GameCube Component Cable Prices Holding Steady at or Just Below $300
Prices have still been holding steady around the $300 mark heading into 2025. I've been reading quite a few posts here about the high cost of these cables. Although they are considered rare, there seem to be plenty available on ebay at any given time. I do question however, how much longer these values are going to hold up as most TVs made today lack the option for component video inputs altogether. As with another Redditor, I was lucky to buy mine way before the mid-2010s massive price jump. I purchased mine in 2008 for $45-50 on ebay when they were already going for $80 back then. With component video mostly having been phased out as a past technology in favor of HDMI, I may list mine on ebay in the near future. What are your thoughts on value of these cables at this point? The TV's out there that still host component inputs won't last forever.
I would also like to clarify some of the mystery surrounding why this cable went NLA so much earlier than the GC console. For those wondering about why they were discontinued (and have such limited supply) or why studies showed that such a small percentage of GCN users actually used this feature, it's important to remember than when Gamecube was released in 2001, most people didn't own an HDTV yet, nor did they even know what they were. Most consumers were still buying affordable CRTs, and unless you owned a very high end model CRT, they didn't even have a component connection; in fact you were lucky to have S-Video in.
There were few HDTV signals being broadcasted at the time and blu ray wasn't even around yet, so there was little incentive to buy an HDTV at an astronomical price of several thousand dollars. It can be said with absolute certainty that Nintendo was way ahead of it's time with this feature. The choice to discontinue the component feature saved on production costs of new consoles too since they didn't have to manufacture the digital port. This kept prices competitive with other platforms such as Playstation and Xbox, also competing for a share of the market. By the time HDTVs finally started to become mainstream, Nintendo was already sunsetting GCN and focussing on release of the Wii, which can be argued was far behind it's time since most people didn't understand why the next gen console did NOT have 1080 resolution when competing consoles featured HDMI with much more simplified connections. This all while HD was mainstream at that point, so it's anyone's guess what happened there. That's for another post though.