No its actually been found that in various professional cases of it, it is a artificial thing for pricing when talking legit businesses that exist for retro game selling ,grading and making the prices. reports on this has been a thing for atleast 6 years easy to find . In fact I just typed in ''retro game pricing artificial'' and find actual studys and reports about it on the first page confirming it is or is highly likely in some cases

This actually started looked into do to some years ago a common game and not a special edition or odd error just a common Super Mario Bros game albeit factory sealed for $2 million USD

Which to me and lots of people collectors are not actually people who actually want or enjoy gaming but just collecting and/or to get more money later, in fact most collectors are viewed that way as they usually make a hobby or interest quickly too expensive for others and they regularly are against official affordable in comparison reproductions of the items and games for it ''devalues'' the as most put it '''investment '' of the original item and purchase.

Collectors = investors? Okay... but investors are everywhere. It is part of the economy and in many cases a big part of what is pushing the prices. Ask Nvidia and their shareholders if you do not know what i mean. Is a GPU really that expensive to be build? Well, not really... the last thing i heard is that Nvidia is having a margin of 70% on most of their GPUs and this is just one of many examples i could hand out.

Yes, Microsoft is another big investor with "pushed prices", so the investors can be happy.

However, i can not set a certain fixed "affordability" because this value just is extremely volatile, dependable on the personal situation. So it could range between 1 and 100 dependable on personal circumstances. Just not realistic making it fair for everyone. It only works if it comes to taxes and fines, so far. Most people still would not be able to afford a attorney, so the rights system usually is not in their favor.

In fact, the regional pricing was never intended to be a tool in order to execute fairness. Not at all... it was done in order to "hit" the pain threshold for a certain location, which is fluctuating dependable on their local economy and general income.

Most people would say, by common sense... a certain resource is simply worth so and so much and it would count for everyone, but thats not how it works; this is just a idealistic view.

Yes, it is capitalism and the majority of people are believing in it, else it would not exist anymore. So they are trying to gather as much as possible, because it is giving them power.

Without capitalism, many of these games would likely never exist.

Someone may be testing how much the market will bear. But the law of supply and demand means that eventually prices will come back down when there is less demand.

THESE ARE DIGITAL GAMES! [CLAPS] THERE IS NO SUPPLY TO DEMAND!

The biggest problem I have with these price hikes is that for most of these old games, it’s the fans who’ve kept them alive, not the publishers. The only reason they still work today is because of community patches, mods, and privately run servers. People have poured their own time (and money) into keeping their favorite childhood games playable.

Without that community effort, a lot of these titles wouldn’t even run properly on modern systems. They’d crash, fail to start, break halfway trough a mission and just get refunded right away.

For example, my group and I have spent years keeping Giants: Citizen Kabuto alive. We built a patch, run a private global server, host dedicated servers, make support guides, and keep a Discord community going with weekly multiplayer events. Without our patch and servers, the game doesn’t even work correctly. They definitely couldn’t claim it still has multiplayer. It’d just be basic peer-to-peer LAN at best.

Doubling the price of 25-year-old games that barely function without fan fixes is just going to drive people away and eventually kill these games for good. It’s honestly a pretty nasty move from Interplay, especially since they’ve never once reached out or acknowledged any of the communities keeping their stuff alive. A little appreciation or even a simple “thanks” would go a long way. Instead we get silence and higher prices.

Exactly. A lot of DOS games here have had discounts slashed to just 20-30% or are simply "erased" out of existence on the back of a price-inflated low-effort remaster. Take away DOSBox & ScummVM (100% community projects) and the whole lot would have a saleable value of 0 due to being completely unplayable on modern computers. If all community modders had said "We give you permission to download and use our mod freely, but we don't give permission for publishers or stores to pre-package it", a lot of people would have their eyes opened wide as to who actually does most of the work 'getting old games to run on new systems'.

If you're one of the people who helped make the fixes in Giants unofficial patch 1.5, etc, then you have my thanks. It's one of my favourites and your work has not gone unappreciated by many of us. :-)

Honestly, I think places like Steam and GoG should have to put disclaimers on these old games. People should know when a game only works because fans kept it alive with patches and fixes. If it won’t run properly, or at all, without community effort, that’s something buyers deserve to know. Same goes for multiplayer: if it only works through private servers and needs a fan patch because the original master server’s been dead for years, that should be made clear right on the store page.

Thank you for the kind words! Glad we're not going unnoticed outside of the community. I wasn’t one of the people who worked directly on versions V1.497.0 (beta) up to V1.510.138.0 (current), but I’ve basically been the community lead for Giants for about ten years now. Me and a bunch of regulars just refused to let it die. We got multiplayer running again, host events, and keep things alive however we can. It’s been a labor of love more than anything. But it’s also the only reason the game still works the way it does today.

ah yes my favor topic the EVIL and grimy Investor.
that's why i am a investor i wanna see the world burn and decay. that's why we invest.

just tell your self that when you go to sleep makes you feel much better then grasp the reality.

Just let Gabe Newell, i mean Steam... pay and maintain the servers. Are there no Steam servers everyone can use for multiplayer?

I mean, almost every Classic is on Steam now... gamers can not live without Steam for a long time already and PC gamers usually do not need to pay for servers (this is different on consoles).

It’s a nice idea to “just let Steam (or Gabe himself) host the servers,” but that’s unfortunately not how it magically works.

The game was made long before Steam’s multiplayer system even existed. Back then, it used services like GameSpy and MPlayer to find and host online matches. Those services were shut down many years ago, which means the original “official” servers simply don’t exist anymore.

When a classic game is released on Steam or GoG, that only means you can buy and launch it there. It doesn’t automatically get new online servers. For a game to use Steam’s servers or matchmaking, the developers would need to update the game’s code to work with Steamworks, Valve’s modern online system. That requires source code access and active development, which Giants hasn’t had in decades. The developers are not involved, and Interplay holds all the property rights. The game still falls under copyright protection.

That’s why the community runs private servers instead. Players have patched the game so it connects to a community-run master server. These fan servers are stable, easy to join, and basically the reason multiplayer still works at all.

So in short:

Steam (or GoG) doesn’t automatically provide servers for old games.
Giants would need a full modern update to use Steam’s online system. Which is unlikely to happen unless Interplay decides to do a remaster.
The community has kept multiplayer alive through patching and private servers instead.

And in this case. I e-mailed Gabe himself. We've been at it for quite some years now trying to get the patch & our work legitimised somewhere. Interplay and Steam don't answer, GoG is walled off. Even the Developers can't do anything for us either, we asked them ourselves.

Hehehe! Thats funny.. now thats a "gamer-joke", for those enjoying jokes.

Probably already said (didn't read all 70 responses) but:

Remember "By gamers, for gamers"???

Yeah, me neither.

1000%

There may be an economics lesson in your future...