Why Are Pokemon Games So Expensive?

over the last several years Pokemon games have been getting more and more expensive and I'm sure you've been wondering why well simple idiots like me are buying sealed copies of these games and Grading them thanks for watching I'm kidding of course but Pokemon games have been getting more expensive let's just take a look at some of these games at random the Gen 1 Pokemon games are going for around 50 each hand those are the cheapest uh Pokemon Crystal goes for around a hundred dollars um Pokemon Black 2 goes for 150 and lose copies of Pokemon Emerald are going for as much as 200 and those are just the loose cartridge copies complete and box copies are going for way more than that sometimes hundreds of dollars more than that why is that why are they so expensive I mean these games sold millions of copies each so they're not rare but they are expensive why well there is a very simple if inconvenient explanation supply and demand Pokemon is the single largest franchise in the world in fact it makes more money than Star Wars and Marvel combined it is a ginormous Money Maker people love it all across the world Millions possibly hundreds of millions of Pokemon fans exist and well Pokemon fans always want more Pokemon especially older Pokemon stuff there are a lot of Pokemon fans nowadays I mean they're they're still Pokemon fans that are just entering the franchise with the release of scarlet and violet I mean scarlet and violet have been out for less than a year now the latest Pokemon games and have already sold almost 25 million units I'm willing to bet that quite a few of those went to brand new Pokemon fans who have never played the games before and uh there's gonna be those fans who enter the franchise and realize well the series is actually kind of fun I want to to go back and try some of the older games and then there's people like me who grew up in the 90s and thus grew up with Pokemon who want to gather up some old Nostalgia and have some fun with the old Pokemon games like we used to 20 30 years ago there's always the ability to play these older games with an emulator or with a bootleg cartridge that doesn't cost you an arm and a leg but people want the real deal if I wanted to I could take Pokemon from this copy of emerald and transfer them to this copy of Pokemon Soul Silver and then up to this copy of Pokemon Black 2 and eventually I could transfer this Pokemon all the way up to the present day in Pokemon scarlet and violet and you just aren't able to do that unless you own authentic cartridges for these older games and there's plenty of other reasons why people want the authentic experience and the reasons don't really matter the fact is people want authentic Pokemon cartridges so prices go up let's take a look at Pokemon Emerald as as an example um so Emerald sold about 7 million copies total um which is not a small number in fact Emerald is the third best selling games on the Game Boy Advance um which seems like a lot but there are a lot more than just seven million people who want a copy of emerald nowadays according to Bulbapedia about 2 million copies of emerald are Japanese copies which means that there's only about 5 million left across all the other regions of the world so let's just say for the sake of argument that there's about 4 million that are in English Okay four million copies of emerald and English how many of those over the last 20 years have been lost or damaged or just straight up destroyed thus shrinking the supply even further uh I wouldn't be surprised if there were only about three and a half million copies of emerald right now that are in English in a condition that people are able to play with and uh yeah suddenly it doesn't seem like that much does it especially for a Pokemon game that a lot of people consider one of the most owned versions of the whole series and that's just right now you know over the last 20 years how many have been lost or damaged well how many in the next 20 years are going to be lost and damaged how many more Pokemon fans are going to show up in the next 20 years the franchise shows no signs of slowing down in fact if anything since the pandemic began it has just grown more and more popular because more people are getting into it and again that doesn't even count for things such as complete inbox copies I mean there are always going to be far fewer complete in box copies of these Pokemon games than loose cartridges for obvious reasons you know in in the 90s and 2000s when most kids got a game like this you know what they did with the Box they threw it in the garbage so if you want these Pokemon games complete in box especially for older games with cardboard boxes you need to expect to pay a pretty penny in order to get them especially in good condition there's also just more Pokemon fans who want to own every single Pokemon game such as me you see that wall behind me I own every single Pokemon game complete in box including the spin-offs so yeah there's more and more people who are like me who just want to own every single Pokemon game so it doesn't matter if you already own Pokemon Gold you're going to want to own Pokemon Silver and Pokemon Crystal so that just shrinks the supply even more as more and more people whether you want to call them shelf collectors or speculators or what have you just grab up so many copies of these games for themselves in their own personal Collections and if you're a game collector who is also tired of not being able to find good deals anymore make sure that you're subscribed because I am going to be making a video soon about that very topic for the older Pokemon games basically anything from before for the 3DS era people are willing to pay a little more money in order to ensure that it's an authentic copy of those games the Gen 3 Pokemon games on Game Boy Advance are the most faked video games ever I mean there are easily many many times more fake copies of Pokemon Ruby and fire red and emerald than there are authentic copies and for people who are wanting to make sure they own the real deal they're willing to pay the price to make sure theirs is real instead of pay 20 bucks and it turns out to not be the real deal that that it's a fake as a rule of thumb on eBay if it is cheap then it's probably too good to be true let's take a look at Soul Silver here oftentimes on eBay a loose cartridge of this goes for over a hundred bucks but there's also plenty of listings right now for 10 15 20 and that might seem appealing because why would I spend 100 bucks when there's a listing right there for 20. well it's because those are fake those are not real copies of the game will they work probably but they're not the real deal and to collectors and to anyone who cares about