Game and Market Watch – By Dan Loosen

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.