The £1.99 Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About
Picture the scene. It’s a Saturday morning in 2019. You’re at a car boot sale somewhere in the Midlands, and you find a copy of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 for the Mega Drive in reasonable condition, label intact, cartridge clean. The seller wants £8. You pay it without blinking because you know — everybody in the retro scene knows — that Sonic 3 is a sought-after cart. It’s got a complicated licensing history, a legendary soundtrack, a genuine place in the canon of gaming history. Eight pounds feels like a steal. You go home happy.
Fast forward to 2024. That same copy of Sonic 3 is sitting on a market stall and the seller is asking £4. He’s already dropped it twice this morning. Nobody’s biting. Meanwhile, on Steam, Sonic Origins Plus — which includes Sonic 3 & Knuckles, all the other classic Sonic games, and a stack of additional content — retails for £24.99, and goes on sale for under £8 with almost metronomic regularity. The individual Mega Drive classics on Steam? You can grab Sonic 3 for £1.69 in a sale. Sonic 1? 89p. The entire Sega Mega Drive Classics collection — 53 games, including iconic titles that would have cost you tens of pounds each in cartridge form a decade ago — has been spotted on sale for under £4.
This isn’t just a story about digital convenience versus physical nostalgia. This is a story about market forces, perceived value, and the quiet but accelerating transformation of what it means to “own” a piece of gaming history. The retro cartridge market — which experienced a decade of almost uninterrupted growth through the 2010s, driven by YouTube nostalgia culture, pandemic-era hobby adoption, and a genuine collector community — is now facing a structural challenge it didn’t fully anticipate. Steam, and the broader digital classics ecosystem that surrounds it, has reached a critical mass. And the original hardware market is starting to feel the tremors.
Understanding the Boom: How Cartridge Prices Got So High
To understand why what’s happening now matters, you first need to understand what happened before. The retro gaming collecting hobby didn’t emerge fully formed. It grew slowly, fed by specific cultural currents, and it peaked — at least in terms of casual collector activity — at a moment that now looks, in retrospect, like a high watermark that was always going to be temporary.
The YouTube Pipeline and the Normalisation of Retro Collecting
The mid-2000s to mid-2010s were the crucible years for retro game collecting as a mainstream hobby. YouTube channels like AVGN (Angry Video Game Nerd), which launched in 2006, and later channels like Metal Jesus Rocks, Game Chasers, and Pat the NES Punk created an entire cultural framework around hunting for and playing old games on original hardware. These weren’t niche channels for the already-converted. At their peaks, they were pulling millions of views per video from audiences who had grown up with these games but hadn’t thought about them in years.
The effect on prices was gradual at first, then sudden. Between roughly 2010 and 2016, you could still walk into a CEX, a charity shop, or a car boot sale and find NES, SNES, and Mega Drive games for prices that felt reasonable — often £2 to £10 for common titles, with rarities commanding more but not the eye-watering amounts they’d later reach. The market was growing, but it was still fundamentally a buyer’s market in aggregate. Supply, from the enormous volume of games produced during the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, was plentiful.
Then something changed. The channels got bigger. The hobby got press coverage. Mainstream articles began appearing about “retro gaming as investment.” Reddit communities like r/gamecollecting swelled. And critically, grading services — particularly WATA Games, founded in 2018, and the existing VGA (Video Game Authority) service — began applying the same sealed-condition premium grading logic to video games that CGC had long applied to comic books. Suddenly, sealed games weren’t just curiosities. They were investment vehicles, with some titles selling at auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The WATA Effect and Market Manipulation Concerns
The WATA grading bubble deserves its own detailed treatment because it sits at the heart of understanding the subsequent correction. In August 2021, a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. for the NES sold at Heritage Auctions for $2 million (approximately £1.6 million at the time). This followed a sealed copy of The Legend of Zelda selling for $870,000 in July of the same year. These numbers were staggering — and they were, it later emerged, potentially compromised by conflicts of interest between WATA Games, Heritage Auctions, and prominent buyers in the market.
A 2021 investigation by journalist Karl Jobst detailed allegations that key figures in the graded game market were effectively operating a pump scheme — artificially inflating prices through coordinated purchasing, then leveraging the resulting media attention to drive broader market enthusiasm. WATA and Heritage Auctions denied the allegations, but the damage to confidence in the extreme high end of the market was real. By 2022, the sealed grade market had cooled significantly. But crucially, the damage from the inflation had already filtered down to the loose cartridge market, where prices for common games had risen substantially on the back of the general enthusiasm generated by the bubble years.
By 2021, a loose cartridge of Earthbound (known as Mother 2 in Japan) for the SNES was consistently selling for £150 to £200 on UK eBay listings. Chrono Trigger for the SNES — a game that was already expensive but had been finding buyers in the £80-£100 range in the mid-2010s — was regularly clearing £200 to £250. Even relatively common titles had seen inflation. A complete-in-box copy of Super Mario World for the SNES, which you’d have picked up for £20-£30 in 2015, was now fetching £60-£80. The market had convinced itself — as markets do during bubbles — that prices only went up.
The Pandemic Surge and Its Complicated Legacy
COVID-19 and the lockdowns of 2020-2021 added an additional layer to an already complex picture. Stuck at home, with disposable income temporarily increased for many middle-class workers who suddenly had no commuting costs, no holidays, and no restaurant bills, a significant cohort of nostalgic adults in their 30s and 40s decided that now was the time to revisit the games of their childhoods. eBay’s retro gaming categories saw traffic surges that the platform’s own data confirmed publicly. Prices spiked further.
But there’s a crucial nuance here that’s often missed in retrospective analyses. Not all of these new pandemic-era buyers were the same. Some were genuine collectors who had wanted to build collections for years and finally had the time and motivation. These buyers understood what they were buying, cared about condition and completeness, and were building collections for personal enjoyment and long-term curation. Others were opportunists — people who had vaguely nostalgic feelings about Sonic or Mario, heard that old games were “worth money,” and started panic-buying without deep knowledge or genuine passion. These buyers were inherently temporary.
When lockdowns ended and economic pressures began biting — rising energy bills, mortgage rate increases, the general cost-of-living squeeze that hit UK households particularly hard from late 2021 onward — the second category of buyers began exiting the market. They’d paid peak prices and now wanted their money back, or at least back enough of it to matter. They started listing their purchases on eBay at the prices they’d paid, found fewer buyers, and gradually dropped their prices. This correction was already underway before digital pricing entered the picture as a significant factor. But digital pricing has accelerated it in ways that are now becoming impossible to ignore.
