This Rerez Talks rant originally aired in March 2016
So I've got a kind of interesting story to talk about. Recently we released a video on Rerez about the IQ Player, a Chinese-only released video game system produced by Nintendo. It's a really cool system and its has a really neat history. But people really weren't angry about that why they were angry was because I said this thing was rare and that got people really upset because they've seen this before. If they knew what it was and they searched it on eBay and Amazon and they were like well I can buy it for $100 or $200 that can't be that rare. Okay so let's talk about this because I think it's an interesting topic. First off this system really only had about as far as I can tell just less than 500,000 units sold. We really can't be certain because Nintendo doesn't release the numbers for IQ sales in mainland China and I don't know if there's a legal reason for that but we just don't know how many they've actually sold over there. One thing I can tell you though is that this system was only sold in one region compared to other video game systems Nintendo sold like the Nintendo 64 and the Super Nintendo which were sold in multiple regions like North America, Europe and all over the world and those systems have sold multiple millions of units. But this thing here we know for a fact couldn't have sold millions of copies because it just couldn't have while limited to one region. That's almost near impossible. Specifically in an area where video game consoles were largely banned for quite a while. This system here just probably didn't do very well which led to not being a very popular system for many people in China. Another reason why this thing is not very popular outside of China is because this is only loaded with Nintendo 64 games and anyone in North America who wants to play a Nintendo 64 they just get a console and play it. Also one funny thing about the IQ Player that probably affected its value in North America and everywhere else in order to use the IQ Player in North America you need an up-down AC converter because in China they use a different form of power than we do in North America. So if you're to plug an IQ Player up to a normal outlet that we have you break the thing. I don't know exactly what would happen I believe it would actually just burn or set on fire or something but I didn't want to plug up this IQ Player to test it because that would have been really mean to the person that lent it to me. So this is the kind of thing that makes this system kind of less valuable in terms of price but it is still a rarity or oddity.
Now also what I want to talk about is the perceived notion that a rare video game console or game would be worth a lot of money. In some instances that is true. Some rare video games cost a lot of cash but in other instances the perceived value of the product isn't really affected by how rare it is. This right here is Hilton Ultimate Team Play. It's the rarest PSP game ever made but what's funny about this is that I only paid five dollars for this game and honestly I don't really know anyone else that owns one. So as long as that's a fact whatever price I choose to sell this game at will set the price for how much these are worth in the wild. Now that's essentially how trade and perspective value on these things work. Because I paid five dollars for this thing right now it's only worth five dollars. If somebody else finds one that they choose to spend $200 on now it's worth $200. Now essentially why I'm bringing this up is because of Earthbound. When Earthbound came out in North America they produced tons and tons of cartridges. There's a whole bunch out there in the wild but what ended up happening was the game wasn't that popular so the game lost its value at one point. Then people started to realize how much they actually did like this game and they wanted to go out and buy copies and when they did because of the demand of the thing they needed to go out and spend a little bit more than they were expecting. People that bought the game initially would sell it at a higher value and the higher value caused a fluctuation in how much Earthbound carts were worth nowadays. Earthbound cartridges can go for $100 to $200 because Nintendo did not rerelease this game in any other format until the Wii U came out. For some people the Wii U version isn't good enough because that's still technically an emulation and diehard people want to play Earthbound on its original platform without any console emulation. So that's why that cartridge can cost a lot of money simply because people just value it more. That doesn't mean there's less units of Earthbound out there than the IQ Player or this PSP game. It just means that people are willing to spend that much more on that game because they want it so much. Rarity does not mean it costs a lot of money and just because something is really expensive doesn't mean it's rare. So basically all I'm trying to say in this is this. The perceived value of a rare video game is exactly what you're willing to pay for it. If somebody's saying oh this game is $300 because only 500 exist well that doesn't mean that the game is worth that much it just means that's what people are willing to pay for it. So in the future if you see one of those games out in the wild and it has a really high price tag on it take a second glance and consider if you really should be paying that much for something that may not even be that rare to begin with.
