Heritage Auctions Thread

[AdamW | 713]

15 minutes ago, final fight cd said:

With that absolutely huge disconnect between eBay and HA, these are obviously people just now jumping on the bandwagon.  At what point do these “investors” price out everybody and can only sell to other investors?  Surely there are only a handful of people driving these prices up, right? 

 

I mean, it's probably at that point already, but that doesn't mean a lot? It works for other much more mature markets. There's only relatively few people in the world who'd buy an Action Comics #1, but they all know how much it costs. Ditto super pricey art, books, furniture, etc. You don't need a *lot* of people to sustain a market, they just need to be keen and have a lot of money. It's been working for art for centuries, especially.

Looking at things from another angle, the 'research' article by Michael Hartnett mentioned here:
https://www.bofaml.com/en-us/content/market-strategies-insights/weekly-market-recap-report.html
got a lot of play in the kinds of newspapers read by the kinds of people with lots of money to invest in things. It argues specifically that 'collectibles' are a thing to be getting into. (The same analyst made the same argument in 2016 and looking at the charts he's showing this time around he wasn't right then, but that doesn't mean people won't believe him...)

Seems like the actual note isn't available for free online, so I can't link it, but you can find quite a lot of stories referring to it, e.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-invest-in-real-assets-outperformance-advice-from-bofa-2021-3 , which mentions specialty investment funds that buy cars and art; I wonder if anyone will ever try setting up one of those for games...

[Dumars2001 | 164]

I would say that video game collecting has now entered the same stratosphere (or about to, with rising prices almost every day) as coins, comics, cards and has surpassed action figures already! I am still awestruck by what just happened and is happening at the moment!

Some people's collections just went from being worth hundreds of dollars to thousands of dollars, thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars and dare I say, hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars!!

[Dumars2001 | 164]

I am noticing games selling like crazy now on ebay, seller's raising their prices on their current listings or listings ending early now, because of this latest madness Heritage Auction.

[RalliArtEvo | 44]

14 minutes ago, Dumars2001 said:

I am noticing games selling like crazy now on ebay, seller's raising their prices on their current listings or listings ending early now, because of this latest madness Heritage Auction.

Any examples of this?

[Dr. Morbis | 2,088]

1 hour ago, Dumars2001 said:

I would say that video game collecting has now entered the same stratosphere (or about to, with rising prices almost every day) as coins, comics, cards and has surpassed action figures already! I am still awestruck by what just happened and is happening at the moment!

Some people's collections just went from being worth hundreds of dollars to thousands of dollars, thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars and dare I say, hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars!!

You're confusing regular people's beat up loose cart collections with WATA graded 9.8+++++ first print edition of [Insert first game in very popular franchise here] primo games...

[final fight cd | 185]

How are these sales affecting loose copies?

[Dumars2001 | 164]

1 hour ago, final fight cd said:

How are these sales affecting loose copies?

Some collectors/people will now try and Frankenstein games together to get a nice Wata CIB score and sell it for a premium price.

 

[O.G. CIB | 415]

2 minutes ago, Dumars2001 said:

Some collectors/people will now try and Frankenstein games together to get a nice Wata CIB score and sell it for a premium price.

 

That’s been going on since day one. Nothing new to the collectors that have been actively involved in WATA/Hertiage. It’s openly discussed on Facebook groups. 

 

[Dumars2001 | 164]

2 hours ago, RalliArtEvo said:

Any examples of this?

I had quite a few games on my saved  my ebay dashboard, that sold or that the buyer ended. mostly super Mario Bros, Zeldas, etc. a sealed super Mario Bros white sealed wata 8.5 sold for $22,000, a SNES Mario kart wata 8.5 sold for $15,000, a wata 9.4 CIB nes super Mario black seal (seller wanted $9,000) was ended early, quite a few gameboy wata Pokemon games were ended early by seller, a Nes wata 9.2 final fantasy (seller wanted $10,000) was ended early, that above mentioned vga Tyson sold for $38,500 and I can literally go on and on with more, but here are just some examples of the fallout from today's HA sales.