Steam’s Classics Library: The Scope of the Disruption
Valve launched Steam in 2003, but the platform’s role in the retro gaming ecosystem wasn’t significant until the mid-2010s, when major publishers began systematically releasing back catalogues through digital storefronts. The real acceleration happened when Sega, in particular, committed to making its legacy library available in a way that was both comprehensive and aggressively priced.
The Sega Mega Drive Classics Collection: A Case Study in Market Disruption
The Sega Mega Drive Classics collection on Steam is probably the single most significant example of digital pricing disrupting physical market values, and it’s worth examining in detail. The collection, which has evolved over multiple iterations since 2010 and reached its current comprehensive form around 2018, contains 53 games from the Mega Drive library. The full list includes genuine stone-cold classics: both Streets of Rage sequels (all three, in fact), Phantasy Star II, III, and IV, Shining Force and Shining Force II, Gunstar Heroes, Comix Zone, Ecco the Dolphin, Golden Axe (all three), Sonic the Hedgehog 1, 2, and 3, and dozens more.
At full price, this collection retails for £24.99 on Steam. During Sega’s regular seasonal sales — which happen several times per year and are entirely predictable — it drops to around £6.24. We have seen it as low as £4.99 during major Steam sale events. Individual games from the Mega Drive library are separately available at prices ranging from £1.69 to £3.99, with frequent sale prices of 89p to £1.49.
Now let’s do some comparison shopping. A loose cartridge of Gunstar Heroes — Treasure’s legendary 1993 run-and-gun, widely considered one of the ten best Mega Drive games ever made — was fetching £35 to £50 on UK eBay in 2021. As of early 2024, you can find it for £20 to £30, and if you’re patient and willing to watch auctions rather than buy-it-now listings, sometimes less. Comix Zone, Sega’s visually stunning 1995 beat-’em-up that was always expensive due to its late-cycle release and relative scarcity, peaked at around £40-£60 for a loose cart in 2021. Current prices are closer to £25-£40. These are meaningful drops, and they’re not happening in isolation.
The key question is causation. Are prices dropping because of digital availability, or because the broader bubble correction would have happened anyway? The honest answer is: both. But the evidence for digital availability as a specific causal factor comes from comparing price trajectories for games that have robust digital releases versus those that don’t. When a game is available cheaply and easily on Steam, Switch, or PlayStation with appropriate enhancements, its cartridge equivalent tends to show steeper price erosion than titles that remain exclusive to original hardware.
Nintendo’s eShop and the SNES/NES Classic Problem
Nintendo’s approach to its back catalogue is, characteristically, more complex and more controlling than Sega’s — but the market effects are arguably even more significant, if less obvious. Nintendo Switch Online’s expansion pack, which costs £34.99 per year for a family plan or £17.99 for an individual subscription, includes access to a library of NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, and — via the Expansion Pack tier — Mega Drive games. This isn’t quite the same as Steam’s individual game pricing model, but the economic calculation for casual players is devastating for physical prices.
For £17.99 per year — roughly the cost of one decent loose SNES cartridge — a subscriber gets access to several dozen SNES games including Super Mario World, Super Metroid, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, F-Zero, Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario Kart, Kirby Super Star, Star Fox, and many others. These are the games that form the backbone of SNES cartridge collecting. They’re the titles that casual enthusiasts buy first when they decide to build a SNES collection — and now, those casual enthusiasts have a very good reason not to bother with cartridges at all.
The Nintendo Switch Online library’s effect on the market for CIB (complete in box) and loose SNES carts has been gradual but measurable. Titles that were already on Nintendo’s service began showing slower price appreciation or outright stagnation from around 2021, while titles that remained hardware-exclusive continued to appreciate for longer. The gap between “available on NSO” and “not available on NSO” has become an increasingly important variable in assessing cartridge value.
The Capcom and Konami Factor
Sega and Nintendo aren’t operating in isolation. Capcom’s approach to its back catalogue through the Capcom Arcade Stadium series and dedicated compilations — Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, the Mega Man Legacy Collection volumes, Disney Classic Games: Aladdin and The Lion King — has systematically brought huge portions of the SNES and Mega Drive libraries into affordable digital reach.
Consider Super Street Fighter II Turbo for the SNES. In 2020, a complete boxed copy was fetching £60-£100 depending on condition. The game is now part of the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, available on Steam for £24.99 at full price and frequently on sale for under £10, containing ten Street Fighter games including multiple SNES and arcade versions. The loose cartridge equivalent on SNES can now be found for £20-£35. That’s a significant drop for what was always considered a premium title.
Konami’s situation is more complicated because the company has been less systematic about digital re-releases, but compilations like the Contra Anniversary Collection (Steam, £15.99, frequently £3.99 on sale) and Castlevania Anniversary Collection (same pricing) have affected prices for those series’ SNES and Mega Drive entries. Contra: Hard Corps for the Mega Drive — a genuinely scarce and sought-after game that was clearing £50-£80 in 2020-2021 — has softened noticeably, with recent eBay completed listings showing more sales in the £30-£50 range.
The Psychology of Value: Why This Is More Complex Than It Seems
If you want to generate some heat in a retro gaming community, suggest that digital re-releases are making original cartridges “worthless.” You’ll get passionate pushback, and much of it will be entirely valid. The relationship between digital availability and physical value isn’t simple, and reducing it to “Steam sells it cheap therefore the cart is worth less” misses important nuances about what collectors actually value and why.
The Authenticity Premium: What Digital Can Never Replicate
The most sophisticated collectors — the people who have been in this hobby for fifteen or twenty years, who built their collections when prices were lower, who understand both the technical and cultural history of what they’re collecting — aren’t particularly threatened by Steam pricing. For them, the value of original hardware and original media is not primarily about having access to the game. It’s about owning a physical artefact that connects them directly to a specific moment in gaming history.
