I know this thing has been out since last year but I have a question about it regarding the price.

I pre-ordered this from CD Japan and ended up paying like $250 all things considered which is still better than what people on amazon want for it...

...but then I see the suggested retail price was only 14700 yen?

Yet I ordered the Rockman X Box from CD Japan and there was no such jump in price...?

Did anyone else encounter this and/or have some negative feelings about it?

Also, I don't know if anyone knows, but the CD Japan website lists the RockCan as out of print... yet you can still buy it?

I didn't buy it because I thought it going to be rare but I was kind of thinking it was going to replace the Rockman 1-6 Box this it would be produced in decent numbers. Is this Capcom's plan or is it really out of print?

Sorry for the all the questions but I'm curious.

The Rock Can was a special order item so you're paying their special request services markup for it.  The Rockman X Box is a standard CPCA release that you don't have to special order.  I paid the same $250 for the Rock Can. 

*******************************************
NEODAI-2242 Goods / Mega Man Series OST Collection
  GOODS 17640yen  Released: 2012/06/01

Payment Method : PayPal
*******************************************
Subtotal :          17640yen
Shipping :          2900yen
--------------------------------
Total : 20540yen
        US$254.37

I don't know of the specific print status or if it's actually OOP or not, but that might just be a limitation of their special request system.  They upload special requests as actual releases with the NEODAI-#### catalog number so it might just be how they have to put it in the system to get it into their eMarket database for order availability.

Oh, okay... I was kind of assuming that the Rockman X Box wasn't a standard release given it's massive size but I guess it doesn't include anything like the tin.

The physical format doesn't matter here. Just if the publisher decides that only one specific shop should have the right to distribute the release.

Anyone seen that the price for this thing has skyrocketed lately? $250 seems meager now.

If I had to guess it's because it was a limited print run and they probably didn't make that many and are all out by now.

Good investment. Congratulations.

In a certain sense your right... but couldn't it just be a lull in production? I remember a few times in the past the previous boxes were hard to find for small periods of time and this basically just gave sellers an excuse to mark them up.

Anything I say is just speculation at this point but I'm fairly certain large box sets, ESPECIALLY ones that come in specially designed cases or displays (like RockCan or earlier the Wizardry box), just don't get reprinted.  I think that 2 year print run thing you always see (or used to see?) on albums was always the "we'll print more copies and make more on demand up until <this> date but after that we're done".  I don't think specially designed box sets ever really follow that logic because everything about them costs more -- production, marketing, distribution, warehousing, shipping, etc. 

A good example of how this works was the old Suikoden box set that Konami wanted to publish.  They wanted to see how much demand there was for a Suikoden box set and said "if we get 1000 preorders we'll make 1000".  There weren't enough preorders, so they ended up cancelling it.  I've never seen a company poll like that before but I imagine that every company has to go through that kind of logic before making a box set like that because they'd largely be a revenue loss with the cost of production and how few people buy them.

tldr: box sets are always hard to come by.  If you really want one you really need to find a way to preorder/special order or get it as quickly as possible because there is no guarantee they'll be around later.  See: Breath of Fire Box Set, Rock Can, SaGa Premium Box, every DQ  Box set ever, etc.  I mean, even the Ghibli ga Ippai box set I have from like 1996 is still hundreds and hundreds of dollars and everything in it's been printed and reprinted individually like 3 to 4 times.  It's either that or attempt to navigate the ebb and flow of the secondary market and various vgm speculators out there.

In the forever I've been collecting vgm and buying box sets I only ever remember one being widely available after it's release and that was the Castlevania box set that randomly got price dropped 50% on amazon.co.jp to something like 6500Y from the original listing price of almost 200000 and I have no idea why or how but a lot of people took advantage of that.  That, and the one time I accidentally bought a second DQ box set and sold it to Ramza because I held on to it until he got enough money for it, lol.

The issue with boxsets is most fans of the stuff have a number of the soundtracks included. The people getting the best deals are the ones that have none of the included music or if there is like one really HTF soundtrack included (MMX8, which apparently was going in the triple digits). Even the Guilty Gear boxset a few years ago, beauty of a set and the arrange disc is excellent, but I'm not enough of a collector to essentially rebuy a number of soundtracks I already own (someone please tell me why I still have that stupid GGX arcade soundtrack after all these years...).

Off-topic, but any input on the newer DQ boxset? I generally like the London Philharmonic ones, but I feel like they mixed the strings too high. I tend to prefer the original set of Symphonic Suites in most cases (NHK...I don't think there was a boxset that collected these). They sound more relaxed.

The 2-year date, I thought, was not a print date, but the first date that sellers were allowed to charge less than retail price for the album.