Unless there is a discovery of a warehouse full of these in the future, like it or not, this shitty game is going to remain valuable.
Valuable to obedient capitalist stooges who value things based on what other people say, yeah, but no sane person would pay more than $100 for the thing. As it is they are paying $6000 a year in interest on the money they borrowed to buy the piece of crap. When you say "I respect what this thing is worth" you are by proxy saying that you respect the total losers from hell that paid this money for it. Sure its possible that the guy that bought the $40,000 copy is 50 Cent or Steve Jobs...but it really probably isn't. Its just some f*cktard with too much credit, or possibly even a gang of f*cktards who pooled their Visas together to buy the thing and will eventually end up suing each other for custody. This isn't a case of supply/demand and all that, its just a mental case idiot who probably only owns one pair of sheets spending what could be the down payment on a half a million dollar house on a useless plastic wrapped box that will never sell for that much money again.
I am not sure if I agree with you that the buyer of a Stadium Events is someone maxing out a credit card. A figure that is commonly quoted is that 1% of the population of this country hold 90% of its wealth. That means roughly 3 million people in this country could somewhat easily purchase a Stadium Events and not be broke because of it.
Furthermore, regardless of if you think it is foolish or not, the game has been a great investment as of late. Imagine if you paid $5,000 for a Stadium Events cartridge in 2005, or if you purchased $5,000 of stock. Odds are your return on equity would be much greater for Stadium Events than most any publicly traded stock. That is why rich people are told to diversify their portfolio. People should hold stocks, bonds, munis, T-Bills, and valued assets. The common asset purchases for a wealthy people are art, cars, or real estate. I am fairly certain that the video game market as an investment has eclipsed all of those other alternative investments in the past few years.
Maybe the person who buys this Stadium Events is a Wall Street investor that has absolutely no care for video games? Maybe the skyrocketing value of the game is enticing enough for a wealthy individual to take a risk on this alternative investment?
I am not a fan of video games as investments, because I collect games to play them. Games as investments means that my hobby has become more expensive, and I really dislike that. However, as a person who works in finance, it would be ignorant to ignore the investment value of video games as of late, especially for top dollar items that are grabbing headlines.
Maybe Yahoo! will publish another article on the person who purchases the game, and that way we can see who is right about the purchaser.