When Concord released for the PlayStation 5, Game Wrecks was little more than an idea. Two weeks later, this site was in its infancy and Concord was on its death bed.

The physical copy of the game sold at retailers for 11 days before a message from Firewalk Studios game director Ryan Ellis opened the floodgates for mass returns. The unintended consequence of creating a poorly selling game and then allowing for refunds less than two weeks later was the creation of one of the rarest games in the PlayStation 5’s library.

Already the market has started to respond. Just the Concord disc by itself has sold on eBay for an average of $75. The consumer base for Concord at this point is made up of mostly speculators and connoisseurs of rare garbage, but history tells us that both could be correct about the flop’s future value.

Devil’s Third

• System: Wii U
• Current Value (CIB): $242

Somehow or another, Nintendo saw something in Valhalla Studios’ mature third-person shooter, and agreed to publish it in order to save the game from cancellation. It was the brain child of Tomonobu Itagaki, most famous for his work on Ninja Gaiden, who had left Team Ninja to work with Valhalla Studios.

Whatever Nintendo saw in Devil’s Third, audiences did not.

The game felt monotonous, with a swordfighting component shoehorned onto the third person shooter aspect of the game. Devil’s Third sold poorly as a result. Apparently, Nintendo themselves had somewhat lost faith in the game as the launch date approached, and made it an extremely limited release.

Three factors work in Devil’s Third owners’ favor when it comes to price: Nintendo published the game, copies of the game are rare, and in the years since the game’s launch it has developed something of a cult following. Despite its quality, there are still people who want the game, creating a low-supply high-demand market.

Interestingly enough, the PAL version of Devil’s Third still only sells for around $60 complete in box. This is because the game got a wider release in Europe, although sales were still low.

NBA Elite 11

• System: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360
• Current Value (CIB): $3,360

I’m cheating a little bit here.

Electronic Arts attempted to cancel the release of NBA Elite 11… after having already sent retailers copies of the game. EA requested that retailers send the copies back, but naturally some stores accidentally sold copies.

The reason EA attempted to cancel the game at all is because the game’s presentation was so rough that they could not even create a decent looking gameplay trailer. So technically, it was a game that sold poorly due to poor quality that is now extremely valuable.

At the time, EA was trying to cut into 2K’s NBA video game dominance with NBA Live, with not much success. They had rebranded to NBA Elite, which was the title of the mobile app EA fully released, but EA never released another basketball game for home consoles.

There are likely fewer than one thousand copies of NBA Elite 11 in circulation for either console it was planned for, making it a “holy grail” collectors item and primarily driving the price.

Rule of Rose

• System: PlayStation 2
• Current Value (CIB): $628.00

Rule of Rose was sold poorly, but not just due to a lack of quality. Rumors surrounding the game’s more mature content caused an uproar, particularly in Europe, and negatively affected sales. The outrage led to the game getting canceled in the United Kingdom despite the British ratings board deeming Rule of Rose acceptable for sale.

Rule of Rose was a pioneer in the psychological horror genre, and it may have been a little ahead of its time. The game has become a cult classic among horror genre enthusiasts, although it still has a 59 on Metacritic.

In a highly unusual turn of events, the PAL version of Rule of Rose actually decreased in rarity, or at least the sealed copy did. Somebody in Italy discovered an unopened shipment of about 400 sealed copies, almost immediately tanking the price. It got to the point where opened copies of the PAL release were selling for more money than the sealed copies were.

Conker’s Bad Fur Day

• System: Nintendo 64
• Current Value (CIB): $255

The world was not ready for Conker.

Modern audiences generally appreciate Conker’s Bad Fur Day‘s gameplay and crude humor, but while the game was on the market, the world’s favorite alcoholic squirrel was just incompatible with the N64’s audience of mostly younger players.

Upon acquiring the developer Rare, Microsoft secured a remake of Conker’s Bad Fur Day as an exclusive for the original Xbox titled Conker: Live and Reloaded. The remake saw higher sales, with the Xbox’s audience being composed of edgy early 2000’s teens who appreciated the game’s irreverence.

Because Conker’s Bad Fur Day‘s humor is far more acceptable today, it is one of the most highly sought after N64 games, and even the loose copies consistently sell for over $115. The game did get a full rerelease in the Rare Replay compilation, which initially brought down the market value to about $60, but it doubled in value between 2015 and 2021.

FIFA 14

• System: PlayStation 2
• Current Value (CIB): $120

FIFA 14 as a game sold well. Those sales did not come from the PlayStation 2 release.

FIFA 14 released on just about every console released after the year 2000, including the PlayStation Portable and the Nintendo Wii. But the oldest console that got FIFA 14 was the PlayStation 2, making it the last game ever officially released on the console.

Although releasing a PlayStation 2 game with the PlayStation 4 already on the market sounds absurd, there was some reasoning behind the decision. The PlayStation 2 was and still is the best selling home console of all time, and the sales strategy of just about any FIFA game is to ensure that as many people can play them as possible. It was not unreasonable to assume there were still some people still using the PlayStation 2, even if it was mostly for their DVD-playing capabilities.

That being said, FIFA 14 for the PlayStation 2 was a very limited release for obvious reasons, and because of that it is really the only FIFA game that retro game collectors actively seek out.