[Dumars2001 | 164]

3 hours ago, Dr. Morbis said:

You're confusing regular people's beat up loose cart collections with WATA graded 9.8+++++ first print edition of [Insert first game in very popular franchise here] primo games...

yes very true, but a 9.0 Tyson's (later print) going for $25,000, a 9.0 super Mario Bros 2 black seal going for $40,000, a 9.0 super Mario 3 going for $19,000, a 9.0 turtles 1 going for $10,000, an 8.5 n64 Mario kart going for $35,000. so, it isn't just everything in 9.8 grades going nuts right now.

Edited April 3, 2021 by Dumars2001

[tidaldreams | 654]

Pokemon games went a bit low IMO compared to some of the other stuff, but hey what do I know.

[AdamW | 713]

@tidaldreamsit's interesting that a lot of the stuff that went nuts is stuff that's kinda 'new' to the HA scene, and some of the prices seem kinda weird compared to each other or the ebay market. Whereas the Pokemon prices were all sort of...logical, and more or less in line with prior ones. Almost feels like that market is maybe maturing a bit. The weirdest things to me were how little the Yellow #1 went for, a 9.4 Silver selling for a bit more than a 9.6 Gold (wat?), and how much less FireRed/LeafGreen went than Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald. I wonder if the craziness of FR/LG prints scares the market a bit; both the FR and LG sold today were first prints, but neither WATA nor HA said so, they may not be sure yet.

I didn't see muuuch eBay activity on Pokemon listings after the auction, not much more than usual. Someone smart snagged a VGA 85 Emerald for $9.9k, that wins my arbitrage award for the day Another Emerald (WATA 9.6) that was listed for $100k has been taken down, I'd expect to see that go back up at a lower price in the next few days. Someone who was listing a Yellow #1 for $200k dropped the price to a waaaaay more reasonable $120k

The only loose sale that really stands out is a Red #2 CIB going for $1225(!!!!):
https://www.ebay.com/itm/324541415512?nordt=true&rt=nc
which is kinda insane. But not many more sales than on any other day recently or any other real wacko ones.

Edited April 3, 2021 by AdamW
mention yellow #1

[GPX | 1,369]

6 hours ago, AdamW said:

I mean, it's probably at that point already, but that doesn't mean a lot? It works for other much more mature markets. There's only relatively few people in the world who'd buy an Action Comics #1, but they all know how much it costs. Ditto super pricey art, books, furniture, etc. You don't need a *lot* of people to sustain a market, they just need to be keen and have a lot of money. It's been working for art for centuries, especially.

Looking at things from another angle, the 'research' article by Michael Hartnett mentioned here:
https://www.bofaml.com/en-us/content/market-strategies-insights/weekly-market-recap-report.html
got a lot of play in the kinds of newspapers read by the kinds of people with lots of money to invest in things. It argues specifically that 'collectibles' are a thing to be getting into. (The same analyst made the same argument in 2016 and looking at the charts he's showing this time around he wasn't right then, but that doesn't mean people won't believe him...)

Seems like the actual note isn't available for free online, so I can't link it, but you can find quite a lot of stories referring to it, e.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-invest-in-real-assets-outperformance-advice-from-bofa-2021-3 , which mentions specialty investment funds that buy cars and art; I wonder if anyone will ever try setting up one of those for games...

It’s dangerous to compare the market of video games being the same trend as art/coins/comics. The rarities and high end prices are generally agreed upon by veteran collectors in those realms of collecting. 

With the current bids on game items on HA, who are the veteran collectors that are in agreement that this is a fair reflection of the game collecting market?

[Dumars2001 | 164]

 

Here we go! I am sure some more main stream publications and Youtubers will be talking about this within the next few days!

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/business/super-mario-bros-nintendo-auction.html

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/04/02/this-1986-super-marios-bros-game-just-broke-the-record-for-most-expensive-ever-sold/?

