The famous, and at times legendary, Japanese retro game scene is suffering a major setback and one local resident, Oliver Jia, couldn’t help but express his disappointment at this drastic change.
Having long been a fan of retro games, Jia found himself faced with increasingly bare shelves in Surugaya shopsin Kyoto, his favorite stop for retro gaming and collectibles.
A year ago, Surugaya in Kyoto was a retrogame paradise, but now it’s a skeleton. The PS1 section is half empty, and all that remains is a fraction of the Famicom Disk System games that once crowded the shelves. Westerners have taken everything, to the point that I no longer even try to go retrogame shopping in big Japanese cities.
Oliver Jia
In the long series of back-and-forths with users on X, Jia reports having seen with his own eyes what we can define as a “Western scalper“, emptying an entire shelf of games, leaving virtually nothing for other buyers.
This behavior has become increasingly common, as more and more “improvised dealers”, passing off cheerfully for foreign tourists in search of collectibles, they crowd the shops with the aim of emptying them to resell them later.
I have nothing against tourists, the real ones, who buy even dozens of games to actually play them, or to enrich their collection, but those who empty entire shelves, buying numerous copies of the same product, just to resell everything online, ruin everyone this wonderful hobby.
Oliver Jia
At the moment the Japanese have begun to stock up on shops outside the big cities, which still have them reasonable supplies to satisfy everyone, but this situation is likely to spread to these more remote locations too.
Oliver also pointed out how the pandemic has only made things worse, with a surge in “improvised retailers” who exploited the fact that everyone was addicted to online shopping to explode this trend.
However, Jia is keen to point out that he has nothing against those who have opened businesses, including online ones Resale of retro games by settling in Japan and contributing to the national economy, his dissent is only for those who, trying to copy these realities, regularly visit the nation to empty the shelves thinking they have a small fortune in their hands.
However, Oliver maintains one optimistic outlook on the future of the sector. “The demand for retrogames is cyclical,” she explains. “We are currently in a period of high demand, but once this is met, prices and supplies will tend to stabilize again.”
Despite the sad decline in stock of retrogames in major stores in Japanese cities, Jia found a way out to satisfy his passion: online shopping. “There are many online shops and suppliers who speak only Japanese and require a local address to ship to, still allowing me to find a series of items that this type of tourist has not yet discovered,” she admits.
Tags: Japanese fed Western touts empty shops
