> But they've always been lower since mame than they otherwise would be. The price > would have gone up either way because they are dying and becoming more rare. The > games people remember playing that sell for $150 could sell for 10X that without > mame.
They'd probably just not sell at all in that case.
There's a cap to what people can afford, that dictates the market more than anything else. people don't have 10x the current PCB prices for the hobby.
Honestly, I think with or without MAME prices would be the same, if anything MAME has raised the profile of certain market segments significantly causing an increase in the prices.
Back in the 90s for example, everybody seemed to think Shmups were garbage (and given the quality of most of the console ports / games they were used to, I'm not surprised) yet now most people have been exposed to them, primarily through emulation, the prices have sky-rocketed.
When I was given the ROMs to some shooters to emulate back in the late 90s / early 2000s, primarily when I was looking at Raine, not MAME (and when I didn't have the ability / experience to actually emulate them) I was told that they were 'junk' games that nobody cared much about. That was Batrider and Guwange (which was barely a year old at the time) I remember the years following that people started turning their heads towards them more and more (even after rejecting them as unfair at first) and now you see the market conditions that have developed surrounding those games.
I think without emulation they'd still be trading for practically nothing, as far less people would care about them and demand would be significantly lower.
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