Why is Retro Gaming so Expensive? | Hacker News Reader

Why is Retro Gaming so Expensive?

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2 pointsshinryudbz4 comments

This is very meh.. Some idiot paying a shitton for a game, some other tricksters putting carts on ebay for idiot prices does not mean the hobby suddenly became expensive..

There's lots of hardware available, there's lots of games, and for the rare titles, there are storage-emulators available allowing you to play your... backed up copies so you're not.. causing needles wear and tear on the originals that you... own.

I do think playing on "real" hardware is more fun to me, be it a PC runnign Windows 98, or a Commodore 64.. It's part of the experience to me, so I may not be so "pure" when it comes to the game itself..

I don't buy hw anymore. Emulator is good enough. Can't compete with collectors.

For some reason people want the experience but I would rather go to the arcade. But I think there's something to it. At this moment in time, it would be impossible for me to sit down and play final fantasy 7. It's just an enormous time sink where a good chunk of it is playing clunky side games or reading lots and lots of texts or grinding to get to the next section. I have too much to do and that's not really that fun. But if you get all the hardware, and you get your pizza rolls, and you bean bag chair, and you sit in front of the TV with your wired remote, and it doesn't have a button to make screenshots, and you don't have your favorite chat app integration, and you leave your phone elsewhere to charge, maybe you feel like you can just calm yourself enough to sit and play the game for the next 6 hours before it's past your bedtime.

I think for me the biggest issue is that I have a toddler so in no way I can do anything for more than 2 hours straight when he is awake.

Having a kid actually "demake" many of my hobbies as all take extensive research to have a hang of.

The other reason that I'm not going to own more HW is because I sadly found out I'm into console games, especially all big titles such as Super Mario, Zelda, FF. I didn't own a console in childhood so there is no nostalgic value in playing them, neither do I find these games particularly suitable for my darker taste (back in the day even as a young kid I enjoyed darker games such as Double Dragon and Castlevania when playing at friend's place).

The second point makes me particularly painful because I realized that experience, as food, has its best day before.

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