A 1992 UK-market copy of Super Mario Kart in its original SNES box, with the original manual, the Club Nintendo inserts, and a cartridge board that hasn’t been reflowed or tampered with — that is an irreplaceable historical object. No Steam re-release changes that. The cartridge board contains chips that were manufactured at a specific time, in a specific factory, using manufacturing processes that no longer exist. The PCB traces, the mask ROM chips, the CIC lockout chips — these are genuine primary historical sources for the history of video game manufacturing. A serious collector understands this and isn’t selling their CIB Super Mario Kart because Sega put Sonic on Steam.
Furthermore, original hardware has genuine technical characteristics that emulation and digital ports can’t perfectly replicate. The SNES’s audio chip — the Sony SPC700, designed by Ken Kutaragi before he became the father of PlayStation — produces sound in a specific way that results from its hardware architecture. SNES games running on original hardware through a properly calibrated RGB SCART connection into a Sony Trinitron CRT television look and sound different from those same games running through RetroArch with the best available SNES core. The difference is subtle, debated, and subject to enormous individual variation in perception — but for the enthusiasts who care about it, it is real, and it is not something that Steam can compete with.
The Casual Collector Exodus and Its Market Consequences
Here’s where the real disruption is happening, and here’s why it genuinely matters for the health of the wider market. The casual collector — not the twenty-year veteran with a CRT setup and a RGB-modded Super Famicom, but the person who was drawn into collecting during the YouTube boom years or the pandemic, who bought games because they loved them as a kid and wanted them “around” — that person is the market’s fuel. They were the buyers at car boots, the bidders on eBay, the customers keeping retro shops viable. And they are leaving.
They’re leaving partly because of broader economic pressures. But they’re also leaving because the value proposition of cartridge ownership has fundamentally shifted for people who were always primarily interested in playing the games rather than owning historical artefacts. If your goal is to play Streets of Rage 2 — and it’s a perfectly sensible goal, because Streets of Rage 2 is a masterpiece — then spending £15-£25 on a loose Mega Drive cartridge when you can play it on Steam for £1.69 in a sale, or through your existing Game Pass subscription on Xbox, or through a cheap Mega Drive Mini 2 that you bought last Christmas, is genuinely difficult to justify. The game is available. Cheaply. Legally. With save states and rewind functions.
The departure of casual collectors creates a market that becomes increasingly bifurcated. At the top end, serious collectors with specific interests — complete sets, specific regional variants, mint-condition sealed examples, hardware mods, unusual peripherals — continue to buy and sell at prices that reflect genuine scarcity and genuine expertise. At the bottom end, common titles that were inflated by casual interest but have no genuine scarcity lose value quickly. The middle market — decent condition loose carts of well-known games, the bread and butter of retro shops — becomes difficult.
The Retro Shop Crisis
The impact on physical retro gaming retailers — a sector that was already operating on thin margins before any of this — deserves specific attention. UK retro shops, whether the national chains like CEX or the independent specialists that have popped up in every major city and many market towns over the past decade, built their business models around a certain assumed floor price for common titles. Games that everybody wants — Sonic, Mario, Zelda, Street Fighter — were reliable sellers at reliable price points. They were the loss leaders and the confidence builders that got customers into shops and spending money.
What happens to a retro shop’s business model when its reliable sellers become harder to move? When a customer comes in, sees Streets of Rage 2 priced at £18 for a loose cart, takes out their phone, checks the Steam sale price, and either puts it back or haggles aggressively? The shop owner faces a dilemma: drop prices to compete with digital and watch margins evaporate, or hold prices and watch footfall decline. Neither option is comfortable.
Conversations with independent retro shop owners — the kind of frank, off-the-record discussions that tend to happen at gaming expos and retro fairs — reveal a consistent pattern of concern. Several owners have noted that their buying prices from the public have had to drop to reflect the changing market, which in turn is creating problems because sellers who bought games at peak bubble prices aren’t willing to accept below-bubble offers. The result is a pricing standoff that reduces stock turnover and keeps stock on shelves longer. Slow-turning stock in a small retail space is a serious problem.
The Technical Dimension: What Digital Releases Actually Offer
It’s important to be fair here and give digital releases their due. The best digital re-releases of classic games aren’t simply ROMs dumped onto a storefront. Some of them represent genuine, sophisticated work that adds real value — and understanding what that work involves helps explain why, for many players, digital is now genuinely preferable to original hardware even on pure gameplay merit.
M2’s Remarkable Emulation Work for Sega
The Japanese studio M2 — formally known as M2 Co., Ltd., based in Tokyo and founded in 1990 — is probably the most technically accomplished classic game emulation and porting studio in the business, and their work for Sega has set a standard that makes the Mega Drive Mini hardware and the Steam releases significantly better than casual discussion of “emulation” might suggest.
M2’s approach involves what they call “hardware emulation” rather than software emulation — reconstructing the behaviour of the original hardware at a component level rather than simply interpreting the software’s machine code in a translation layer. The practical results include accurate reproduction of hardware quirks, edge cases, and specific timing behaviours that simpler emulation approaches miss. Their work on the Sega Ages series for Nintendo Switch — releases like Thunder Force IV, Space Harrier, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Phantasy Star — includes not just accurate emulation but extensive additional features: online leaderboards, M2-developed assist modes, display options including multiple authentic CRT filter options, and in some cases restored content that wasn’t present in the original western releases.
The Sega Ages releases are available on Switch for £6.29 each and represent extraordinary value for what you’re getting. Thunder Force IV — Technosoft’s 1992 shooter, one of the greatest shoot-’em-ups ever made, capable of reducing original Mega Drive hardware to a stuttering mess with its on-screen complexity — runs flawlessly in the M2 version, with the added bonus of M2’s “Full Auto” mode that allows the game to be appreciated by less experienced players. The original Mega Drive cartridge currently sells for £25-£45 loose. The Switch version, which is arguably technically superior to running the game on original hardware, costs £6.29.
The Analogue NT and the Premium Hardware Response
The counterargument from the serious collector and enthusiast community often centres on Analogue hardware — specifically the Analogue NT Mini Noir (FPGA-based NES/Famicom clone), the Super NT (FPGA SNES/Super Famicom), and the Mega Sg (FPGA Mega Drive/Genesis). These devices use FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) chips to recreate the original hardware’s logic circuits at a silicon level, providing what is widely considered the most accurate reproduction of original hardware behaviour currently available outside of original hardware itself.