 

sh=7b216071cca0https://www.ign.com/articles/super-mario-bros-record-auction-sale-nintendo-sealedhttps://www.cnet.com/news/super-

 

mario-bros-auction-breaks-record-with-660k-sale/

 

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/2/22364245/super-mario-bros-most-expensive-game-ever-record-sealed-auction

 

https://gamerant.com/super-mario-bros-sealed-copy-new-auction-record/

 

https://www.5newsonline.com/article/news/nation-world/super-mario-bros-game-660000-sale/507-a629e61e-1197-4454-9ff5-d1eb8179673b

 

https://lovebylife.com/the-unique-version-of-the-super-mario-bros-breaks-records-at-auction/

 

https://exbulletin.com/tech/831462/

 

https://www.whuffnews.com/super-mario-bros-sealed-copy-breaks-auction-record-becomes-most-valuable-game-collectible-ever-ign/

 

https://newsweek365.com/2021/04/02/super-mario-bros-sealed-copy-breaks-auction-record-becomes-most-valuable-game-collectible-ever/

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 3, 2021 by Dumars2001

[AdamW | 713]

38 minutes ago, GPX said:

It’s dangerous to compare the market of video games being the same trend as art/coins/comics. The rarities and high end prices are generally agreed upon by veteran collectors in those realms of collecting. 

With the current bids on game items on HA, who are the veteran collectors that are in agreement that this is a fair reflection of the game collecting market?

Are they, though? Action Comics #1 sold for $317k in 2009. Then $1m in 2010. Then $3.2m in 2014. That's a 10x price increase in five years, over 70 years after it was printed. Did "veteran collectors" think it was worth $320k in 2009 and then, en masse, agree it was worth 3x as much three years later and 3x as much again another four years later? Heck, the same thing happens in the art market. Have you seen the history of record art sales?

https://som.yale.edu/news/2016/06/history-of-the-art-market-in-35-record-breaking-sales

the record price paid for any painting tripled, suddenly, between 1959 and 1961; then again between 1961 and 1970; then again between 1985 and 1987; then it doubled between 1987 and 1990. And sub-areas of the art market go just as nuts as game prices sometimes; so-and-so is hot and their stuff sells for 10x as much in a year, then they're not and you can buy it for a dollar. It's just as subject to hype and herd mentality and momentum as any other collectible market, really. Did "veteran collectors" really agree that Sunflowers was worth 3x as much as Adoration of the magi? That the portrait of Dr. Gachet was worth twice as much as Sunflowers three years later? (And remember, after three hundred years or so, the art market is still constantly in a low-level panic about how many of the paintings in circulation are not by the artist they're claimed to be by, or are just straight up fakes...)

I mean, I don't disagree with you entirely. It seems fairly clear that a lot of people are waving a lot of money around without knowing a whole ton about what they're buying, and the values on specific individual games and prints could still be extremely volatile. Someone dropping $20k on some second-tier possibly-rare thing right now could definitely get burned pretty bad and find it more or less worthless in five years. But it seems to me like the trends are kinda established enough at this point to say that there will be a high-end games market in general more or less perpetually. If anything, what's playing out right now is the process of establishing the 'canon' of games and series and publishers and prints that "the market" agrees are going to be valuable, I guess. (I'd also postulate this is why condition is at a premium for certain games: people might be worried that there may turn out to be more 9.0-9.4 sealed copies of, say, Pokemon games than high-roller collectors/investors, but they're pretty confident there won't turn out to be more 9.6/9.8 copies than collectors).

Edited April 3, 2021 by AdamW

[tidaldreams | 654]

1 hour ago, AdamW said:

@tidaldreamsit's interesting that a lot of the stuff that went nuts is stuff that's kinda 'new' to the HA scene, and some of the prices seem kinda weird compared to each other or the ebay market. Whereas the Pokemon prices were all sort of...logical, and more or less in line with prior ones. Almost feels like that market is maybe maturing a bit. The weirdest things to me were how little the Yellow #1 went for, a 9.4 Silver selling for a bit more than a 9.6 Gold (wat?), and how much less FireRed/LeafGreen went than Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald. I wonder if the craziness of FR/LG prints scares the market a bit; both the FR and LG sold today were first prints, but neither WATA nor HA said so, they may not be sure yet.

