He has hoarding tendencies and I believe he just likes being part of the "community".
It's a classic consoomer's community, just like so many fandoms. Your quality as a human being is judged by your collection, in both size and rarest pieces. Have at least five SNES RPGs on original cartridges? It doesn't matter how well you know them, just owning them gets you into the Papa Big Dick Club.
I've told him that they're just going to degrade and end up being worthless. He doesn't care cause "that will take forever".
Yup, bit rot. Though also, cartridge connectors can wear out from how they scrape against the console's own connectors, and discs lose their factory adhesive over time. It's already happening en masse with HD-DVDs. PS1 and Sega CD games are hitting 30 years old now, they're probably over the hill in terms of how long those discs will last.
I told him he could just pirate, he doesn't care because he doesn't even play the vast majority of them and simply likes them because they're "physical".
I pirate all of the old games I own because emulation is an overall better experience. I will never, ever play a retro JRPG on real hardware ever again because those games are insufferable without a speedup button. I guess you could tell him that piracy lets him enjoy the games without putting forth extra wear-and-tear, though I figure he wouldn't care.
In fact, he gets pissed off because I don't collect games and actively sold off my entire collection 3 years ago because the prices were just too good to pass up.
Very based
He thinks it's "disgusting" because I have such a wider knowledge of retro games than he does (both from actually playing games and actually being involved before it became "cool" however many years ago). He doesn't understand how I find my autistic knowledge of all this shit shameful.
He's a fun dude to hang with when it comes to other stuff, but honestly he's the most annoying "gamer" I know in real life simply because he has spent thousands on his collection and still comes off as a complete poser.
Yup, like I said earlier, consoomer communities don't give a fuck about how much you actually know or care about the product in question. What matters is how much of it you have. It's pointless to hang out in a club like that, where you just enjoy your lifelong collection you built up back when games were cheap and you were young, and yet, dudes burning entire paychecks on overpriced carts on eBay can garner even more respect because they can just burn a grand on Little Samson and then pose holding it with a soyface.
I'll always enjoy my games, and I'll always enjoy talking about them, but it's just a hobby. I can dump my collection at any time. I've been thinking about it a lot, anyway, considering I do not give a flying fuck about most of them. I am also really fuckin' sick of Sony catering to pedophiles, to the point where I'd just chuck most of my PlayStation stuff directly into the garbage if it weren't worth good money. I'll keep the portables because those are generally good. Everything PS4 can be shot straight into the sun for all I care.