[bogantech]

> They're old and obsolete. While they may have value to a niche group, they are overall viewed as mostly worthless.

Old and obsolete doesn't mean worthless, if people are collecting them and spending a lot of money on them then they're not worthless.

[derefr]

Most of the reason that collectors have to spend a lot of money on arcade cabinets, though, is not that they have high market resale value; but rather that the machines they can manage to acquire are usually in terrible condition, requiring large amounts of conservation work to get working and presentable again. And they’re so broken down, because everyone but these few collectors have valued — and continue to value — these machines so little that they’ve allowed them to rot in warehouses for decades. Many arcade cabinets are recovered from e-waste recycling centers, or even landfill.

If they truly had market value, then people other than the collectors themselves would be making a business out of finding and restoring these cabinets, in order to sell them to the collectors. But no such business exists — because there just isn’t the demand to sustain it.

I’m reminded of a recent YouTube video about MadCatz gaming peripherals. The video’s author had to spend thousands of dollars buying the few remaining controllers on the used market to use as examples. Why so much? Not because of high demand. Because of limited supply — they were so valueless (mainly due to just being awful products even when new) that every owner of one had long thrown in away; no gaming store wanted to buy any used (being seen selling such brands was a mark against the quality of a store!); and even thrift stores had long dumped them for lack of interest. These gamepads and flight-sticks had value to this one guy making this one video — but literally nobody else.

A one-time purchase, does not a market-clearing price make. The market is still just as illiquid after such a purchase as before it.

[magicalist]

> Why so much? Not because of high demand. Because of limited supply

Eh, "high demand" is meaningless on its own in this case. There's high demand relative to the supply.

And not everyone recognizes value in an old cabinet and throw theirs out (further reducing supply), but that just means the market isn't efficient, but that's true of the market for most things.