I didn't see muuuch eBay activity on Pokemon listings after the auction, not much more than usual. Someone smart snagged a VGA 85 Emerald for $9.9k, that wins my arbitrage award for the day Another Emerald (WATA 9.6) that was listed for $100k has been taken down, I'd expect to see that go back up at a lower price in the next few days. Someone who was listing a Yellow #1 for $200k dropped the price to a waaaaay more reasonable $120k

The only loose sale that really stands out is a Red #2 CIB going for $1225(!!!!):
https://www.ebay.com/itm/324541415512?nordt=true&rt=nc
which is kinda insane. But not many more sales than on any other day recently or any other real wacko ones.

Yeah, I remember that emerald and I thought the seller took it down because I couldn't find it in sold listings, but it's showing up now. Silver was always a bit rarer than gold in sealed condition so that probably contributed to it selling for more. I've had opportunities to pick up sealed golds in the $400-600 range not even a year ago, but always passed because the boxes weren't in the best condition. Kind of annoyed I didn't pick some up.

[OptOut | 8,881]

This shit is getting more hilarious by the day!

Play on, monkeys, play on! 

Edited April 3, 2021 by OptOut

[GPX | 1,369]

1 hour ago, AdamW said:

Are they, though? Action Comics #1 sold for $317k in 2009. Then $1m in 2010. Then $3.2m in 2014. That's a 10x price increase in five years, over 70 years after it was printed. Did "veteran collectors" think it was worth $320k in 2009 and then, en masse, agree it was worth 3x as much three years later and 3x as much again another four years later? Heck, the same thing happens in the art market. Have you seen the history of record art sales?

https://som.yale.edu/news/2016/06/history-of-the-art-market-in-35-record-breaking-sales

the record price paid for any painting tripled, suddenly, between 1959 and 1961; then again between 1961 and 1970; then again between 1985 and 1987; then it doubled between 1987 and 1990. And sub-areas of the art market go just as nuts as game prices sometimes; so-and-so is hot and their stuff sells for 10x as much in a year, then they're not and you can buy it for a dollar. It's just as subject to hype and herd mentality and momentum as any other collectible market, really. Did "veteran collectors" really agree that Sunflowers was worth 3x as much as Adoration of the magi? That the portrait of Dr. Gachet was worth twice as much as Sunflowers three years later? (And remember, after three hundred years or so, the art market is still constantly in a low-level panic about how many of the paintings in circulation are not by the artist they're claimed to be by, or are just straight up fakes...)

I mean, I don't disagree with you entirely. It seems fairly clear that a lot of people are waving a lot of money around without knowing a whole ton about what they're buying, and the values on specific individual games and prints could still be extremely volatile. Someone dropping $20k on some second-tier possibly-rare thing right now could definitely get burned pretty bad and find it more or less worthless in five years. But it seems to me like the trends are kinda established enough at this point to say that there will be a high-end games market in general more or less perpetually. If anything, what's playing out right now is the process of establishing the 'canon' of games and series and publishers and prints that "the market" agrees are going to be valuable, I guess. (I'd also postulate this is why condition is at a premium for certain games: people might be worried that there may turn out to be more 9.0-9.4 sealed copies of, say, Pokemon games than high-roller collectors/investors, but they're pretty confident there won't turn out to be more 9.6/9.8 copies than collectors).

I’m not disputing the significant rise in popularity of games and as a form of potential investment. What I’m disputing is you’re equating the current market of video games to that of the speculation of other collectibles of yesteryear. Other markets have established themselves over decades, whereas video games retro market is nowhere near established. 

