Why is the retro game market in japan so different to the west? and cheaper too

Americans have no sense of community so we actively try to fuck each other over at any opportunity, this is especially relevant with selling nostalgia collectibles. We also don't take care of our things so you get a lot of badly worn or destroyed cartridges and systems. We're just two fundamentally different societies

I noticed this too. I buy a lot of Jap art books and "How to" books. If I wanted them in the west I'm looking at £50 a book. Japs will sell them them directly for £5-8 a book and they're always MINT condition, even when "used". 3/5 times they'll also send little cards thanking me for buying said item, and candies/Shiba Inu theamed stuff.
I buy anything western and at most I'll recieve a card demanding I give a 5 star review. lmao

Because they take care of their things and also typically sell shit off pretty often because their homes are tiny. Also katakana is unintelligible to the majority of foreigners.

I don't know about old video games but plenty of western collectables have a whole lexicon of abbreviations to describe the condition.
I collected comics and action figures when I was a kid and that was the norm.

they got a culture obsessing over old good.
burgers got consumerism buy new throw away.
Nobrainer they would get more old stuff at higher quality preserved.

If we want to go deeper murrica is young,they dont have anything old to obsess over so its alos natural they would try to promote new good.

Higher in number and more pristine supply due to less ghetto culture. While they do scalp and flip certain things (rare doujins, comiket exclusive kind of shit) there's an overall less scalper chase after profit culture when it comes to "used" items compared to American's convert everything into a stock asset investment max profit mentality. Stronger perception of their actual market, so most games have very little value as they know they're not rare while actual rare JP games only go up for sale a few times a year justifying their more than few thousand dollarydoo value. Compared against western Mario and Mega man games sold a bajillion copies but they're now 1000 dollars for some reason.

The difference here is that "used" is effectively "new" in Japan, and any deviation from that has a dozen pictures and them apologizing in the description and you're told it's scratched and stuff. Yeah, we in the west have "Mint", "Opened", "Opened, used", "Used", "Very Good", etc but from my years of buying stuff from Japan the worst I've seen is stuff like "Opened, missing item" or "Opened, scratch on object". They don't even seem to consider anything "used" could be worse than directly describing the issue and almost always it's something banal. Meanwhile you go to eBay and you have a whole writeup with a dozen pictures showing the object scratched to hell and it's "Very good".

Most famous retro games sold far more in Japan than they did in the global market. That's part of the reason they're so cheap now, because there's several million copies of everything.

Nintendo succeeded because they marketed their video game console as an "entertainment system" that looks like a VHS player that came bundled with a bunch of plastic crap. Should you be surprised that things sold as disposable toys only for little baby children are treated like disposable baby toys?

I honestly wanna just buy out an entire one of these stores and see if Americans would pay double the price if I opened up my own place.

You sound like the typical im so mature playing cowardduty consolefag.

They wouldn't. eBay is filled with Japanese copies of games from these very stores and they take months to sell a single copy. There's one eBay account I've been checking out every once in a while since they do bundle deals of games their shop has and they've had a listing for Jump Super Stars/Jump Ultimate Stars that hasn't sold a single copy for about half a year now and I think they had like 26 of these things?

westoids are FOTM faggots, japan tends to appreciate the past and history of games way more

>I buy anything western and at most I'll recieve a card demanding I give a 5 star review.
hearty kek

i wish i was in japan so much

Renting video games is illegal in Japan so back in the 80s a culture of buying used games and selling them back to then try other games popped up instead. In the west retro/used games became about collecting and hoarding, although in the early 2000s you could buy NES stuff dirt cheap from GameStop or garage sales or whatever so we had a chance to have the same used game prices as Japan but collecting took over. It’s actually a big problem that westerners go to Japan and buy up the games and take them away, prices have gone up in the last decade or so because of tourists collecting rather than being part of the buy used and sell it back culture.

You underestimate the cluelessness of normalfags, most people walking into a store are none the wiser. Most people on Any Forums dont even know the prices of video games because they keep going "wow this game is worth that much now?"
Maybe not "double the price" like I was exaggerating but marked up so it makes a decent profit

>Then the soi came.
I hate Australians so much

Different culture with an emphasis on maintaining old things. Look at their population.

It wouldn't work as your primary source. Again, even eBay can't get this stuff sold and that's where you go for niche stuff like Japanese games. At best you might be able to sell stuff people speedrun like OoT or SM64 that have demand for the JP copies. Keep in mind normalfags aren't looking for games in a language they can't understand to begin with so you are already having a hard sell trying to do that even on the Famicom side.