Sealed Kingdom Hearts Cesa print sold for 5K best offer

[Mijael | 347]

Found this at ebay: sold for $5000  best offer  Kingdom hearts Cesa Print . What do you think? is this pure marketing or does this print has organic collectivity?

Edited February 3, 2022 by Mijael

[AdamW | 713]

I'm kinda expecting that if the market as a whole holds out, a massive bump in value for Japanese prints of games that were first released in Japan has to be in the cards. They are ridiculously under-priced by the standard of NA copies ATM. Either the NA prices have to crash (big speculative money gets out of the market) or the JP prices have to come up (big speculative money finally figures out the Japanese prints are desirable). If you're at all plugged in to the markets it's fairly obvious a few people have come to this conclusion and are buying the crap out of unopened/sealed JP games at this point...

[OptOut | 8,884]

35 minutes ago, AdamW said:

If you're at all plugged in to the markets it's fairly obvious a few people have come to this conclusion and are buying the crap out of unopened/sealed JP games at this point...

[RH | 4,904]

Past experience never guarantees future performance, but I just don't see there ever being a HUGE spike in demand for Japanese games in the US.  Yes, it can go up.  Values might even double or triple, but we won't see the jumps like we did in the last five years for games like Super Mario Bros 1 or 3.

There's something about Japanese stuff.  You either "get it" and love it tremendously, or you don't and don't care.  Most people don't get it and don't care.

[inasuma | 1,203]

1 hour ago, AdamW said:

I'm kinda expecting that if the market as a whole holds out, a massive bump in value for Japanese prints of games that were first released in Japan has to be in the cards. They are ridiculously under-priced by the standard of NA copies ATM. Either the NA prices have to crash (big speculative money gets out of the market) or the JP prices have to come up (big speculative money finally figures out the Japanese prints are desirable). If you're at all plugged in to the markets it's fairly obvious a few people have come to this conclusion and are buying the crap out of unopened/sealed JP games at this point...

 

18 minutes ago, RH said:

Past experience never guarantees future performance, but I just don't see there ever being a HUGE spike in demand for Japanese games in the US.  Yes, it can go up.  Values might even double or triple, but we won't see the jumps like we did in the last five years for games like Super Mario Bros 1 or 3.

I'm not saying you're wrong but folks have been saying this type of thing, seemingly for the past 10 years. No I did not spend many nights crawling nintendoage forum archives to come to this conclusion.

[AdamW | 713]

@RHthe way I see it, the key thing is there's a large amount of new money which ostensibly values "cultural significance" and release precedence. And a lot of that new money is fairly dumb - it doesn't really know the market and it doesn't seem to bother doing any research beyond "what HA wrote in the description". My take is that once someone tells that money to care about JP releases, it will. What I kinda expect to happen is for someone - clink, Goldin, or maybe just some high-profile eBay seller - to run a sale of something like an unopened first print SMB or Zelda which manages to get some traction, pull in a crazy price, and then there'll be a rush.

Part of what influenced me on this is that I saw a discussion on the discord for one of the fractional asset companies which made it clear that a) both the company and its superfans were interested in JP games, and b) neither the company nor the superfans had any actual knowledge about them.

But yup, I could be wrong! No way to tell other than time. And I can't claim to be disinterested in this case either, so take my take with a pinch of salt.

[YOURTURN | 1,256]

I want to point out that @AdamW has probably been spying on me. Because what he said is very much spot on when it comes to my pick-ups for the past 1.5 months. 

In the end I limited that portion of my collection to what I have simply because print variants are based more on serial numbers than "price down" (or "best") re-releases. But I will skip that and instead the fact that I grossly underpaid for two of my sealed games from the same Japanese eBay seller.

Hence why I have always put an emphasis on buying Japanese ports. While watching others act like they are less "rare" than their NA counterparts. Which is not always the case when it comes to PS1 ports (as an example). 