The Analogue Super NT retails for $189.99 USD (approximately £150 at current exchange rates) and accepts original SNES cartridges while outputting via HDMI at up to 1080p. The Mega Sg is similarly priced. These are premium products aimed at enthusiasts who want the best possible modern display compatibility with their original cartridges, and their existence is relevant because it demonstrates that a significant segment of the market — the segment that cares most about authentic hardware behaviour — is willing to invest serious money in cartridge-compatible hardware. For these buyers, a Steam sale price is irrelevant. Their collection of original cartridges gains value from Analogue hardware because it can now be experienced optimally on modern displays.
Analogue’s products sell out quickly whenever new batches are available, which is itself a data point about the health of the premium end of the collecting market. The Super NT’s most recent batch in 2023 sold out within hours. There is clearly a committed, financially capable audience for high-end original-cartridge hardware. The question is whether that audience is large enough to sustain the broader market infrastructure — the shops, the fairs, the online marketplaces — that the hobby depends on.
The FPGA vs Original Silicon Debate
It would be intellectually dishonest not to acknowledge the ongoing technical debate within the enthusiast community about whether FPGA-based hardware is “the same” as original hardware. The argument is nuanced and depends heavily on what you’re optimising for. FPGA implementations like the Analogue devices, or the open-source MiSTer project (which uses an Intel Cyclone V FPGA development board to emulate dozens of systems), do reproduce the behaviour of the original hardware’s logic with extraordinary accuracy. But they’re still, at the silicon level, different devices running logic that was written by engineers at Analogue or the MiSTer community to describe the behaviour of the original chips.
Original SNES hardware contains specific chips — the Ricoh 5A22 CPU, the Sony SPC700 audio processor, the various enhancement chips like the Super FX, SA-1, and DSP chips — that have specific electrical and thermal characteristics. Whether those characteristics matter for gameplay or perceptible experience is debatable and varies by individual. But for the most committed authenticity-focused collectors, they matter enormously. And this is why a segment of the market will always pay a premium for verified, unmodified original hardware in excellent condition, regardless of what Steam is doing.
The Numbers: Tracking the Price Collapse in Real Time
Let’s be specific, because specificity is what separates genuine analysis from hand-wraving. Using completed eBay listings — the only reliable real-world pricing data available to the general public — and price tracking tools like Price Charting (pricecharting.com), which has been tracking video game values since 2007, we can build a fairly detailed picture of what’s actually happening to cartridge prices across different categories.
Mega Drive: The Clearest Signal
The Mega Drive market shows the clearest correlation between digital availability and price decline because Sega has been the most aggressive publisher in terms of Steam back catalogue pricing. Consider these specific examples using UK eBay completed sale data from 2021 peak to early 2024 (all prices for loose cartridge only, UK PAL versions unless specified):
- Sonic the Hedgehog: Peak loose price approximately £8-£12 (2021). Current price: £4-£7. Steam sale price: 89p. Decline: roughly 40%.
- Streets of Rage 2: Peak loose price approximately £18-£28 (2021). Current price: £12-£18. Steam price in sales: £1.69. Decline: roughly 35%.
- Gunstar Heroes: Peak loose price approximately £35-£50 (2021). Current price: £20-£30. Steam sale price: £1.69 (as part of Mega Drive Classics). Decline: roughly 40-45%.
- Shining Force II: Peak loose price approximately £30-£45 (2021). Current price: £18-£28. Available on Steam individually for £3.99. Decline: roughly 38%.
- Comix Zone: Peak loose price approximately £40-£60 (2021). Current price: £25-£40. Available on Steam. Decline: roughly 30-35%.
Now compare this to Mega Drive titles that have NOT received significant digital re-releases on modern platforms. Panorama Cotton — a rare 1994 rail shooter from Success Corporation, one of the most sought-after Japanese Mega Drive games — has shown minimal price decline. Mega Turrican, Elemental Master, Phelios — obscure but collectible titles with no Steam equivalent — have held their values more robustly. The pattern is clear. Digital availability is the key variable in the price equation.
SNES: A More Complex Picture
The SNES market is more complex because Nintendo’s approach to its back catalogue is more fragmented and controlled. Nintendo’s own first-party titles are available through Nintendo Switch Online subscriptions, but not on Steam, and not as individual purchases. Third-party SNES titles have a more varied digital presence.
First-party Nintendo SNES titles available on NSO have shown price softening but less dramatic collapse than equivalent Mega Drive titles:
- Super Mario World (complete boxed): Peak approximately £60-£80 CIB (2021). Current: £45-£65 CIB. Decline: approximately 15-20%.
- Super Metroid (loose): Peak approximately £40-£55 loose (2021). Current: £30-£45 loose. Decline: approximately 18-25%.
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (loose): Peak approximately £30-£45 loose (2021). Current: £22-£35 loose. Decline: approximately 20-25%.
These declines are more modest than the Mega Drive equivalents, likely for several reasons. NSO is a subscription rather than an outright purchase, which changes the psychological calculus for buyers. Nintendo’s brand carries a premium perception that Sega’s does not. And the SNES is generally considered a more prestigious console for collecting purposes, with a collector base that skews toward serious rather than casual engagement.
However, third-party SNES titles that have received prominent digital re-releases show steeper declines. Final Fight for SNES — available in the Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle on Steam for £15.99 (sale price around £3.99), though it should be noted the bundle contains the superior arcade version rather than the compromised SNES port — has seen its loose cart price fall from around £15-£20 in 2021 to more like £8-£12 currently. The Street Fighter II variants on SNES have shown similar trends.
NES: The Surprising Resilience
Interestingly, NES cartridge prices have shown somewhat more resilience than either SNES or Mega Drive in certain categories, which at first seems counterintuitive given the extensive digital availability of NES games through NSO and countless other platforms. The explanation reveals something important about what drives collector behaviour at the deeper level.
NES collecting has a distinct culture from SNES or Mega Drive collecting, partly because the console and its games are now genuinely old enough to be considered historical artefacts in a more complete sense. The NES’s PAL library is also smaller and more inconsistent than the NTSC library — many Japanese Famicom and US NES games never received European releases, and the PAL conversions that did exist are often inferior technically (slower game speed due to 50Hz television standards). This creates a bifurcated collecting culture where PAL NES games are simultaneously less expensive than their Japanese or US equivalents and more relevant to UK collectors with specific interest in European gaming history.
