Collectors

I’m sure most people are familiar with the concept where an adult strives to make up for lost experiences from their childhood. You didn’t get to travel as a kid? You hop on a plane and go abroad! You didn’t get to eat snacks? You’re eating a bag of crisps for lunch, while also regretting your decision and wondering why your younger self didn’t crave any actual sustenance. Either way you’re definitely doing some things as a grown up that you never had the chance for as a child.

Of course there’s multiple categories and layers to this, but in general I think it’s safe to say that we’re just trying to live or in some cases relive our past. Which I think is great, you get to enjoy things that you couldn’t, or learn more about yourself in the process of “unexpectedly” not liking said things at all.

I distinctively remember wanting to become a fully independent creature as soon as possible, pretty much because I wanted to live my life as I deemed fit and I promised myself that I too, will get out the backlog and fly through it as much as possible when given the possibility. But here I am in turmoil, getting angrier and growing constantly more disappointed by every passing year, simply because I can’t.

Why? Because of those damn collectors.

Be it scalpers, rich idiots, or simple hoarders, there’s a select group of people who seem to enjoy sitting on items with no real value, increasing demand and hiking prices into ridiculous territory. This in itself is a problem, but the bigger issue at hand is that they do NOT actually use any of these things. There’s thousands of game collectors on Youtube alone, who keep showcasing their insane game rooms, with an endless amount of games, which I can guarantee you won’t ever get used. They flaunt their wealth and obsession, while simultaneously pissing people off, who just want to have a good time, but can’t because of them.

Are you a patient gamer, waiting for a game’s price to drop, so you can finally afford to buy it? Well if you wait too long, the price will start climbing back up, because it’s going to be out of print, and some asshole in California wants to create his retirement fund by sitting on all available copies, with 200 dollars a piece. Amazing.

I do not understand how we got here, aside from a good chunk of people being greedy assholes, loving to pull a power play on a sunny Thursday afternoon. But in away I also blame publishers for being morons and not getting with the times, re-releasing their IPs for a fraction of their original price on modern platforms as a digital download. I do not really like being tied to digital only content, but if something is available at convenience for an adequate pricing, I do not mind opening up my wallet for it. But too many things are not available at all for one reason or another, and the only way you could be experiencing them would be either through sheer luck, perseverance, unbalanced trade of goods or piracy, most of which I do not wish to get myself involved with.

I’m not kidding when I tell you: there’s games I had to wait literally 20+ years to be able to enjoy them, because some moron thought that the limited amount of copies it sold, would mean that it’s instantly a “collectors item”, needing a 3000% price increase, despite said game never selling enough even at a 5 dollar price tag. Absolutely flawless logic.

This alone would be already enough to make me go mad, but the fact that there’s people who do not care about the prices simply buy a 300 dollar game from the 90’s as “they cannot wait for a better deal”. These push the idea of superficial worth even further, by making it seem the average person is willing to pay that much for a piece of plastic containing some data.

And this isn’t even exclusive to games, movies suffer from the exact same thing. For some reason DVDs in general have been skyrocketing in worth, because apparently people are getting fed up with the limitations of streaming services, their prices and catalogs, a notion which is being further promoted by scalpers, as they hope to make quick and easy bucks off of others.

Well to this I say: Go fuck yourself.

I’m not buying any of your overpriced crap, and no one else should. You lot should stick to hoarding all the useless, rotting garbage in your mansions, ultimately having to throw it away and lose money. You’re not any better than all those CEO’s and company management which people constantly bitch about. You’re the same as them. Fuck off.