Pokemon it needs to be real and if you want the real deal you gotta pay up it's worth mentioning that most of the expensive games are actually third versions or remakes um basically the versions that fans consider the best of the games so if you want to play the Gen 2 games for cheap just get yourself a loose copy of Pokemon Silver you you can get this for only 30 or 40 bucks which I think is very reasonable you don't need to spend a hundred dollars for Pokemon Crystal you don't need to spend a hundred dollars for Pokemon Soul Silver you can just get a good old copy of silver for you know a lot cheaper than that that's for sure but people want Soul Silver they want Crystal Version because those are the definitive versions of gen 2. they feel like if you're just settling for gold or silver you're missing out on some of the experience even though I disagree silver is my favorite Pokemon game of all time that's why I got it slabbed it's also worth mentioning that pretty much this whole video is just talking about the English versions of these games you can still get foreign language games especially Japanese copies for really cheap I got this complete inbox copy of Pokemon Leaf Green for only 20 bucks and you can regularly find Loose cartridges of every single game for cheaper than that um but people want English for obvious reasons it is worth mentioning that the jack Japanese games for everything prior to the 3DS will work just fine in North American game boys and DS's there's nothing wrong with playing a different language copy it's fully compatible it'll do trades all that stuff just saying it's also worth mentioning that there's quite a few of these games that are just more expensive from the get-go I mean taking this as an example this is a copy of Pokemon Shield that has the expansion pass right there on the cartridge you don't need to pay for the digital DLC uh this retailed for 90 dollars when it came out basically the price of the game plus the DLC you don't get a discount so people didn't really buy it because a lot of people already owned the game and owned the DLC and didn't see a point in getting it complete on the cartridge they didn't even make many of these as far as my research shows they made somewhere around maybe half a million of them somewhere around those lines um and it doesn't really matter how many they made because this didn't sell all that well because people didn't really want it so when it finally did sell out all of a sudden the demand went up now this regularly goes for around 150 dollars and it's just going to continue going up especially years from now when the Nintendo eShop closes down and the only way to play the Isle of armor and Crown Hunter DLCs is by owning this very cartridge let's take a look at heartgolden Soul Silver which were pretty notorious back when they first released for being expensive um if you were lucky to buy one at retail great no trouble whatsoever but the problem is a lot of retailers just didn't order enough of them and the one retailer that did was GameStop and I will never forgive Reddit for saving them what GameStop almost always did with these games is they got their shipment and they opened up the games and then they sold the cartridges as used for 60 bucks and uh people bought it because that was the only way to get these games unless you pre-ordered it or were able to get it really close to release even just a year after heart gold and soul silver released they were already going for an inflated amount and they've just been going up ever since so basically there's a lot more reasons that Pokemon games have gone up in price than just uh you know greedy sealed collectors or the pandemic jacking up prices or people spending their stimulus checks on needless things there's a lot more reasons than that this whole video has been me going over just the reasons I can think of and there's probably more that I just can't which I guess leads to the question of can you still get old Pokemon games for cheap can you still find a copy of emerald or a copy of Pokemon Black 2 that doesn't cost you a hundred bucks that you could just get for 10 or 20. and the answer is yes but you have to put in a lot of work and you have to get really lucky game stores know what they're selling you're never going to go into a game store that has a Pokemon game on sale and they don't know what it's worth they're going to do their research they're going to price it competitively and they're probably going to sell it before you leave the store whether it's you buying it or not and if you go to a yard sale or a flea market or something like that if you do find an authentic copy of the game the owners aren't stupid they know what they have they're probably going to sell it for around what it goes for on eBay every once in a while you might get lucky and find someone who is just willing to let their game go for a few bucks but that's about your best bet you're just you're just not going to find Pokemon games on the cheap anymore it's just not possible so if you are a Pokemon fan who wants to play Pokemon games you're just gonna have to accept that sacrifices will have to be made either you're going to have to just play the games on an emulator or you're going to have to Fork over a lot of money in order to play the real deal there is not much of a middle ground between those two so picker poison in the meantime if you want to Future proof yourself if you're thinking I don't need a copy of brilliant Diamond I already have a copy of shining Pearl you might consider going and getting the one that you're missing you know 25 years from now these prices are probably going to be pretty close to what the older games are right now and uh just between you and me these games are out of print so once they're sold out of stores that's it so uh get them all you can so that'll bring this video to an end thanks everyone for watching um I am very happy that the price that I paid for these older Pokemon games is a lot less than what they're going for these days I pity anyone who's trying to get into collecting all these games now it cannot be easy I I wish you all the best of luck let me know what Pokemon games you have in the comments and if you're hoping to pick up more in the future thanks everyone for watching and stay tuned for more ha [Music]

Channel: Skul

Views: 66,521

Keywords: pokemon, pokemon games, pokemon game collection, pokemon collection, pokemon collecting, game collectiong, game collection, video game collecting, video game collection, pokemon video games, pokemon video game collecting, retro pokemon games, pokemon game prices, pokemon game costs, pokemon game cost

Id: P-mSe4Lr2PE

Length: 14min 4sec (844 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 15 2023