Also, your examples of established markets going 3 times more over several years of time lapse...this isn’t quite the same as what we’re seeing on HA auctions with prices jumping 10x to up to 50x of past values/sales. This is too much of a jump for the scene to be taken seriously as an established market, in any form of collecting/investing.

Edited April 3, 2021 by GPX

[AdamW | 713]

Well, I don't really disagree with any of that. But I didn't really say anything you're disputing either. I replied to someone who asked whether high-end sealed game prices had reached a point where "regular collectors" were priced out and high-roller investor-collectors could only sell to each other, and said "well probably, but if so, so what?", and cited comics etc. as examples of markets where the same is true, but it doesn't mean the market is unviable. I never claimed games were precisely the same in all respects, or anything like that.

I don't disagree at all that the high-end game market is not yet fully mature in various ways. No dispute there.

Edited April 3, 2021 by AdamW

[Jono1874 | 144]

13 hours ago, AdamW said:

Well, I don't really disagree with any of that. But I didn't really say anything you're disputing either. I replied to someone who asked whether high-end sealed game prices had reached a point where "regular collectors" were priced out and high-roller investor-collectors could only sell to each other, and said "well probably, but if so, so what?", and cited comics etc. as examples of markets where the same is true, but it doesn't mean the market is unviable. I never claimed games were precisely the same in all respects, or anything like that.

I don't disagree at all that the high-end game market is not yet fully mature in various ways. No dispute there.

Can we really call a bunch of highly priced games being passed around among a absurdly small group of people a "market"? If someone were to look into what kind of connections these buyers have, how many of these people know each other personally? If myself and 50 friends pool a bunch of money together and start a bunch of high profile auctions for something inane, and we begins selling them to each other for $100,000 a pop, does that create a market?  That's what this WATA/Heritage thing appears to be. Just a bunch of guys with a load of cash, throwing it at each other.  That money never really leaves the pot. You may get some outsiders here and there, but is the market truly a market if there is no room for growth?
 

What I see in certain in certain people online, in the Pawn Stars stuff, is desperation.  "Oh look! Better watch out! your rare games are gonna be worthless someday! better invest in this instead!! XD"  and so on. If this were organic or they had even a shred of confidence in what they're doing, they wouldn't be out there trying so hard to shove it down peoples throats. They suspect it isn't sustainable, and they suspect that their time is limited before the whole thing potentially calapses on itself. 

Once someone spending 100k for a game is no longer conspicuous, youtubers and news agencies will stop reporting on it because it wont make them money to do so. If the practice hasn't caught on with normal people, the whole thing will fall apart, as the advertising is gone.  The only way to keep it relevant is if they continue to top themselves, which will alienate pretty much everyone not in the "in group" as the prices climb higher and higher.

Let me be clear, I don't really have a dog in this race because I don't have any truly rare games. I started my collection with zero intention of ever buying Stadium Events, or Action 52, or whatever. It would actually benefit me if they did drop in price, honestly.  Furthermore, I could make a lot of money in the market that Heritage/WATA are trying to force. The big problem is, in my opinion,  selling anything to people buying into this would be tantamount to throwing it in the trash.  Could I use the extra money? Yeah! But do I want my sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. 2 going to guy who can't identify half the character in the game? No. Never. How about my sealed copy of Pokemon Heart Gold?  Again, No. The only reason I haven't opened those up is because I have no definitive reason to. I never got around to playing the Pokemon game and I have several loose copies of Mario 2. I don't care about their value. If I do sell them some day, I want that stuff to go to people who will appreciate it for what it is. Not for what kind of financial advantage it will give them.

Sorry for the rant, I just find this entire thing as disingenuous as it is desperate. People should spend their  money as they like, but shouldn't pretend it's something other than what it actually is.
 

Edited April 4, 2021 by Jono1874
clarity

[GetTheGreg | 105]

23 hours ago, Dumars2001 said:

 

 

I saw that I had a single view come from VGS and I was like...... Have I been mentioned here!?  I'll gladly accept this small cameo.  Thank you sir.