Common NES games — Super Mario Bros. 3, Mega Man 2, Contra — have declined in line with general trends. But genuine UK PAL NES rarities, and specifically games with interesting PAL-specific characteristics or packaging, have held their values better. The lesson here is that true scarcity trumps digital availability, and the more specialised and knowledgeable the collector base for a particular category, the more resilient prices tend to be.
Community Reaction: A Hobby Divided
The retro gaming community’s reaction to these trends is — predictably for a group of people with strong opinions about everything — deeply divided along lines that roughly correspond to why individuals are in the hobby in the first place.
The “Good, Actually” Contingent
A significant and vocal segment of the retro gaming community has reacted to falling cartridge prices with something between equanimity and outright celebration. These are typically collectors who either got into the hobby before the bubble years and built collections at sane prices, or people who were priced out by the bubble’s excesses and are now finding opportunities they couldn’t afford at peak.
On forums like Sega-16.com, ASSEMblergames, RetroRGB’s Discord, and various subreddits, the consistent refrain from this group is that the bubble was damaging to the hobby’s culture. “The pandemic prices were never real,” is a sentiment you’ll hear repeatedly, and it contains genuine truth. A market where a complete-in-box copy of Super Mario World costs £80 is a market that prices out the casual enthusiasts who might have become serious collectors. Falling prices, this argument goes, are good for the long-term health of the hobby because they make entry more accessible.
There’s also a principled argument from this camp about the legitimacy of digital ownership as a form of preservation. Kevin Bunch, a writer and gaming historian who has contributed to various retro gaming publications, articulated a version of this argument well in a widely-shared piece noting that the proliferation of digital re-releases — particularly when done carefully, by studios like M2, with attention to accuracy and historical documentation — is actually better for games as cultural heritage than relying on increasingly fragile original cartridges as the primary means of preservation. This is a serious point that deserves serious engagement.
The Anxious Middle
The most interesting community reactions come from what might be called the anxious middle — collectors who have significant investments in physical media, who genuinely love the hobby and aren’t interested in selling, but who are watching the market with growing unease. These are often people who bought at peak prices, not as speculators but as enthusiasts, and who now find that their collection’s notional market value has declined significantly.
The key word there is “notional.” If you’re not selling, the market value of your collection doesn’t matter to your daily life. But the psychological effect of watching that value decline is real, and it affects how people think about future purchases, about whether to complete partial sets they’ve been working on for years, about whether the hobby is “worth it” in a broader sense. Several collectors have described, in forum threads and Discord conversations, a kind of collecting paralysis that has set in — they don’t want to sell, but they’re hesitant to buy more at prices that feel uncertain.
This paralysis is itself a market-dampening factor. Reduced buyer confidence means reduced transaction volume, which means shops and online sellers see fewer sales, which leads to further price uncertainty. It’s a feedback loop that, once established, is difficult to break without either a significant new cultural catalyst on the side of physical collecting (the equivalent of what AVGN was in 2008, but for 2024) or a complete market reset to a new lower equilibrium.
The Purists and Their Legitimate Concerns
At the most passionate end of the collecting spectrum sit the purists — people for whom original hardware, original cartridges, and the authentic experience are non-negotiable, and who view the entire digital re-release phenomenon with a mixture of contempt and concern. Their arguments are often characterised as mere nostalgia or romanticisation by critics, but the best versions of their position are actually grounded in substantive concerns about gaming history and preservation.
The core purist argument goes something like this: when players experience games exclusively through digital re-releases — even excellent ones — they lose connection with the specific technical context in which those games were made. A game like Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was designed around the specific properties of the Mega Drive hardware — the Yamaha YM2612 sound chip’s distinctive FM synthesis, the specific colour palette of the hardware’s VDP, the feel of the original six-button controller. Digital re-releases, however careful, involve compromises. They run on hardware with different characteristics. They’re experienced through HDMI rather than composite or RGB. The player sitting with a Switch in their hands, playing Sonic on a Nintendo screen, is having a fundamentally different experience from the one the game’s creators intended.
This argument has real merit, and it’s worth noting that even some of the most technically sophisticated digital re-release work acknowledges it. M2’s developers have spoken in interviews about the difficulty of perfectly replicating the YM2612 chip’s specific aliasing characteristics and the way certain instruments were designed to exploit hardware quirks that are difficult to reproduce accurately in software. The original experience is, in some genuine technical sense, irreplaceable — and if original hardware becomes too expensive or too difficult to maintain, something real is lost.
The Preservation Paradox: When Cheaper Access Means Less Preservation
One of the most intellectually interesting tensions in this whole situation is what might be called the preservation paradox. Intuitively, cheap and accessible digital re-releases seem like good news for game preservation — more people can play and appreciate classic games, the games are less likely to be “lost” to cultural memory. But there’s a counterargument that’s genuinely compelling and often overlooked in mainstream discussion.
Digital Preservation Is Not the Same as Physical Preservation
When Sega makes Gunstar Heroes available on Steam for £1.69, it creates a perception that the game is “preserved” and that original cartridges are therefore less urgent. But the Steam version is not a preservation of the game in the way that matters to historians and archivists. It’s a commercial product, licensed, subject to platform availability, dependent on Valve’s continued operation and willingness to maintain it, and potentially subject to removal if licensing agreements change. It is, in the language of digital preservation, a presentation layer built on an archival foundation that the general public has no access to and no guarantee of permanence.
Real game preservation — the kind done by organisations like the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF), the Internet Archive, and academic institutions — is a separate and much more difficult project. The VGHF’s landmark study, published in 2023, found that 87% of classic video games are out of print and unavailable through legitimate means — that is, they have no digital re-release, no current legitimate way to purchase them. The games we’re discussing in this article — the popular Sega and Nintendo titles with robust digital presences — are actually the survivors. They exist in commercial digital form because they have commercial value. The thousands of games that don’t have commercial digital re-releases are, functionally, dependent on physical media and the communities that preserve and catalogue it.
When cartridge prices fall and collector interest diminishes, the infrastructure that supports this broader preservation work — the shops that stock obscure titles, the collectors who seek out complete sets of regional releases, the enthusiasts who document hardware variations and board revisions — is weakened. The argument that “Steam is preserving these games” is true only for a commercially valuable minority. For the vast majority of the medium’s history, physical collection remains the only viable preservation mechanism.