[fcgamer | 4,723]

10 hours ago, AdamW said:

I'm kinda expecting that if the market as a whole holds out, a massive bump in value for Japanese prints of games that were first released in Japan has to be in the cards. They are ridiculously under-priced by the standard of NA copies ATM. Either the NA prices have to crash (big speculative money gets out of the market) or the JP prices have to come up (big speculative money finally figures out the Japanese prints are desirable). If you're at all plugged in to the markets it's fairly obvious a few people have come to this conclusion and are buying the crap out of unopened/sealed JP games at this point...

The Japanese prints aren't particularly desirable though, and that's coming from a guy that exclusively collects Japanese. Those trying to "get in" the game by snapping up Japanese prints are failing to look at some of the obvious points, but before I address those points, I just want to inquire why you feel that "Either the NA prices have to crash...or the JP prices have to come up..." These are two totally different markets, two totally different things. Not really related to each other at all.

Now then:

1. Most Japanese games were never sealed. So what we are really discussing is CIB games*

*yes an unopened game is still a CIB game

2. As much as reseals are a problem for buyers / grading companies, unopened CIBs are an even larger headache. There's a reason the "qualified" games or whatever they are called don't go for the same premium.

3. There is little to no nostalgia for these games, from the West. If you actually look at the games that shot up in price, they are the same games that went to astronomical prices in the West...Little Samson, Panic Restaurant, etc. The folks that were buying these as Japanese versions were doing so mostly as gamers, with some speculators and Japanese sellers jumping in on the situation, though this has nothing to do with the WATA / Dentists crew.

4. The libraries are too different, at least for the Famicom / NES and N64J / N64USA. A lot of the stuff that would be desirable to the investors never even made it over there, i.e. the Marvel crap.

It's funny, licensed Famicom stuff is basically worthless in Taiwan. The Japanese are way beyond the stage of nostalgia for collecting that stuff, at least I'm under that impression, and the Taiwanese only care about the bootlegs / homemade originals. On the latter, I have seen a drastic increase in interest and price since ten years ago, but it is starting to wane again imo; I think many are just opting for cheap reproductions and emulators, with even more losing interest with the nostalgia boom dying off a few years after it started (around 2016). 

5. So Famicom games aren't desirable anymore in regions that grew up using them, often featuring foreign / unknown characters / franchises and unreadable text, yet somehow these are supposed to be the next big thing for investors? Especially since they never came sealed? Lol.

Even if someone could sell it to the numpties, it still doesn't even address one other huge issue: How many people in the West know about the actual market of unopened CIB Japanese games? Are we basing it off what's available on Yahoo Japan Auctions? Word of mouth from Western collectors, who likely wouldn't have access to the whole Japanese market? Word of mouth from Japanese sellers, who just as easily could sell used items as "NEW CIB", or hype up rarities just for their own selling needs? 

The whole idea is laughable, basically it will be a repeat of the situation of games in Korea? Lol.

[AdamW | 713]

@fcgamerWhere I'd disagree with you is that I don't agree that "desirability" is a fixed and unchanging property. It definitely isn't. Sports games have been "undesirable" for approximately ever, except that Madden just sold for nearly half a million dollars (and if you were really paying attention for a couple of months before that, you might've noticed formerly "undesirable" sports games with major players on the cover disappearing off eBay).

To point 1: in my opinion what the big money crowd cares about is whether someone will put it in a plastic case with a number on the top. VGA does this for unopened JP games. The big money crowd is getting more comfortable with VGA via clink and comicconnect auctions. I don't see any inherent reason why the kind of person who would pay six figures for a US SMB would not be interested in a JP copy in a VGA box with '90' on the top. (Also, saying 'most' is putting it too strongly; JP games were sealed from I think PSX onwards, and US copies of those generations are already starting to get into the big money category).

