Topic: Most valuable Wii U games?

Totally agree, tho I do think unopened Zelda and other Nintendo franchise stuff might be worth something.

@rockodoodle
Supply and demand. The question is how much demand there will be for the Wii U disc specifically. It's not like Earthbound or something where the only way to play the game as it was originally is to hunt down the cartridge. With something like BotW on Wii U you'll be able to get an "authentic" version with a Wii U disc, Wii U download, Switch cart or Switch download. And odds are people will rather the superior Switch version.

People will always like collecting. To some, a Switch card of a Wii U game is not the same as having the original Wii U release, box etc.

@gcunit
No question at all that those people will always exist. I'm just thinking that maybe with the Wii U the wind is going to be taken out of the sails quite a bit because of Switch ports and digital distribution. Think about it, if the Switch gets ports of most of the Wii U's biggest hitters why would you start a Wii U collection? The Switch is going to draw in more of an audience.

Then there's digital distribution which, frankly, hasn't really been a factor for retro gaming yet. Sure you can download SNES games and even do it legitimately but you can't download it legitimately for the original hardware. With Wii U you can. And while you still can people who just want to play the game will be able to do so without paying more than whatever the eShop price is.

Basically I just think that the Wii U is just about the worst console to be speculating on games with. It sold poorly for sure but everything else about it is going to make it super hard for games to become and remain expensive.

Cars 3 in the UK is an Argos Store Exclusive so that might go up at some point. Can't imagine they'll be selling that version for much longer especially being other other systems.

Hello Kitty Cruisers is like 100 at gamestop.

@Samus7Killer In the US anyway. In the UK its still around the £15-20 mark off of the top of my head. Heck, I still see new copies being sold by the publisher at London Comic Con.

In-fact, quite a few of those rare licensed games in the US at still at the £15-20 mark here. Might be worth considering the Euro versions with either a PAL Wii U or region modded Wii U should you go now that path of a complete Wii U Set.

@Angelic_Lapras_King I'd never want these overpriced kiddie games that pubs printed low quantities of. Collector or not, i will not have such filth in my house. Im fine with the 20 physical games i own.

@Samus7Killer I know, but there are some collectors that go for EVERY game, kiddie sports the lot, when going after a full set.

@Angelic_Lapras_King good for them. I wont have it!
But sad they have to pay outrageous prices for such a game.

I will never go for a complete set. I bought 180 retail games for the Wii that I think are the best and most valuable in the whole library. I'm still missing 20ish games before I can call it a complete set of quality titles in mint condition scoring from 10/10 down to 6/10 with any truly forgettable game with no redeeming points filtered out.

I'm not sure about what Wii U games will rise in value. It's hard to say.
One factor to count in are Wii U games that are only on retail but not on the eShop. They will be harder to get as time goes by and therefore generate more curiosity. Around 20 retail games were already taken down from the Wii U eShop so if you want to play them now you 've to find a physical version. Also, a dozen of Wii U retail games never made it to the Wii U eShop in the first place. I always thought Mass Effect 3 Special Edition would be one of those rare pearls, but Gamestop is still throwing it away used for a tenner. It wouldn't hurt to pick it up for the price (as it's totally worth it) and sell it for 80 in 20 years.
I'd also aim for the low print indie retail games FAST RACING NEO, SteamWorld Collection, Shovel Knight, Teslagrad, and Terraria. In general low print is always sought after. I'm still checking regularly for that elusive PAL version of Impossible Mission for Wii.

@Sargon Project Zero: Maiden of Black Water (Limited Edition) was almost impossible to buy and only released in Europe. I was lucky and got my copy. I love it.

Not only that but the game is built around the GamePad, which makes it difficult to port.

@skywake I think - just to be contrarian - that the Wii U will actually be a console that really appeals to collectors for a few reasons.

1 - Every Wii U retail release works without patches
2 - There was a relatively small number of games released making a "full set" of retail releases possible.
3 - Wii U games were often small production runs.
4 - Most games used (to some degree) some of the unique novel features of the gamepad. Whilst they were usually peripheral features they were there and not all of those are easily replicated.
5 - The Wii U was the follow up to the Wii (one of the all time great marketing case studies) and the predecessor to the Switch (which is another marketing case study in making). It's a curiosity piece in other words.
6 - It's the best local multiplayer console ever.
7 - Even if you don't want a full retail set it's a console for which you can definitely realistically hope to own all of the games actually worth owning/playing.

Oh and one more thing - it was a reasonably expensive format to own when new and never really became cheap.

@StuTwo I agree with you, it will be like Dreamcast or something like that.

