The 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".
I 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.
Tangent 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.
I 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.
Wow, 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.
Yes. 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.
Actually, 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"!
There'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.
It'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.
This 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.
This 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.
> 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.
This 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.
I 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.
Retro 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.
> 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.
I 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.
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 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.
Whenever 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"
> "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.
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.
“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.
> "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".