.
Well, it depends. Do you mean by "current prices" the contemporary eBay madness?
I, for one, am forced to pay current prices, but certainly not on eBay. Still, I want quite a few PCE games and what else am I supposed to do? I try to buy at reasonable prices and I am quite patient until I find some, but getting games for pocket change....well, not gonna happen anymore.
And here's the kicker: I do play them.
A lot. I even try to introduce people to the Engine who haven't heard of it before. Actually I'm doing a full introduction run with a friend of mine who loves retro games and shoot'em ups in particular but has never encountered the system before. And while we only play every title I have for a limited amount of time to get through all of them, we ARE of course planning on going back to play most, if not all, of them in great detail.
In between PC Engine Nights 1 and 2 (latter coming up on December 19) we kind of stumbled into almost finishing "Dragon Spirit". Just wanted to give it another quick spin....he wasn't too enamoured with it after the first PCE Night, but he now bumped it up on his personal score list, from 3 of 5 to a 4 of 5.
Wow, this was a lot more text than intended. Long story short, there are people still buying the games (albeit not on eBay) and actually playing them.