I’m focused on NES, SNES, N64, Master System, and Genesis at the moment. I’ve just about reached the end of the cheap NES games and bought an Everdrive N8 Pro earlier this year. Mainly for ROM translations and homebrew, but I will admit to playing some of the higher dollar games on it. I’d much rather play actual carts though.
For me personally, I’ve found that I’ll go upwards of $60+ for a RPG or meatier action adventure game, but haven’t so far spent more than that on any of the consoles.
I’ve also opted to buy ports over original games in some cases. Chrono Trigger for example, I won’t spend $250 on it so I bought the Japanese DS port since it was $30 shipped and supports English out of the box.
I have quite a large game collection 8200 games (6600 physical games) and the cutoff for me was Covid. The prices all went crazy high. The only reason I have such a huge collection is because I love to find bargains like $1 per game. Another thing is most people now have smart phones and look up prices at yard sales and thrift stores. This means less people selling for cheap but also more flippers hunting for deals to resell.
I still buy games, but it’s way less often than before 2020.