Something Chris and I talked about on a recent episode of the MoeGamer Podcast (I forget exactly which one, otherwise I'd link it) was the fact that, with the advent of the limited-run "boutique" publisher in the last generation of gaming hardware or so, it is no longer really possible or desirable to have a "complete collection" of games for a single platform.
I mean, with several thousand games available for the PS2 alone, I'd argue that hasn't been particularly easy or practical to do for a long time now anyway, but the fact that a lot of games are now released as either "get 'em while they're hot" or digital-only means that people are more likely to have completely unique collections of games, rather than everyone having the same old predictable things as each other.
In some respects, this can be a bit of a pain; I'm still salty that I didn't really get into Shantae until well after Limited Run Games had published both Risky's Revenge and Pirate's Curse for PS4 — though I did at least manage to snag Pirate's Curse for Switch, which is fine by me because everything is better on Switch and all that. If you get into something late and you missed the limited print run… well, you're pretty much out of luck, unless you want to pay exorbitant prices to eBay scalpers, and I refuse to do that on principle.
On the other hand, though, I think this is neat, because it encourages people to be individuals, and to express themselves through their game collections. If you have gaming enthusiast friends over and they look through your collection, do you have games that will make people go "hmm, I never heard of that, what is it?" I have loads of titles like this — not all of them are limited-run affairs, of course, but a goodly proportion are, and that excites me.
I'm not 100% sure why, to be honest, because I'm not going to sell my collection and I don't have anyone to "pass it on" to in the event of my untimely (or indeed timely) demise… but I just like knowing that I have this stuff. It's a symbol of the things that are important to me; of how I've spent a significant portion of my life; of friends I've made along the way; of experiences I've had, and experiences I'm still yet to have.
I don't really have a point with which to conclude this other than "games are pretty cool". So I guess we'll leave it at that!
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