Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Mega Man Fans Buy On Annoucement of Mega Man 9

Mega Man 9 is a brand new game in the original Mega Man series with 8-bit graphics (and slowdown and flicker like the old days). It was announced July 4th and released at the end of September 2008 on Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360.

Did the game cause game collectors to go buy the original eight Mega Man games? And if so when did they buy the games, when MM9 was announced or when it was released?

Using our price charts show below we analyzed the prices for all the original 8 Mega Man games.

You can see that 7 out of the 8 original Mega Man games increased in price after the announcement. The average price increase was 16% from June to September. After release only 4 out of 8 games increased in price and only averaged a 3% increase.

Gamers are like stock investors, they buy on the rumor and sell on the fact. Mega Man games increased in price more in anticipation of the new game and didn't change much at all after release.

In the charts below the red line is the price before announcement. The blue line is the release date.

Mega Man - NES


+34% After Announcement | -6% After Release

Mega Man 2 - NES


+50% After Announcement | +6% After Release

Mega Man 3 - NES


+5% After Announcement | +4% After Release

Mega Man 4 - NES


+23% After Announcement | -17% After Release

Mega Man 5 - NES


-8% After Announcement | -17% After Release

Mega Man 6 - NES


+5% After Announcement | +0% After Release

Mega Man 7 - SNES


+7% After Announcement | +3% After Release

Mega Man 8 - Playstation


+14% After Announcement | +48% After Release

5 comments :

Unknown said...

The other problem is probably due to the more recent release of the anniversary collection that probably prevented much of an increase as seen with other prequels to a recently announced game. If the anniversary collection was never released, the increase would've had a more lasting impact.

If this were considered a stock investment, it would have been a clear loser since reprints destroy potential growth of a game's resale value. This is not taking into account the value of sealed games since they can be more of a wild card in that sense.

mndrix said...

It worked out well that the announcement and release happened between June and September. According to an earlier article, video game prices are stable during that time period. So we can be relatively confident that the increases are not attributable to an overall rise in the game price level.

JJ Hendricks said...

Chris - I had completely forgotten about Mega Man Anniversary Collection. I bet a lot of people did buy that instead of the old games since they could actually play it on the new consoles.

The prices for Mega Man Anniversary Collection for Gamecube, PS2, and Xbox are all up from June to October. The Xbox price is up about 60% of so! Thanks for pointing that game out to me.

Anonymous said...

I sold my Sega Saturn copy of Mega Man 8 for $146.94 last week, so I definitely saw the benefit of the games' release.

JJ Hendricks said...

Wow. That is quite the price for Mega Man 8 on Saturn. I does look like the game has increased in price quite a bit over the last few months.

Congrats on the great sale.

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