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"The Tourists Have Taken Everything" Laments Japanese Resident as Retro Runs Dry
- codetrotter 3y ago> "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." So it’s less about tourists and more specifically about scalpers. Yeah, I can agree with that sentiment in general.
- zymhan 3y agoTalk about a misleading headline
- haunter 3y agoRetro console and game prices always have been expensive in the US but steadily getting more and more expensive (less and less availabe stuff outside of collectors). And you don't even have to think about very old stuff (NES/SNES), the 3DS and its games are now above MSRP in most markets. 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.
- rib3ye 3y agoHow did buying a bunch of used games make them richer?
- bdcravens 3y ago> Lots of people have a lots of free money so they just bought up everything. Rich get richer. 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.
- stefanfisk 3y agothat's not what he said.
- lsaferite 3y agoI presume the line of thought continued that the well-off used their liquidity to fly to Japan, buy retro games, and then sell them at a markup in the US.
- spacecadet 3y agoPlease. "richer" could mean +$1 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.
- spacecadet 3y agoSmooth skins? Is that less offensive to the majority? LOLOL
- fennecbutt 3y agoApparently I'm a white man with too much money cause I like buying and playing pogeymanz.
- haunter 3y agoYou can buy something for X and sell it for 3*X (and 3 is a very conservative example)
- hombre_fatal 3y agoThere's a different entitlement here that nobody is talking about: shopkeepers aren't museums. They want to sell product and they should be able to, even to the foreign collector / scalper, if that's what they want to do. 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.
- dylan604 3y agoYes, I'm getting the sense that the wambulance needs to visit several people here.
- kardos 3y agoWould retro rental solve the scalper problem?
- bluescrn 3y agoNo. It's about collecting/ownership. 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
- jsemrau 3y agoI still fondly remember 15 years ago buying Gamecube games for about 100 JPY.
- lisper 3y agoThis should not come as a surprise to anyone. Finite non-renewable supply plus increasing demand inevitably leads to speculation and price increases. Bitcoin has the exact same dynamic, except that because it's not a physical product it's not bound to a particular location like games can be so people don't get as emotionally attached to it.
- akira2501 3y ago> Finite non-renewable supply plus increasing demand inevitably leads to speculation and price increases. 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.
- david-gpu 3y agoThe current title doesn't reflect the opinion of the person being interviewed, which is more nuanced and less controversial: > "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".
- hinkley 3y agoI knew someone who got a retail job in Seattle. They were coaching employees to refuse to sell large quantities of things to scalpers. Like someone buying ten pairs of jeans at a go, to fly out of SEATAC to someplace Levi’s are expensive.
- vidanay 3y agoTangent of the day: A buddy of mine in high school visited the Soviet Union ca. 1987. 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.
- jareklupinski 3y agoplot twist: he was smuggling luggage bags :)
- vidanay 3y agoKnowing that guy like I do, he was likely smuggling Dokken t-shirts and cassettes.
- spacecadet 3y ago[flagged]
- oldpersonintx 3y ago[dead]
- spacecadet 3y ago[flagged]
- codetrotter 3y ago“Cultural appropriation” is a very United States specific idea first of all. Secondly, as much as I hate scalpers too I think framing this as any kind of cultural appropriation is beyond silly anyway. These are video games that we all grew up playing. No matter what country or continent we are from, many of these retro games are part of all of our culture. I do think however that you raise an excellent couple of ideas that sadly will not be read because of the downvotes attracted by the other parts of your comment: - Have more places where people can come to play games instead of bringing them home. Yes! There exists some arcade pubs for adults in my country and in other places too. But I would love if more kinds of arcades existed. - Make new games inspired by the games that we grew up with. Absolutely! And I am sure a lot of them are made already and we just don’t get to hear about it. But I would still also love to see more games made by people who are in it for the purpose of making more great games.
- spacecadet 3y agoSo whats your beef? you agree with my points.
- lotsoweiners 3y agoOr no one wants to hear his holier than thou attitude.
- deleted 3y ago
- aidenn0 3y agoIt's no different in the US. You used to be able to walk into a thrift shop with $10 and come out with several NES games. The popularity of retro gaming has made that a thing of the past.
- dylan604 3y agoThis sounds like the olds talking about has gas used to be nickel, or a cup of coffee being a nickel. 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.
- wk_end 3y agoI love old video games. When I was still living in Seattle, I thought it'd be fun to join a local retro game group on Facebook, hoping to maybe connect with people who share my hobby. 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.
- slumberdisrupt 3y agoWow, gross people?! Is collecting that perverse of an activity? OK, yes it is, but so is playing video games in general and enjoying retro games "correctly" in particular. Emulation is a "blessing"! Weird and vaguely competitive.
- chucky_z 3y agoYes. This scalping community is gross. It's not about collecting it's about scalping, let's all be blunt and clear here. 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.
- slumberdisrupt 3y agoActually, right, but it's not about the hobby of gaming in its ideal form (playing the game software). It really is about "scalping" (oof! so much for the entrepreneurial spirit and the sanctity of buying cheap and selling dear) and collecting or some other passionate hobby. What is this other passionate hobby? Emulation actually makes playing games so easy and accessible that the perverse nature of playing them "correctly" (with original hardware) is completely exposed. These perverted game hobbyists insist on the "correct" experience: I want to hold that dusty, magnificent copy of Pokemon Stadium 2 in mine own hands, to smell the corroding copper contacts on its PCB edge, to snap the power switch upwards, to see the dull red oval light up... but alas, I must emulate. 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"!
- skybrian 3y agoThis is markets in action. When one market offers a lower price than another, there’s an opportunity for arbitrage. Unless something stops it, prices should equalize. So maybe some Japanese stores need to raise their prices, and then they’ll be better stocked.
- jovial_cavalier 3y agoI suspect the real problem is the purchasing power parity vs. the foreign exchange rate. The two can be quite different for a lot of reasons that I don't want to get into. But the upshot is that to raise the prices denominated in yen such that foreign scalpers won't bother may also muscle out the domestic hobbyists.
- skybrian 3y agoAnd indeed, it looks like the yen has gone down significantly [1]. So that's more tourism and more exports. [1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/Currencies/Yen-tumbles-to-153-against-dollar-on-U.S.-inflation-raising-intervention-risk https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/Currencies/Yen-tumb...
- spacecadet 3y ago[flagged]
- david-gpu 3y ago> Japan LITERALLY said to please stop The article quotes one American expat living in Japan complaining about scalpers. Not a single Japanese person is quoted in the article, and even if there were, one person doesn't represent a country. It may be a good moment to disconnect from the Internet for today.
- spacecadet 3y ago[flagged]
- m3kw9 3y agoMaybe they have not discovered mame
- Ekaros 3y agoI can already tell that there will be crash in future, though at the demographics that cause these issues it will be far far away... 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.
- m3kw9 3y agoWhat if Sony /nintendo wants some extra revenue…
- RetroTechie 3y agoThen they make a mini console with some "greatest hits" included. Or (in exchange for $$) license some 3rd party to do so.
- spxneo 3y agoWhenever I read either an English article about a Japanese business doing well or highly paid Japanese gig worker saying how much he earns (always from Tokyo and not the conservative parts of Japan) I always get suspicious. 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"