Not sure if this belongs in the market thread or not since it’s a market question but doesn’t pertain to the TCG. Regardless, I’ve been looking on eBay to see what all of the mainline games are worth nowadays. I thought since Red/Blue/Yellow were older that they would be going for more than what they actually are. After finding that they are still relatively cheap I made a quick price breakdown using eBay BIN sold listings, these are for authentic versions of the games (because there’s so many fakes being sold) with working batteries for Gen 1-3 (but you can usually find them cheaper if they battery is dead) and only including the cartridge. This is what I found:
So I’m wondering why you all think games like Ruby/Sapphire and Black/White are going for $50+ when they aren’t as old as R/B/Y. Is it because of the system they were released on? Is it because the game boy games are harder to go back and play through when you have a better version of the games with Fire Red and Leaf Green? Thought this was interesting since I’ve been looking at buying some of the old games back and being surprised by the different price points.
The first 2 generations are available on the eShop on the Switch and/or the 3DS. If you want to play HGSS (the best game), you need to buy the original. The older games have the modern alternative. I’m sure if the newer games rerelease digitally they will also be less in demand physically.
They might have been refering to the fact you can download the games up to pokemon crystal on the 3ds eshop.
These were rby were released in 2016, gold and silver in 2017, and crystal in 2018.
Yeah, I know those were released on 3DS. The way that they said it made it sound like they were also available on Switch, which they are not with the exception of Let’s Go. It would be really cool if they put gold, silver, crystal etc on the Switch. It would be great to see them on a big screen.
This coupled with the point @miraclegro made about what’s available on the 3DS eshop, it makes perfect sense why the games are priced the way they are.
If it has a working battery. Very likely, you’ll need to replace the battery first, which only cost like $1 each – but you need to solder it in, which is a pain in the ass. With a dead battery, the game is worth ~$70 it looks like.
I had no idea some of the prices were so high now. And it seems there’s hardly any difference in price between cartridge only and complete. Here in the UK prices are a fair bit cheaper for some of them though. You can get Platinum for about £25-30 for example.
From what I found the price difference between cartridge only and complete-in-box is pretty high for the older games. For example, Red version cartridge only goes for around $25 while CIB goes from anywhere between $200-$300+, probably because most of the boxes got damaged over the last 20+ years while examples like Platinum or B/W 2 go for slightly over $100 which is still a decent amount of money but not nearly as high of a premium as the GBC games.
The thread directly below this one was posted just a few days ago by me, but discusses the value of “complete in box” game prices. It has a similar trend, with the exception being Heart Gold and Soul Silver due to the rarity of the original box with poke walker.
It’s relative still. At least imo, in the US, buyers here will want US copies of the game not european ones. The boxes are different as we have a different rating scale than the EU. With this in mind, it seems that demand is then greater than supply in of the US of US copies hence the price discrepancy. If there was no difference in the boxes than it would be outrageous to have such a large price spread. Your average collector will buy what is nostalgic for them and in the US that will be the US boxes for video games.
