MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Metal Freezer by Seibu?

> So the board is rare game was a proto or maybe very limitied release in Japan not
> many copies floating
> around so what's a fair price for this then..??? 3 grand doesn't seem totally
> excessive if you consider
> what Shoutime recently paid for two rare PCB's

Here's the thing: there isn't really anything else to compare this one to in terms of a sale price, so it's basically worth what someone is willing to pay for it.

Does that mean it's worth $3K? Maybe, maybe not. But without an established market value for it pretty much any value can be slapped on it knowing that a) rarity may drive pricing and b) once someone buys it there's a precedent established for price.

Additionally, what other titles may have sold for can't really be used to establish price for a different game; perceived desirability and rarity comes into play here. As an example, I recently found out that an undumped Epos PCB sold for a very low price (as in, barely in the three-digit range), and had I noticed the auction would have snapped it up myself. However, something like Beavis & Butthead will never go for that sort of money.

One last thing to consider: the arcade collecting community has something of a split opinion regarding MAME. Some people see it as being anywhere from harmless to useful for troubleshooting dedicated games; others see it as devaluing their games by allowing anyone to play them on their computer or destroying original cabinets when people convert them to run MAME. Depending on where a given seller falls on the issue (assuming that there's a suspicion that a game may end up in MAME), pricing may be adjusted accordingly or sale may be refused.

And yes, flat-out greed can also be a part of it. I once had someone try to sell me a Cube Quest with a broken LD player and missing the disc for $10K because it was, in his exact words, "so rare you'll never see another one". When I asked him what had happened to both of those items - which had been in the exact same game when I originally sold it in fully-working condition to another collector roughly four years prior - he got really quiet. My suspicion is that he parted out the working player and disc to make a quick buck, put a broken player in the game so that he could claim it 'just needed a disc', then sought to flip the resultant semi-working game for way more than it was worth.

So, yeah, in this case, there is no "fair price" - it's more or less worth what someone is willing to pay for it until a bunch more crop up and flood eBay.