To point 2: this is mostly true, but I think will prove irrelevant at least for a time. There's a referee: VGA. If they say it's unopened, the market will treat it as unopened, at least until there's some kinda scandal about how they're doing it wrong. Getting VGA to pass it as unopened will be a problem/opportunity for the 'entrepreneurial' side of the market. This is analogous to the US market again. The big whales aren't buying raw games off eBay and sending them to WATA, generally; they leave that to medium-sized players who get to eat the profit if they score a good grade, or eat the loss if they get a reseal or a bad grade. This will be (already is) the same for JP games: there will be (already is) a category of middlepeople who do the work of buying from Japan and submitting to VGA to provide "high quality product" for the whales to buy at prominent auction houses. VGA is nearly as backed up as WATA right now, and similarly has shut down its lower priced tiers, making grading a bigger gamble for games currently valued in three figures, but I expect a decent chunk of that VGA backlog is JP games already, and if they open up lower tiers again, more are going to get sent in. Also note there's a significant exception: FDS games were sticker sealed, with a tamper evident sticker, and several significant games were first released on FDS (notably Zelda and SMB2). Yeah, there's talk about fake stickers, but then, as you said, reseals are also a thing.

To point 3: for the area I'm talking about it doesn't matter what JP games are expensive now. The ones I suspect will start going for high prices in the US at some point are the same ones whose US prints already go for high prices: Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, yadda yadda. It doesn't matter that some of these are currently not expensive at all (an unopened Zelda: LttP sold for under three hundred dollars the other day, can you imagine that for a US print, and I was too cheap to buy it, sigh). It might matter that some of them are still in relatively high supply, but enough of them aren't. An unopened first print SMB hasn't shown up for months (and the next one that does is going to sell high, by JP standards). Unopened first print Zelda doesn't come up a lot. Unopened SMW is difficult just like sealed SMW is difficult in the US.

To point 4: again true but irrelevant. There don't need to be a lot of 'desirable' games. There are only a handful of Genesis games the whales are interested in (Sonic and Madden), but hey, that's enough! Also, I wouldn't expect JP prints of USA-origin games to be worth anything much, why would they? So it wouldn't matter if Marvel stuff did get over there, logically speaking the US prints are still what should be desirable for them. The illogicality that I expect the market to correct over time is the way that, right now, JP prints of games that were made and first released in Japan are way undervalued. I'm not expecting JP prints of USA-origin games, or JP obscurities, to behave the same way.

[AdamW | 713]

Finally, to your "huge issue": it might be one in the medium-to-long term, but I don't think it would affect a short-term bump. What would matter to US whales is availability in the places they buy. It's taken like, what, two years for people to start getting the message that maybe sealed copies of SMB3 are pretty common, and that process still going on - they still sell for five figures every time HA lists one, which is nearly every day it feels like.

Given VGA's backlog, let's imagine what would happen if there was a sudden spike in value for a JP game which someone in Japan was sitting on a thousand unopened copies of. First there's a short delay while the news spreads in Japan. Then, best case (for them), they speak fluent English and maybe have a US shipping proxy read to go. They ship off fifty copies to VGA. If they're smart they have VGA forward at least some of them straight to an auction house for sale. What happens next? They wait about a year for them to get graded, on current timelines. Then they have to get through the auction house pipeline. So there's at least a year during which supply is still going to look short even if there's a pile of copies in the pipeline, and any other copies that get sold during that time - which will only be copies that other forward thinkers already got through the VGA backlog - get the benefit of the apparent 'short supply'.

Even when those copies start coming to market, as SMB3 shows, this market is apparently not that smart. There would likely still be a few months during which those copies would sell for stupid high prices even if they were getting sold off nearly every day.

[fcgamer | 4,723]

@AdamW: Right, so you are saying the following:

Games that were made and released first in Japan are undervalued; however, games that were made first in America and have Japanese counterparts (i.e. whatever Marvel did make it over there) shouldn't be worth anything much. 

