In prior Game & Market articles, I discussed factors that increase awareness of games, and can be a large factor in driving their value up. This time, we’re going to look at an entire segment of games that is generally overlooked by those factors, why they are overlooked, and the few exceptions that you as a collector might want to be aware of… Sports games.

When most collectors that I talk with start trying to gather a complete collec- tion of games for a system, they tend to either start or end with the sports games. The theory seems to be they can either buy a huge chunk of the library for usually just a couple bucks apiece to help complete a decent percentage of it, or they put it off until the end because they have little interest in actually playing any of them.

Let’s first look at the simple factors that cause sports games to be pretty low in price:

SPORTS GAMES ARE POPULAR

Perhaps this is obvious, but sports games in general are really popular. This means that a lot of each title is sold, and the secondary market is full of opportu- nities to find these games.

That isn’t the only factor though, as games that sell in higher quantities often retain value better than sports games. An easy example of this is Super Mario Bros

for the original NES is more expensive to purchase than NFL or Major League Baseball for instance, even though the original Mario platformer probably sold ten times more copies than either of the other two games.

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Dan Loosen Dan Loosen (4 Posts)

Midwest Gaming Classic / GOAT Store - He met his future business partner Gary Heil in elementary school where the pair would often find themselves coding Apple ][GS computers after school. Soon, this hobby became more serious when the pair was asked to create a game for a discontinued video game console by a small company. That company shifted away from small run game development before the game was complete, but Dan and Gary decided to forge ahead with their own company, and GOAT Store, LLC was born. While the pair doesn’t develop games anymore, in 2003 the GOAT Store helped bring the first Dreamcast title to market developed on the open source KallistiOS platform with Feet of Fury. Since that time, Dan has helped to bring additional independent projects to the Dreamcast, and has helped created development tools for other projects. Additionally, along with Gary Heil, he runs the Midwest Gaming Classic trade show to help give a platform to smaller projects that are often unsupported from the original manufacturers!