I can usually finagle 20% or so off the buy it now price, but sometimes I'll find a seller who won't accept offers that are even slightly lower. What's the point of making your item OBO if you do that?

I'm younger (22) and got into the hobby more recently (2015, if that can be considered recent now).

For me, certain things in the hobby have always been too expensive in my eyes. For example, most 486 and earlier stuff, Voodoo cards and desirable Socket7 and SS7 have always been ludicrously priced in my opinion. And stuff that was fairly affordable e.g. Socket 478 & 462 mobos and early 2000s AGP cards, have gone up significantly since then to the point where I hesitate to buy anymore. I think eBay is really responsible for a lot of it. eBay items naturally have to be priced higher to offset eBay's quite large fee and if you don't want a crazy high shipping cost, you have to factor that into the price as well. You also gotta factor in the "nostalgia wave." Pretty much once stuff hits between 18-20 years old, the people who grew up with that stuff are going to want to require it, thus creating high demand and eBay happens to be an easily accessible way to do that.

Whenever I find stuff locally, most of the time it's significantly cheaper than the going rate on eBay. Granted, I tend to be buying from people with little computer knowledge, but the times I have the price is almost always more reasonable. I don't get many opportunities to buy locally unfortunately. I live pretty much in the middle of nowhere, I think the last time I came across anything worth caring about was maybe 2021...? You really just got to scrounge around and put yourself out there as "that guy who likes computers, especially old ones" and eventually people will offload their 25 year old garage junk on you. Although more recently the quality of what people have offered to give me has dropped significantly. I was promised a Tandy, and I got an Acer...

Will the prices ever drop? I don't think so. I think they will stabilize however. In the next 20 to 30 something years I could see a lot of the older collectors eventually selling off their collections to either help with retirement, family finances or because they just can't keep up with it anymore before they die, or their kids inherit it and sell it all off which could help replenish the market. But with how inflation is going, the actual price will probably never fall. Will the value decrease? Maybe, but it's hard to say yet.

keenmaster486 wrote on 2024-05-08, 02:21:

I can usually finagle 20% or so off the buy it now price, but sometimes I'll find a seller who won't accept offers that are even slightly lower. What's the point of making your item OBO if you do that?

Hah, I've challenged ppl before on the use of words like "OBO" "Mint" etc, and got back snotty replies like "It's just what you say on a for sale listing, it doesn't really mean much, don't you know anything?" like I'm the dumbass.

edit: You even catch some crazy shit like "Light wear and minor stains but mint, price firm OBO."

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-05-08, 14:18:

Hah, I've challenged ppl before on the use of words like "OBO" "Mint" etc, and got back snotty replies like "It's just what you say on a for sale listing, it doesn't really mean much, don't you know anything?" like I'm the dumbass.

edit: You even catch some crazy shit like "Light wear and minor stains but mint, price firm OBO."

"not tested, sold as seen, fully functioning, mint condition, no offers OBO, sold as seen, NOS, opened never used, fully refurbished"

ebayers are just poor llm generators sometimes 😀

I was lucky enough to get into this 'hobby' (I like to call it my 'interest' rather than hobby but regardless..) pre-pandemic, around 2015 or thereabouts. It was not cheap at the time, but it was much cheaper than today. To make things easy for me, it was much cheaper where I live; people tended to view 80s and 90s hardware as still mostly junk so I've ad time to accumulate a considerable bunch of 'junk' by the time my local market caught up to the growing interest and increasing prices internationally. At this point, pretty much everything is out of my price range, and I am happy to sit on what I already own. I occasionally buy things I really want at the current prices, but it is rare.. I recently bought an Atari 800XL and some peripherals for it, at prices I never thought I would pay 5 years ago, for example, but I really wanted one and if I didn't get one today I'd probably not find one in a few years I'd guess.

I think the prices of games in particular have absolutely gone crazy.. I own a rather humble collection, and I don't think I'll get to grow it anymore going forward. The dreams of having a room filled with rows of big box games will go unfulfilled and I made my piece with that. Sad, but it is what it is. I won't pay 50-60 USD+ for a 40 year old game, but I know others will and they are free to do so.