I think for me it’s retro games, specifically. I used to have been in the used video games market for 5 years from 2008 to 2012. My goal was to construct a personal video game collection, physical copies of games I personally enjoyed growing up.
I was registered on a game trading site which served as the base of my business, I’ve made rounds of thrift store hopping and any used games market I could find locally. I’ve struck amazingly good deals and I might’ve had luck on my side a few times (for example, a guy on that game trading site gave me a free copy of Super Metroid that I got to choose for a minor mistake he felt he needed to honor.)
And I felt like I was incredibly close to completing my personal collection until 2012, I ran into some dumb drama with my sister and ex girlfriend back then. They racked up the cable bill in my name that I was trying to cancel and they wouldn’t let me cancel it until I turned in all equipment. And I was jobless at the time too, having lost my job. So I needed to sell some things and sure enough, had to sacrifice my entire collection at the time that I spent 5 long years building.
I never recovered since and this was during the golden period where it was still fairly fun to collect and everybody wasn’t pretending to be a pawn shop.
I would try continuing what collection of games I’ve tried to build, through Steam but it wasn’t the same. Nowadays, the used video games market has turned into just a platform full of resellers, pawn brokers and stingy greedy collectors.
I find it very cheapening that people treat games like they’re just tools of trade. They mean nothing and they’re treated like nothing except to make a quick buck, however possible.
It’s only worsened thanks to Goodwill and similar thrift stores, getting in on it where everyone pays too much attention as to what the prices go for on EBay and VGPC.
And we have WATA involved that hasn’t made things better. Thanks for shitting on an honest hobby, assholes.
When I got into the hobby, it was about “my dudes” out of necessity, as there simply weren’t as many releases. In many cases certain options didn’t have models, so you had to build something yourself. With 40k, this is back when Games Workshop actually encouraged kitbashing right in the codexes.
I took a long hiatus from the hobby and came back to find the high tempo of new miniature releases and the accompanying hype cycles to be overwhelming.
To me, playing 40k hyper competitively is sort of nuts. 40k has never, in any edition, been finely balanced enough to make tournaments be anything but cheeseballs.
It’s about playing with friends and having a built in sense of good play. Recently I’ve been getting a ton of mileage out of playing Space Hulk, which is just so much fun.
There’s a whole world of wargames and skirmish games outside of 40k. Even in the GW catalog, Mordheim is a great game which is going years later with a ton of fan support.
For the ultimate freeform modeling, there are games like Gaslands where you can build almost any theme and it costs a few bucks for all the materials to make a car.