The Reproduction and Repro Cartridge Problem
Falling prices have another, less discussed consequence: they weaken the economic incentive to distinguish between authentic and reproduction cartridges, which has significant implications for preservation and for trust in the marketplace. Reproduction cartridges — circuit boards printed to look like original cartridges, loaded with ROM images, sometimes with professional-quality labels — have been a feature of the collecting market for years. They represent a genuine problem when sold as originals, which does happen.
When prices are high, buyers are motivated to learn how to authenticate cartridges — to identify correct board markings, check screw types, verify label printing characteristics. This knowledge, transmitted through community guides, YouTube videos, and forum discussions, is itself a form of preservation knowledge. When prices fall to the point where it’s barely worth the authentication effort — when a loose Streets of Rage 2 costs £12 and the reproduction is £8 — the economic logic of careful authentication breaks down. The community’s collective vigilance about authenticity may diminish alongside prices, with long-term consequences for the reliability of the physical cartridge market as a whole.
The Alternative Ecosystem: GOG, Itch.io, and the Independent Question
Steam isn’t the only platform reshaping perceptions of value in the classic games market, and it’s worth examining the broader digital ecosystem to understand the full picture.
GOG and the DRM-Free Advantage
GOG (Good Old Games), owned by CD Projekt, has been selling DRM-free versions of classic PC games since 2008 and has expanded into classic console games through licensed deals. While GOG’s focus has historically been more on classic PC gaming — DOS-era games, early Windows titles — its pricing philosophy is relevant because it demonstrates that consumers have come to expect classic games at very low price points. GOG’s classic releases regularly hit £1.49 to £2.99 in sales, and the platform’s consumer-friendly DRM-free model has established a consumer expectation around classic game pricing that affects how players think about all classic game purchases, physical or digital.
The Evercade and the Physical-Digital Hybrid Model
One genuinely interesting attempt to respond to these market pressures is the Evercade system, developed by UK company Blaze Entertainment, which launched in 2020. Evercade uses physical cartridges — actual, holdable, real cartridges — but these cartridges contain licensed collections of ROM images from specific publishers rather than single games. The Namco Museum 1 cartridge (£19.99) contains 11 arcade and console games. The Atari Collection cartridges contain dozens of 2600 and arcade titles. The Mega Cat Studios and PIKO Interactive carts contain licensed indie games and officially released homebrew titles.
Evercade is, in a sense, the most intellectually honest attempt to bridge the gap between the physical collecting impulse and the digital era’s economic realities. The cartridges are real physical objects with genuine scarcity — they can be lost, damaged, or discontinued. They have official licensing that means they’re legitimate, not emulation-in-a-box grey area products. But they’re priced at accessible levels (£19.99 to £29.99 for most carts) and contain multiple games, acknowledging that the single-game cartridge at £25-£50 model is increasingly difficult to sustain.
Evercade’s success — the system has sold well enough to justify multiple hardware iterations, including the Evercade VS home console and the more powerful Evercade EXP handheld — suggests that there is appetite for physical media in retro gaming if the price point is right. But it also implicitly acknowledges the new pricing landscape. An Evercade cart containing 11 Namco games for £19.99 is only possible because those games can’t sustain £19.99 each as individual physical objects in the current market.
Itch.io and the Homebrew Economy
One area of the retro gaming market that digital disruption has actually energised rather than damaged is the homebrew and indie retro scene. Itch.io, the independent games marketplace, has become a significant platform for games made for original hardware — actual NES, Game Boy, Mega Drive, and SNES ROMs designed and programmed by indie developers, often sold both as digital downloads and as physical cartridges in limited runs.
Studios like Mega Cat Studios, Bitmap Bureau, and Broke Studio are creating new games for original hardware and finding audiences willing to pay significant premiums for limited physical editions — not because the games are “worth” that much intrinsically, but because the combination of limited production, genuine quality, and the novelty of a new game for a 30-year-old console creates a different value proposition from simply owning a copy of a game that millions of other copies exist of.
A limited run physical copy of Xeno Crisis for the Mega Drive (Bitmap Bureau, 2019) originally retailed for around £45-£55 and has since increased significantly in value. Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril for the NES, produced by Sivak Games, commands high prices in physical form. These are new scarcity items in a market increasingly desperate for genuine scarcity, and their existence points toward one possible future for the physical retro gaming market: a much smaller, more specialist ecosystem focused on limited-production new releases rather than mass-market vintage re-circulation.
The International Dimension: Japan, North America, and Why UK Collectors Have Specific Concerns
UK collectors face specific challenges that make the Steam pricing problem more acute than it might appear from a purely global perspective. The PAL gaming market has always been complicated — technically inferior versions of games (due to the 50Hz versus 60Hz display standard issue), smaller print runs for many titles, and a distinct history of regional releases that creates both specific opportunities and specific vulnerabilities.
The 50Hz Problem and Why It Makes PAL Carts Less Desirable
PAL versions of Mega Drive and SNES games typically run at 50Hz, which on systems designed for 60Hz NTSC operation means they run approximately 17% slower than intended, with black borders on screen to account for the different aspect ratio. Sonic the Hedgehog at PAL speed is noticeably, sometimes dramatically different from the intended 60Hz experience. For serious enthusiasts who know this, PAL carts are a compromise — they’re historically significant UK artefacts, but they’re not playing the game as designed.
The widespread availability of region-free solutions — the Mega Drive with a region switch, the SNES with a Super CIC or territory switch — and the increasingly common practice of region-free play has meant that UK collectors who want to play games correctly have often pivoted toward Japanese or North American carts, which play at 60Hz on appropriate hardware. This has fragmented the UK market in ways that make general price tracking complicated and that create specific dynamics around which PAL carts are genuinely desirable.
The PAL games that hold their value best are those with meaningful regional differences beyond just the speed — different packaging, PAL-exclusive bonus content, regional censorship differences (Germany’s versions of various games, with swastika removal and blood colour changes, are specifically collected by some enthusiasts), or simple rarity due to the smaller print runs of the UK market. These specific regional interests are not threatened by Steam pricing because they represent genuine historical specificity that digital releases can’t replicate.
The Import Market and Yen Fluctuations
UK collectors with access to Japanese import carts — which play at 60Hz on appropriately set up hardware and often have better localisation or original Japanese versions of games that were changed for Western release — have been dealing with the additional complication of yen-to-pound exchange rate fluctuations. As the yen weakened substantially through 2022 and 2023 against the pound, importing from Japan via platforms like Yahoo! Japan Auctions (accessible through proxy services like Buyee or Zenmarket) became significantly more affordable, adding another source of pressure on the prices of UK domestic listings.