Essentially, you are grasping onto the hope that Famicom games, for example, are viewed as the first print of the game, for stuff like the Marios, and therefore are currently undervalued. It is a very big stretch to view the Famicom versions as first prints, and the NES versions as second prints though. 

As for the seals, basically everything cartridge-based wasn't sealed, the disk stuff was. 

[AdamW | 713]

Pretty much, except it doesn't even have to be that binary. I'm not expecting people to decide that matte seal US SMB is worthless now. They wouldn't even have to decide JP first print SMB is more valuable that matte seal US SMB. The gap in the market looks way huger than that, to me. If you're sitting on an unopened first print SMB right now (I'm not, I wish I was :D) you don't need the market to decide it's worth more than matte seal US to be happy. If the market just decided it should be worth at least as much as a US oval seal copy, that would probably make your day...

[fcgamer | 4,723]

3 minutes ago, AdamW said:

Finally, to your "huge issue": it might be one in the medium-to-long term, but I don't think it would affect a short-term bump. What would matter to US whales is availability in the places they buy. It's taken like, what, two years for people to start getting the message that maybe sealed copies of SMB3 are pretty common, and that process still going on - they still sell for five figures every time HA lists one, which is nearly every day it feels like.

Given VGA's backlog, let's imagine what would happen if there was a sudden spike in value for a JP game which someone in Japan was sitting on a thousand unopened copies of. First there's a short delay while the news spreads in Japan. Then, best case (for them), they speak fluent English and maybe have a US shipping proxy read to go. They ship off fifty copies to VGA. If they're smart they have VGA forward at least some of them straight to an auction house for sale. What happens next? They wait about a year for them to get graded, on current timelines. Then they have to get through the auction house pipeline. So there's at least a year during which supply is still going to look short even if there's a pile of copies in the pipeline, and any other copies that get sold during that time - which will only be copies that other forward thinkers already got through the VGA backlog - get the benefit of the apparent 'short supply'.

Even when those copies start coming to market, as SMB3 shows, this market is apparently not that smart. There would likely still be a few months during which those copies would sell for stupid high prices even if they were getting sold off nearly every day.

You still have to convince the folks buying the stuff that the quirky Japanese versions are the ones they want to buy. No offense to America, but if people hate seeing bilingual signs in shopping plazas, convincing them that some game with Japanese text on the box, in a market they know even more than nothing about, is rare - well yeah, sorry bud, I honestly don't think that's where the market is at.

[fcgamer | 4,723]

1 minute ago, AdamW said:

Pretty much, except it doesn't even have to be that binary. I'm not expecting people to decide that matte seal US SMB is worthless now. They wouldn't even have to decide JP first print SMB is more valuable that matte seal US SMB. The gap in the market looks way huger than that, to me. If you're sitting on an unopened first print SMB right now (I'm not, I wish I was :D) you don't need the market to decide it's worth more than matte seal US to be happy. If the market just decided it should be worth at least as much as a US oval seal copy, that would probably make your day...

One other situation that we have is that of markets across countries, which is another reason why it's not going to happen. 

[AdamW | 713]

I'm not sure the people spending six figures on Japanese video games are the same people complaining about bilingual signs in shopping plazas.

But you could be right, and I could be wrong. Only time will tell.

[fcgamer | 4,723]

You need to get the other players to buy into it. I don't think many outside of the States are buying into the whole idea of graded games and the value as well. Good luck convincing the nation of Japan in buying into it. Again, that's the big problem with your speculation, who knows what's even over there. On the short term, yeah sure, might convince a few idiots with more money than common sense, though in a few years time, nope. Even in the short term, it would have been basically manufactured due to pipeline issues with the grading companies themselves. 

[fcgamer | 4,723]

9 minutes ago, AdamW said:

I'm not sure the people spending six figures on Japanese video games are the same people complaining about bilingual signs in shopping plazas.

But you could be right, and I could be wrong. Only time will tell.