Edited April 4, 2021 by Maertens29

[GPX | 1,369]

22 minutes ago, Maertens29 said:

I saw that I had a single view come from VGS and I was like...... Have I been mentioned here!?  I'll gladly accept this small cameo.  Thank you sir.

So you’re the guy from that YT channel? We’ve done some communications there a few hours ago.

[GetTheGreg | 105]

8 minutes ago, GPX said:

So you’re the guy from that YT channel? We’ve done some communications there a few hours ago.

John Who?  I saw your thread and your grammar seemed familiar haha!

But yea, I used to come around all of the time on Nintendoage but I fell off once the swap to VGS happened.  Not sure why... It just wasn't the same

[AdamW | 713]

1 hour ago, Jono1874 said:

Can we really call a bunch of highly priced games being passed around among a absurdly small group of people a "market"? If someone were to look into what kind of connections these buyers have, how many of these people know each other personally? If myself and 50 friends pool a bunch of money together and start a bunch of high profile auctions for something inane, and we begins selling them to each other for $100,000 a pop, does that create a market?  That's what this WATA/Heritage thing appears to be. Just a bunch of guys with a load of cash, throwing it at each other.  That money never really leaves the pot. You may get some outsiders here and there, but is the market truly a market if there is no room for growth?
 

Well...yes. There are people buying and people selling. That's the definition of a market. It could be a very small market, it could be a very unstable market, it could vanish in six months, but it's still a market. The very concept of a market is intended to exclude the sorts of value judgments you want to make about whether it "should" exist: it's intentionally a very disinterested concept. If someone's buying and someone's selling, you've got a market.

I mean, I don't have any skin in this game either, really. I don't have anything anyone at HA would be interested in buying. I just have a different opinion on how likely it is that a high-end games market will turn out to be real and sustainable. Is it, on some level, absurd to pay half a million dollars for a copy of Super Mario Bros? Of course it is. We left the realm of vaguely objectively identifiable value long ago. If you want to play Super Mario Bros there are a hundred ways you can do it that would make more sense than paying half a million dollars for a sealed copy and opening it. If you want to look at the box art you can find lots of pictures of it on the internet. (Or just buy a not sealed box for a lot less money).

But it's not really any more absurd than paying that range of money for a comic book. Or for a coin. Or for an orchid. Or for a stamp. Art is arguably slightly different, because there really only is exactly one Sunflowers (well, actually, there are a few, but who's quibbling) or The Scream or whatever. But a comic's just a press-printed replica of some art some guy drew. You can read the contents of Action Comics #1 for free very easily, and it's not very artistically significant, is it? It's a hokey story about a guy who can pick up cars. It's culturally significant, but it's not really the same thing. A coin is a small disc (usually) of metal you can point at and say "this small disc of metal is very old and there aren't very many of them around any more!" A rare orchid is a plant that usually doesn't look any prettier than a thousand other plants you could buy for a dollar. A stamp is an intentionally disposable bit of paper with possibly a picture on the front and some glue on the back. And yet there are longstanding and sustainable markets valuing certain instances of all those things in hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.

The internet informs me that the record sale for a coin is $10m, unless I'm missing something; the record price paid for an orchid seems to be $100,000, but then I only looked at one page of search results; the record price for a single stamp is $9.48m. Would you say, objectively, that spending nearly $10m on this reddish irregular octagon:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_philatelic_items#/media/File:British_Guiana_1856_1c_magenta_stamp.jpg

is more or less insane than spending half a million dollars on a not-quite-first-print of Super Mario Bros? I mean, it seems hard to say...

Some of those markets are very small and more or less everyone in them knows each other, and yet there they are and have been for decades.

Edited April 4, 2021 by AdamW
grammar

[AdamW | 713]

Oh, the ten million dollar stamp sold to Stuart Weitzman, apparently, the shoe mogul, who "collected stamps as a child". How many extremely rich people do you reckon there are in the world who played Mario when they were kids?