Collect-A-Thon – A Video Game Collection App

As a form of media, video games have always been a prevalent piece that tie to people who integrate them into their own everyday lives, typically as hobbies. Before fully becoming a mainstream industry, the production of video games initially began in the 1950’s before becoming a niche market that nearly faced collapse on several occasions due to shorter resources and rising costs of production at the time. As time progressed, however, the video game industry has grown substantially with advancements in technology and hardware that allow consoles to be produced at a more effective rate, leading to far bigger numbers of video games for people to collect in spades.

Image Source: https://www.demandsage.com/gamers-statistics/

As statistics were recorded back in 2024, the global population has been recorded to show that 3.2 billion people are known to play video games in their everyday lives according to DemandSage. These metrics have grown substantially and continue to increase with every passing day due to the level of relevance and impact that video games have achieved. Yet significantly less people are known and seen to regularly possess a large library of video games and consoles, rendering the wide-spread collection of them to be considered a niche hobby in comparison. The reason for this is because due to rise of video games as a form of media over the years, hardware has consistently grown and evolved as it gives birth to newer consoles that continue to house even more games. This causes older games along with their consoles to become scarce, resulting in them being more difficult to find and purchase because these older consoles becoming obsolete. This is one of the biggest reasons why collecting older copies of video games has become a niche purpose for several people who play video games. All the while, older games along with their respective consoles continue to dwindle in supply and relevance despite still being products that function as pieces of industry history that people will often never find anywhere else until they’re entirely unavailable.

With this in mind, I still proposed that this hobby could be utilized for the purpose of the design of an app to fill that niche: a Video Game Collection App known as Collect-A-Thon. While using this app, Users can quickly and conveniently catalog an inventory of any copies of games or consoles they’ve collected onto a personal list, allowing them a more readily available method allowing them to keep a personal inventory of any video games or consoles they might currently have. The app has a wide range of video games and consoles documented from different eras, allowing several options for curious eyes who either want to simply be aware of them or to expand their collection even further.

My role was to integrate essential features into Collect-A-Thon that would benefit most from seeking to expand on its versatility. For example, I was responsible for implementing the wish-list feature for any games or consoles that the User might not have collected yet, while being made even more effective when combined with in-app feature to quickly locate any nearby stores that a game or console was available to purchase. In addition, even smaller cosmetic features such as visual menu customization helped even further enrich the experience, allowing Users personal freedom over how they want to visually assemble their list of collected video games on top of any style of game elements to really make the collection feel even more like their own; 8-Bit, 16-Bit, 3D, and more. By producing a Video Game Collection App that gives Users as much freedom of usage as possible, this helped function towards filling the niche of people collecting them regardless of abundance or scarcity while helping video games further expand as an industry and a medium.