Furthermore, who is spending six figs on Japanese video games at the moment?

[AdamW | 713]

By "Japanese video games" I meant US copies of Super Mario Bros, Zelda and Pokemon games. In my experience, the kind of people who really love those games (or speculate on the value of them) don't tend to write letters to local newspapers about malls with signs in foreign languages.

Edited February 3, 2022 by AdamW

[fcgamer | 4,723]

2 minutes ago, AdamW said:

By "Japanese video games" I meant US copies of Super Mario Bros, Zelda and Pokemon games. In my experience, the kind of people who really love those games (or speculate on the value of them) don't tend to write letters to local newspapers about malls with signs in foreign languages.

So what you are actually saying is the following?

I'm not sure the people spending six figures on North American video games are the same people complaining about bilingual signs in shopping plazas.

But you could be right, and I could be wrong. Only time will tell.

[AdamW | 713]

I think we're done here.

[fcgamer | 4,723]

1 minute ago, AdamW said:

I think we're done here.

So is that a "yes" or a "no" ?

edit: Yes or no on whether I am understanding what you meant previously.

Edited February 3, 2022 by fcgamer

[DefaultGen | 5,405]

I randomly have one of these FWIW. It was in a lot of Kingdom Hearts games that was sitting unsold BIN on Yahoo maybe a year ago. There were maybe 8-9 sealed Kingdom Hearts games in the lot and I paid like $500 for it. I was valuing it personally at $100-200 because the new GBA and DS games don't mean much to me.

Not bragging, just a counterpoint to that these are impossibly rare.

Edited June 3, 2023 by DefaultGen

[3rdStrongestMole | 430]

5 hours ago, fcgamer said:

The Japanese prints aren't particularly desirable though, and that's coming from a guy that exclusively collects Japanese. Those trying to "get in" the game by snapping up Japanese prints are failing to look at some of the obvious points, but before I address those points, I just want to inquire why you feel that "Either the NA prices have to crash...or the JP prices have to come up..." These are two totally different markets, two totally different things. Not really related to each other at all.

Now then:

1. Most Japanese games were never sealed. So what we are really discussing is CIB games*

*yes an unopened game is still a CIB game

2. As much as reseals are a problem for buyers / grading companies, unopened CIBs are an even larger headache. There's a reason the "qualified" games or whatever they are called don't go for the same premium.

3. There is little to no nostalgia for these games, from the West. If you actually look at the games that shot up in price, they are the same games that went to astronomical prices in the West...Little Samson, Panic Restaurant, etc. The folks that were buying these as Japanese versions were doing so mostly as gamers, with some speculators and Japanese sellers jumping in on the situation, though this has nothing to do with the WATA / Dentists crew.

4. The libraries are too different, at least for the Famicom / NES and N64J / N64USA. A lot of the stuff that would be desirable to the investors never even made it over there, i.e. the Marvel crap.

It's funny, licensed Famicom stuff is basically worthless in Taiwan. The Japanese are way beyond the stage of nostalgia for collecting that stuff, at least I'm under that impression, and the Taiwanese only care about the bootlegs / homemade originals. On the latter, I have seen a drastic increase in interest and price since ten years ago, but it is starting to wane again imo; I think many are just opting for cheap reproductions and emulators, with even more losing interest with the nostalgia boom dying off a few years after it started (around 2016). 

5. So Famicom games aren't desirable anymore in regions that grew up using them, often featuring foreign / unknown characters / franchises and unreadable text, yet somehow these are supposed to be the next big thing for investors? Especially since they never came sealed? Lol.

Even if someone could sell it to the numpties, it still doesn't even address one other huge issue: How many people in the West know about the actual market of unopened CIB Japanese games? Are we basing it off what's available on Yahoo Japan Auctions? Word of mouth from Western collectors, who likely wouldn't have access to the whole Japanese market? Word of mouth from Japanese sellers, who just as easily could sell used items as "NEW CIB", or hype up rarities just for their own selling needs? 

