>>57124146Unironically one of the Paul brothers. He got the open tcg packs on camera/collect overpriced graded cards/treat pokemon tcg as an investment strategy trend rolling during covid, and because pokemon is a massive multimedia franchise with a rabid, autistic western fanbase that's the worst mix of nintendie and actual children who don't know how computers work it spread to the games. Japanese markets aren't so fucked. Too many people want out of print games either to sit on a shelf until they can be resold for an even higher price, sit on a shelf just to say they have them and show off, or play once or twice to collect the pokemon themselves due to idiots considering emulating then transferring via pksm hax despite it generating exactly the same data as it would on hardware with exactly the same effort involved. Which leaves people interested in collecting games to actually play them with a hostile market. Sure, there's always been a collector's market where the older/rarer stuff only gets more expensive, and there's nothing wrong with buying things just because you want them or selling your stuff to make money, hell as a game preservation and design enthusiast I really value the original hardware experience myself! But this is a whole other level and when regular people go to sell their stuff on ebay and see the last 20+ sales were $100+ very few are gonna list theirs for $20 just because "that's what it SHOULD be and I wanna be fair" so unfortunately the market has elected to bare these insane prices. Gens 3-5 are in short supply because pokemania died, a majority of initial and early 2nd hand sales were to fans who didn't care if it was popular they love pokemon so a lot of those copies already have a forever home, or younger kids who grew up in an increasingly digital world where outgrowing your old games meant it got dumped at Good Will or thrown out when your parents decided to clean up because garage sales became less and less common.