@BlueOcean Yeah - Dreamcast consoles and games have held up in price really well despite the games being comically easy to pirate.

I sold my Dreamcast a while back and made comfortably more than I'd paid for it all when new.

I kinda agree with the Dreamcast comparison but I just wanted to point out that Dreamcast game prices tanked from 2004 to 2010, only to go up again with the recent "collector's bubble". The Dreamcast was my main console from 1999 to 2010 - I've bought games for it for more than a decade.

Between 2004 and 2010 you could find most "mainstream" Dreamcast games for less than a fiver - Virtua Fighter 3TB, Virtua Tennis 1 and 2, Metropolis Street Racing, Soul Calibur, Jet Set Radio, Dead or Alive 2, Crazy Taxi, Soul Reaver, Shadowman, GTA2, Sega GT - and the list goes on. A lot of Dreamcast must haves could be purchased for less than £5.

In 2010 I started keeping a list of the games I buy and the price I pay for them (as I do with the records I buy) and on my list I can see that I bought Spawn, Trickstyle, Plasma Sword, LeMans24 Hours, Marvel vs Capcom and a few others for 4 quid each - Ebay Buy It Now prices. In the same year I bought Power Stone for £6.30, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure for £13 and a series of american imports (including Daytona, 18 Wheelers, Ecco and Space Channel 5) for as little as £2.40 a piece. These are again, all Ebay Buy it Now prices and the game were bought on a whim, without much investigation about average prices.

Even Grandia II, the last game I ever bought for Dreamcast in 2011, didn't cost more than £20. There is a handful of Dreamcast games that have been constantly fully priced, but it's a minority (Skies of Arcadia, Shenmue 2, Rez and the japanese SHMUPS).

However, today, with modern prices and the game collectors' frenzy, all prices have increased - but for at least a decade the Dreamcast was notoriously the cheapest console to buy great games for. I am surprised you could sell it and make more money than what you paid for everything new.

I realise my post doesn't make yours less true because eventually, Dreamcast games did hold up in price rather well - you are correct given the current state of affairs. But I just wanted to mention my experience because we can't talk about Dreamcast prices now without mentioning that they have been dirt cheap for a decade. I expect the price of WiiU games to drop to a comical low in the next few years, only to be re-discovered much later. Not much reason to pay high prices now, especially for mainstream games.

@spizzamarozzi True. I was thinking of facts like Wii U is a console that received fewer games than average and thus it has the potential to become the typical collector's thing like @StuTwo suggested.

I agree with your point, because of the collector's bubble of this decade, some people have been collecting limited editions during the decade just to sell them in the future. It might not work as well as they think, though. For example, Project Zero: Maiden of Black Water (Limited Edition) is expensive on Ebay since launch but it was very "limited" indeed and still you can get it new for €100-200 which is expensive but not crazily expensive. I only got one and I'm not selling it. I had problems with my pre-order and I almost didn't get it.

Because of the "collector's bubble", only the games before it started have the potential to sell for thousand or even hundred thousand euros in the future like some rare sealed NES, SNES and Mega Drive games. Unfortunately, I don't have any of those. It is funny that some of these elite games collectors only buy them in case that they cost even more in the future, which makes the "collector's bubble" an appropriate term.

I would also add that there's a slight difference between the two libraries. Both had very strong first party releases, brilliant, but the Dreamcast had a lot of third party exclusives, which the WiiU sadly lacks.

If you think of the wealth of shmups and fighting games (most of which were exclusive to the Dreamcast at the time of release), the racing games, the RPGs (off the top of my head I can think of 4 exclusive third party RPGs for Dreamcast) plus all the quirky little games such as Maken X, Toy Commander, Ooga Booga, Blue Stinger etcetera, the Dreamcast does have an interesting and highly unique library to explore, even beyond Sega.

If you take away all the first party stuff from the WiiU library, you're basically left with very few exclusives, some multi-plats, and a saucerful of shovelware. It lacks a bit that wackiness that made the Dreamcast such an interesting console to re-discover in my opinion, so I'm not sure how the WiiU library will be seen in the years to come.

@StuTwo I really like all the points you make.

Let me add, that a real complete Wii U collection contains all Wii games as well, because they all can be played on it too (except the few Wii games that need Gamecube controllers).

Wii U has the benefit of playing the massive and extraordinary Wii library, which makes the console even more valuable and attractive for a collector like me.

Depends entirely on which are ported to switch. Would expect Mario Kart 8 and Pokken prices to fall soon if they haven't already, for example. Cartridges also likely to hold value longer than discs.