A loose Japanese copy of Castlevania: Rondo of Blood for PC Engine — not a Mega Drive or SNES game, but illustrative of the point — was, at 2021 prices, available for around £80-£120 for a decent copy from domestic UK sellers. The yen’s weakness meant that by 2023, direct imports from Japan could bring the same game in excellent condition for £40-£60 all-in including proxy fees and shipping. This international arbitrage effect has added another layer of downward pressure on UK domestic prices, particularly for games where Japanese versions are desirable.
Practical Guidance: Navigating the Market in 2024
All of this analysis is useful for understanding what’s happening, but retro gaming enthusiasts are, fundamentally, practical people with limited time and money. What does all this mean for how you should approach collecting, buying, and selling in the current environment?
What to Buy, What to Hold, What to Sell
If you’re a serious collector with long-term intentions, the current market offers genuine opportunities. Games that have been significantly devalued by digital availability but that are historically significant and genuinely scarce in excellent original condition are arguably at a better entry point now than they’ve been in years. You’re buying at deflated prices driven partly by market sentiment and partly by the casual collector exodus, not at prices that reflect fundamental historical value.
The categories worth targeting right now include complete boxed examples of mid-tier games that have seen significant price drops but retain historical importance — CIB Mega Drive games in the £20-£40 range, SNES cartridges in the £15-£35 range, genuine UK PAL first-pressings with original documentation. These are items that are physically finite (they’re not making any more of them), increasingly dependent on declining supply as more cartridges are lost, damaged, or cannibalised for boards, and undervalued relative to their historical significance.
What to avoid right now: loose common carts of games with robust digital presences that were inflated to peak bubble prices and are still pricing above realistic deflated value. A loose copy of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 at £15 in a retro shop that hasn’t updated its pricing since 2021 is a bad buy in 2024. The same game at £5-£7 is fine if you actually want to play it on original hardware.
What to consider selling, if your collection includes examples: sealed or near-mint graded examples of games at the very top end of desirability that you’re not actively using and that benefited from bubble-era pricing. These haven’t crashed as far as loose carts, but the trajectory is uncertain and the carrying cost of waiting for recovery is real.
Hardware: Where Value Is Actually Accumulating
One of the counterintuitive findings of examining the current retro market is that original hardware — not the game software, but the actual consoles — has in many cases held or increased in value while software prices have declined. This makes a certain kind of sense. There are more original cartridges in existence than there are working original consoles in good condition. SNES consoles, in particular, are subject to capacitor degradation and the famous yellowing of the plastic housing (caused by the bromine fire retardant in the ABS plastic oxidising), which means that truly excellent condition examples are becoming rarer.
A fully recapped, RGB-modded SNES in an original-colour, non-yellowed housing — particularly a 1-CHIP revision of the console, which produces noticeably better video output than the later revisions — will fetch £150-£250 from the right buyer. That price has been remarkably stable. Original Mega Drive hardware, particularly the Model 1 with its distinctive sound characteristics (the Model 1’s discrete audio path is considered by audiophiles to sound better than the Model 2’s integrated audio) and its iconic red-stripe design, continues to command premiums for excellent examples.
If you’re looking to invest in the retro hardware market with some expectation of value retention, original consoles in excellent condition are a better bet than common software titles. Hardware is harder to fake, more difficult to reproduce convincingly, more dependent on the specific manufacturing moment of the original production run, and appeals to the high-end collector base that has proven most resilient to digital disruption.
The Authentic Experience: Building a Setup That Steam Can’t Beat
For the enthusiast who wants to understand what all the fuss about original hardware is and build a setup that provides an experience Steam genuinely can’t replicate, here is a practical starting point based on current market prices and availability.
The core of the ideal retro setup in 2024 is a working CRT television — specifically a Sony PVM (Professional Video Monitor) or BVM (Broadcast Video Monitor) with RGB input, or at minimum a consumer-grade Sony Trinitron with RGB SCART input. PVM prices have exploded in recent years (a 14-inch Sony PVM-14N5E was £100-£150 in 2018, and can now easily exceed £400-£600 in excellent condition), but medium-sized Trinitron televisions with SCART can still be found for reasonable prices at charity shops and Facebook Marketplace, particularly in 21-inch and 25-inch sizes. The visual difference between a correctly set up RGB signal on a Trinitron and any other viewing option is, for most people who see it for the first time, a revelation.
Combine a CRT with a well-maintained original SNES or Mega Drive (either original or Analogue Super NT/Mega Sg for modern display compatibility), a quality RGB SCART cable from a specialist supplier like Retro Gaming Cables UK, and a properly cleaned and tested selection of cartridges, and you have an experience that is genuinely, demonstrably, and meaningfully different from playing on a Switch or through Steam. Whether that difference is worth the investment is a personal judgement — but for the enthusiasts who’ve experienced it, it’s typically not a close call.
What Comes Next: Scenarios for the Retro Market’s Future
Predicting the future of any collecting market is a fool’s errand — the history of collectibles is littered with confident predictions that aged badly. But we can identify the key variables that will shape the retro cartridge market over the next five to ten years, and sketch some plausible scenarios.
The Continued Bifurcation Scenario
The most likely scenario, based on current trajectories, is continued bifurcation of the market into two essentially separate segments with limited interaction between them. At the top end, a relatively small but financially capable community of serious collectors continues to pay significant premiums for exceptional examples of genuinely scarce items — sealed or near-mint complete examples, regional variants, unusual revisions, historically significant items. This market is essentially immune to Steam pricing because its participants aren’t buying games to play; they’re buying historical artefacts whose value is independent of playability.
At the bottom end, the mass market for loose common cartridges continues to deflate toward prices that reflect pure nostalgic sentiment rather than any functional premium over digital alternatives. Common Mega Drive and SNES games eventually settle at £5-£15 for loose carts — “charity shop prices” — which actually makes the hobby more accessible and potentially attracts a new generation of enthusiasts who weren’t priced out by bubble-era values. The middle market — complete boxed examples of sought-after but not genuinely scarce games — remains volatile and uncertain.