The whole idea is laughable, basically it will be a repeat of the situation of games in Korea? Lol.

All of this,  100%

[GPX | 1,369]

14 hours ago, AdamW said:

@RHthe way I see it, the key thing is there's a large amount of new money which ostensibly values "cultural significance" and release precedence. And a lot of that new money is fairly dumb - it doesn't really know the market and it doesn't seem to bother doing any research beyond "what HA wrote in the description". My take is that once someone tells that money to care about JP releases, it will. What I kinda expect to happen is for someone - clink, Goldin, or maybe just some high-profile eBay seller - to run a sale of something like an unopened first print SMB or Zelda which manages to get some traction, pull in a crazy price, and then there'll be a rush.

Part of what influenced me on this is that I saw a discussion on the discord for one of the fractional asset companies which made it clear that a) both the company and its superfans were interested in JP games, and b) neither the company nor the superfans had any actual knowledge about them.

But yup, I could be wrong! No way to tell other than time. And I can't claim to be disinterested in this case either, so take my take with a pinch of salt.

I think you are taking the HA market a bit too literally in the random high bids and nonsensical end prices. It is not currently transferable to the open market outside of HA, apart from sought after franchises going up, to varying degrees.

The HA market is currently dominated by American bidders/collectors/resellers and the heavy prices are all relating to games in English. Unless they have unlimited amounts of money, they will likely to continue spending big on Western games, and not throw big money at foreign games.

Also, my hunch is that the big bidders are likely to have big stacks of Western games themselves, waiting to be unleashed on a later date on HA. If so, it is not in their best interest to hype up Japanese games, as that would mean less pool money to be spent on future US/English games.

[AdamW | 713]

Like I said to other folks on this thread, I just think it's a mistake to believe that how things are now is how they will always be. Mario games were worth less than actually-rare games, until they weren't. Gen 6 and 7 were too new and common to be worth anything, until they were. Genesis wasn't worth anything, until Sonic started selling for five-six figures. Sports games weren't worth anything, until Madden sold for half a million.

I'm not looking at how things are now, I'm making a prediction as to another thing that will change in future. Big spenders don't buy non-US games, until they do. And again as I said, I'm not pulling this out of my ass. Prices on unopened JP games are going up (did you know an unopened Mother sold for well over $2k in January?) and availability is shooting down. Small numbers of them are starting to come to market on the major auction sites (the current certifiedlink auction has several). I don't think this is being driven entirely by Japanese collectors.

Of course it wouldn't be in the interests of big bidders to hype up Japanese games, but big bidders aren't the ones who do the hyping. They're the ones who get hyped to. Who hyped up Mario games, Pokemon games, Zelda games, the "black box series"? The people who stood to gain from them being sold for large amounts of money, not the people who now buy them for large amounts of money. Who's gonna hype up Japanese games? The people who want to sell them to big bidders, and the auction sites who profit from big sales, and the graders who profit from more stuff to grade (why do you think WATA wrote those blogs about the black box series and NES prints? Not out of the goodness of their hearts). There's lots of perfectly good stories to tell there. Black box series? How about the Nintendo small box Famicom set? Nice strong visual theme, manageably small set of games, obvious historical significance. It's already a struggle to buy most of those unopened, and just getting clean CIBs of some of them is getting harder and more expensive.

It doesn't matter that the HA market is "not transferrable" so long as it exists; if I had an early print SMB or Zelda I would send it to HA and walk away with my giant pile of money, it would bother me not at all that I might not be able to sell it for the same amount somewhere else. In any case, though, I don't think it's as clear as that. Goldin, Certifiedlink and Comicconnect all get broadly similar results to HA for many game sales. eBay is trickier because it's so much less trustworthy for both buyers and sellers, but even there, high grade games from reputable sellers do fine.

Edited February 3, 2022 by AdamW