Since the release of Deadpool and Wolverine, I’ve written two separate articles about the video game adaptation of The Big Mouth Merc. One was simply “Hey, did you know this even existed? It’s hard to get hold of now, though,” and the other focused on the increasingly exorbitant prices on the used market.
The problem was licensing. Although Microsoft now owns Activision, the makers of the Deadpool game, the license for the character has long since expired. This means there are no digital sales and since physical copies have long since stopped being made, what exists is literally all we have. The hype surrounding the film inevitably drove up the price. This has now also happened with the X-Men Origins: Wolverine game.
Over the last few days I’ve been going through my own collection of older games and seeing what the current prices are. I’m not sitting on a gold mine, but every single title I bought for next to nothing in the past is now significantly more expensive. In the case of the Xbox 360, the end of the digital store will now surely affect the rest of the catalog as well.
Suddenly I realized what I had to do. What was once a fun hobby has been spoiled. Game preservation is in shambles, licenses and servers are being shut down, gradually leading to an increasing scarcity of great titles from years past. And ultimately, greed. As prices rise, owners will naturally cash in, and prices will stay high. It’s like a horrible crypto scam, except they’re actually worth owning.
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Games don’t even have to be “good” to increase in price
There were a few reasons why I started buying up old Xbox 360 games in the first place. One of them was that I had mostly skipped the console, trading in my original day one model for the fancy PS3 with Blu-ray player. But about four years ago I got a bargain on a newer model and started slowly building up a library.
The other factor was the Xbox One’s backwards compatibility, which continued on the Xbox Series X|S. Buying used discs was several times cheaper than buying full-price digital copies back then. There was no shortage of places to grab them cheap, with second-hand shops, flea markets, markets, no one seemed to want to hold onto their old Xbox 360 games, and it was a bargain hunter’s paradise.
As a huge Marvel fan who didn’t play most of the games, I started buying those up too. Spider-Man, X-Men, Iron Man, Thor, anything that had the Marvel badge on it. Mostly games that were never really rated as ‘good’ but that I was dying to play. I never paid more than ÂŁ10 for any of them, only The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was worth that much. The rest were all worth less, but some are rocketing in price.
Captain America: Super Soldier, for example. I bought it once for ÂŁ6, and if I bought it now from the same store in the UK, it would cost me ÂŁ32. I could sell it back to them in cash for more than double the price I originally paid. Thor: God of Thunder cost me ÂŁ2, and now it costs five times that. Still not too bad, but it’s a significant increase. It’s similar with the X-Men games, but at least two of them are still cheap. Wolverine, well, the price is going up much faster.
And those are just the Marvel games.
It’s a seller’s market, and ordinary people are the ones who suffer
I saw a video on Instagram recently of a Brit spending over ÂŁ600 on a rare PS2 game. I’m not remotely suggesting this will become the norm, but as discs become scarce and demand increases, prices will inevitably rise. I’m a huge fan of the Sega Dreamcast, but I’ve ultimately given up collecting their games because they’re already in this situation. Even ‘ordinary’ games like Crazy Taxi can still cost more than some new releases.
As I pointed out with the Deadpool game, those of us who just want to play old games will suffer the most. The “serious collectors” with seemingly endless bank accounts won’t bat an eyelid, and those with the cash to buy and sell will laugh their heads off to the bank. It’s like sneaker resellers buying up stock of limited releases and then reselling them at wildly inflated prices. The scale may be different, but the idea is the same.
This is going to be a never-ending issue. Preservation of games doesn’t really seem to matter to any of the manufacturers. If you download a copy to play it in an emulator, you’ll be frowned upon (or worse if it’s something from Nintendo), but minimal effort is made to keep these titles alive for future generations.
License holders make their money, the big publishers make their money, and once they’ve done that, they lose interest. Copyright protection is valuable, but it’s also annoying. None of the cars from the original Forza Horizon are made anymore, for example. Yet that game was taken off sale because of the licensing. This has happened to other Forza Horizon games since then. We’re always the ones who lose out.
The whole system is stacked against us, the regular gamers. My only recommendation is: if you see an old game you like and are happy with the price, buy it. Don’t hesitate, get it while you can. Otherwise the day will come when you might regret it. I’m in exactly that position with Spider-Man: Web of Shadows because I flat out refuse to pay nearly ÂŁ100 for it. If you see an opportunity, take it.