The Generational Change Scenario
A more optimistic scenario involves generational change in gaming nostalgia. The Mega Drive and SNES generations — the children of the late 1980s and early 1990s — are now in their mid-30s to mid-40s, at peak earning power but also at peak life complexity (mortgages, children, demanding careers). Their interest in the hobby is real but time-limited in ways it wasn’t ten years ago. The next wave of nostalgic adults will be the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 generation, now in their late 20s to early 30s, who are entering their peak collecting years.
PS1 and N64 prices have already shown the early signs of this transition. Complete boxed copies of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on PS1, Final Fantasy VII, Tekken 3, Resident Evil 2 — these have shown strong appreciation over the past three years. N64 games, always expensive due to the high cost of N64 cartridge ROM manufacture which resulted in smaller print runs than PS1, have seen specific titles reach impressive prices. Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Harvest Moon 64, Ogre Battle 64, ClayFighter: Sculptor’s Cut — these are the equivalent of the SNES rarities that drove Mega Drive and SNES collecting’s most intense period.
Crucially, the PS1 and N64 generation’s games have less comprehensive digital re-release coverage than the Mega Drive or SNES libraries. Many PS1 and N64 titles are in licensing limbo, or involve publishers who no longer exist, or have music rights complications that make re-release impossible without significant legal work. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is available digitally, but many other PS1 titles are not. This creates a more hospitable environment for physical collecting than the Mega Drive market faces.
The Regulatory and Legal Scenario
One wild card that could significantly affect the entire picture is regulatory change around digital ownership and resale rights. The ongoing legal debate in Europe and the UK about the right to resell digital goods — following rulings like the Court of Justice of the European Union’s 2012 Oracle v UsedSoft decision, which established some resale rights for downloaded software under EU law — could eventually affect how digital re-releases are structured and priced.
If consumers were to gain the right to resell digital purchases — something Steam, Nintendo, and all the major platform holders have so far successfully resisted — the calculation around physical versus digital ownership would shift significantly. The inability to resell a £1.69 Steam purchase is currently not a major factor in most buyers’ decisions, but it represents a genuine difference in the nature of ownership that matters to collectors. A legal framework that enabled digital resale would partially address this gap and might, paradoxically, reduce some of the competitive pressure on physical media by making digital ownership feel more like the physical equivalent.
The Hardware Collapse Scenario
The most concerning scenario for serious retro collectors is one that doesn’t get enough attention: the gradual failure of the original hardware ecosystem itself. SNES, Mega Drive, and NES hardware is now 30-35 years old. The electrolytic capacitors in these systems have finite lifespans — typically 20-25 years under normal conditions — and many units are now failing silently or intermittently. SNES consoles are exhibiting the video signal degradation and audio distortion that indicate capacitor failure in increasing numbers. Mega Drive Model 1 units are losing their capacitors. NES 72-pin cartridge connectors, always temperamental, are becoming genuinely unreliable.
The community of skilled technicians who can recap and restore this hardware is real and growing, but so is the volume of hardware requiring attention. If original hardware becomes significantly harder to maintain in working condition — if the supply of functioning, well-maintained SNES and Mega Drive consoles decreases faster than demand — then the value of both hardware and software could face a sharp, purely supply-driven increase, regardless of what Steam is doing. Alternatively, if FPGA hardware like Analogue devices becomes the primary means of cartridge play, the dynamic between hardware and software value changes further.
Conclusion: The Market You Loved Is Changing — But Something Genuine Remains
We started with a car boot sale and a copy of Sonic 3 that nobody wanted to buy. It’s worth ending somewhere more considered than that anecdote might suggest, because the full picture is more nuanced than “digital is killing collecting.”
What is definitely happening is that the specific market conditions that prevailed between roughly 2017 and 2022 — rising prices across almost all categories, strong casual collector interest, a sense that vintage games were an asset class with reliable appreciation — are over. Steam’s aggressive pricing of classic libraries is one significant factor in that change. Nintendo Switch Online is another. The broader economic pressures that have squeezed disposable income are another. The post-bubble correction from WATA-era excess is another. These forces are not individually overwhelming, but together they’ve fundamentally shifted the market’s centre of gravity.
The casual collector who got into retro gaming during the pandemic, spent £200 on a decent loose SNES game collection, and is now looking at prices that have dropped 20-30% while their energy bills have risen 50% — that person is probably leaving the market. Their departure is sad for the hobby’s breadth, but it was always going to happen. The pandemic gaming boom was not a permanent structural change; it was a disruption that temporarily brought people into a hobby they might not have otherwise explored. Some of those people discovered genuine, lasting passion. Most have moved on.
What remains — and this is important, and this is why the hobby’s future is more secure than the most anxious voices suggest — is a core community of collectors and enthusiasts whose engagement with original hardware is not primarily economic. They’re not in it because the games are appreciating assets. They’re in it because they love the experience, they care about gaming history, they find genuine meaning in the connection between original hardware and the games designed for it. That community survived the pre-bubble era when collecting was genuinely niche. It survived the bubble. It will survive the digital era.
The retro gaming market in 2024 is in a painful but necessary correction. Prices are finding new equilibria that better reflect the actual scarcity and desirability of specific items, uncomplicated by the speculative excess of the bubble years. For serious, knowledgeable collectors, this is actually a reasonable moment to be in the market — prices are more accessible than they’ve been in years for many categories, and the passionate community doing the actual preservation and documentation work is as engaged as ever.
Steam can sell Gunstar Heroes for 89p. And that’s fine. It means more people will play Gunstar Heroes, which is a genuinely excellent game that deserves the widest possible audience. What Steam cannot do is sit on a Sunday morning at a car boot sale with a box of carts, have a conversation with a stranger about why Treasure’s animation techniques were ahead of their time, and hand over a thirty-year-old piece of physical media with the weight and texture of history in your palm. That experience — deeply analogue, deeply human, resistant to digital reproduction — is what retro game collecting is ultimately about. And that, whatever happens to eBay pricing, is not going anywhere.
The cartridge market is changing. But the cartridge, as a cultural object, endures. The question for the community now is not whether to adapt, but how — and whether the infrastructure of shops, fairs, online communities, and technical knowledge that supports the hobby can evolve alongside the market rather than being swept away by it. That’s a project worth investing in, regardless of what Sega puts on sale next Steam Sale weekend.