Or how about eventually finding some cartridge in the future where the battery due to the environment causes it to blow. The acid slowly erodes through the board and then out of the cart itself chewing up the cardboard. That coffin VGS uses isn't sealed in the least bit, it's not a time capsule. Eventually it'll be a time eaten corpse in a box.
Exactly, I install battery holder in all my stuff. People who claim to "preserve" games by getting them graded are a bunch of fucking posers. That's what ROM dumpers are for. All they care about is collecting, and looking at a shelf, not actually gaming. They might as well collect stamps or garbage pail kids. It's like buying a car and never driving it, not a single time. Not even getting in the seat, or opening the door. Just leaving it in a locked garage to die a horrible, lame death, when it should have been enjoyed and broken in.
There are 3 types of collectors/gamers that I see.
Hoarders that rarely/never play (collectors, spend more time researching games/prices than playing games)
Gamers (those who enjoy playing more than collecting, will game any way possible but normally prefer real hardware)
Tinkerers (those who collect normally hardware to tinker and mod them, bring them back to life)
When all these consoles are pretty much done there will be some tinkerers left who bring these back to life and cater to people, like many probably on this forum, who desire a real hardware experience. Those are the consoles that will be desirable, and probably super expensive.
A lot of collectors have no idea what they are doing. I see people all the time looking for "OEM" power supplies, when they will likely die any day. They should be looking for new power supplies that work correctly like the Sega Trio. Those people, and there are a lot of them, will be out of collecting and dump all their shit just because they can't get OEM. Because they are that anal about collecting, opposed to enjoying. They will get tired of dicking around with their Famicom Disk Systems, and deleted FDS games, and say "Fuck it, I'm out", just like I already have.
There will probably always be a market, but the market will probably shift to mainly real collectors who don't even play games and might even collect them with no intention to care for them. Then there will be the people that still desire the real experience legitimate hardware provides, and be willing to shell out some serious cash for working/refurbished stuff. That will be the transitional phase before everything is completely broken for good with no hope to be fixed. Then it will be worth next to nothing except to collectors in a few hundred years that want to actually hold the games they enjoy via emulation.
I think it's important to understand that there will be a transitional period. It's not going to crash all at once. It will crash for good when all systems and games are beyond repair. Until that point it's going to get worse before it gets better. But eventually there will be so many people dumping games right before everything is truly broken that the market will be flooded.
When you have to scour eBay for a working SNES console like you do a Metal Slug 1 AES now, the used game market will be flooded for those respective consoles and their games. No one is going to buy those games when they can't afford/find a/another working console.
