"The Tourists Have Taken Everything" Laments Japanese Resident as Retro Runs Dry
timeextension.com
timeextension.com
> "I should specify that if you’re a tourist in Japan and buying these games because you genuinely want to play them, I don’t have an issue with you," Jia says. "It’s the people who clear entire shelves just to scalp them online when they get home that ruin the hobby here for everyone."
In other words, a better title would be: "American expat laments scalpers are emptying Japanese retro game stores".
Levis (jeans in general) were such a hot commodity on the black market there, that the number of pairs of jeans in his luggage was written on his entry stamp in his passport, and when he exited the country, he had to have the same number of jeans.
I very quickly realized that the group was, almost exclusively, people bragging about their "hauls" as they raided local garage and estate sales. No one ever talked about the games, or playing the games. Just a weird, vaguely competitive hoarder mentality.
Gross people. Gross hobby. Emulation is a blessing.
If someone is excited about sharing something that's completing some part of their collection I think everyone is totally fine with that, it's something they're passionate about!
If it's "I found this thing for cheap and I'm going to charge someone hundreds of dollars because they have no other choice," then do it in something other than a hobby space; don't brag about that. Bragging about scalping makes you an asshole.
Emulation enables hobbyists to play games they otherwise can't find -- or much more commonly, can't afford.
Really, every one of these occupations is gross. Even gaming "ideally" as the poor sap relegated to emulation does is a perversion. And let's not forget those digital collectors. Who reading this thread doesn't have an organized stash of ROM files on their external drive?
Back to the scalper: what actually separates him from the collector? That he fetishizes the money form over the commodity form? In objective terms, the money form really is the purer and cleaner one; it's the commodity form that is marred and gross. Although:
> Whenever there is a general and extensive disturbance of this mechanism, no matter what its cause, money becomes suddenly and immediately transformed, from its merely ideal shape of money of account, into hard cash. Profane commodities can no longer replace it. The use-value of commodities becomes valueless, and their value vanishes in the presence of its own independent form. On the eve of the crisis, the bourgeois, with the self-sufficiency that springs from intoxicating prosperity, declares money to be a vain imagination. Commodities alone are money. But now the cry is everywhere: money alone is a commodity! As the hart pants after fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth.
But none of this matters if you want to stay constrained to some narrow set of nerdy interests. After all is said and done, don't let me "yuck your yum"! So yummy, that corroding PCB smell, those shallow vertical bevels in the gray plastic, that soft crackle of the compressed music of the Nintendo 64... who am I to take that from you? I am no "scalper"!
I'm sure they're crying to sleep over their inventory moving off the shelf in a niche where products can stay on the shelf for decades.
Also, what do these people (including HNers) expect to happen in a collectors' market of items that aren't produced anymore? Prices to be stable forever or the supply to never shrink?
Of course, the cherry on top (wrt the comments here about the sanctity of Japan or whatever) is that it's an American whining about it in the article. Japan is his playground and those tourists are ruining underpriced games for him.
It's also close to people saying I don't go to that place because everyone goes there now, or any other forms of people lamenting things becoming popular.
It's not finite. You can make more.
> it's not a physical product it's not bound to a particular location like games
The issue isn't physical copies or locale. It's copyright law. We should recognize that when something is abandoned, the copyright is abandoned as well, and users should be free to make full copies of the originals if they like.
This idea of "life plus 70 years" as a copyright term in the digital age is a complete and total disaster.
So maybe some Japanese stores need to raise their prices, and then they’ll be better stocked.
[1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/Currencies/Yen-tumb...
Japan prices were always cheaper (different region code, no english translation in games etc)
Lots of people have a lots of free money so they just bought up everything. Rich get richer. Not billionaire rich but rich enough to casually spend on a Japan trip just to buy up as many games as possible.
Since you couldnt be bothered to do 1 minute of research... these types of games fetch huge prices when imported, mostly from white men with too much money.
I don't think they were suggesting that was how they became "rich", but that those with disposable income are always looking at ways to flip in ways that most couldn't afford. Online resellers do tend to serially follow trends in what sells, so that general category could be where they get their money from.
In the end it is nostalgia in collectibles... With the group having most nostalgia now having plenty of disposable income it will raise the price of things they want to own or experience again... And the market is still cheap enough for lot of people to enter as buyers or for purely arbitrage and scalping. You just can't fix human greed. Which this all is about.
I'm suspicious because often these are publicity stunts (as covered before in Japanese media) using Western audience to test the waters before legitimizing themselves in Japan. The neural-pathways are almost always the same in the japanese psyche: "gaijins stealing our X is bad, if Western media talk about it then it must be true so we must protect our X"
So it’s less about tourists and more specifically about scalpers.
Yeah, I can agree with that sentiment in general.
Most games that quality as 'retro' are easily obtainable and playable via emulation or ports (although not always legally...)
Rental would be rough on increasingly rare/valuable hardware, too