Heritage Auctions Thread

[OptOut | 8,892]

1 minute ago, ZeldaFreak said:

I mean, there's no way this can't win at this point, let's just be honest here.

Nah, he got me on a technicality. This thread was not begun in the year 2021, and thus it is ineligible for a 2021 Opty! 

Chili vs. Potato gots it in the bag! 

[Gulag Joe | 584]

13 minutes ago, karljobst said:

Was there ever a statement about why the database was taken offline? Were concerns addressed at any point?

How much is CGC paying you?

[Deadeye | 1,598]

Welcome @karljobst

After the dust settles, hope you stick around and checkout the rest of the site.  Plenty of conversation about games (collecting and playing), but also competitions, game nights, and a growing homebrew section.  I am hoping one day for spreedruns of homebrew games to make traction here.

[zoiks66 | 72]

7 minutes ago, kell said:

Yes. I’ve had multiple private offers from collectors.

To @jonebone’s point earlier regarding private offers, all you have to do is post a pic of a sought after game and the messages start coming. There is plenty of demand for five and six figure games.

Show me an actual buyer.  I’m not interested in the multitude of probable scammers that are making offers.  Show me someone that has paid actual money and doesn’t have a corporate interest in driving up the prices of sealed video games.

[kell | 102]

4 minutes ago, WalterWhiteJr. said:

I’m trying to understand why that’s relevant. If the alleged wata/HA manipulation is directly influencing these offers you describe, then your point is completely moot. 

I answered a question, not making a point. There is demand, for high dollar games, from collectors

[Brickman | 4,041]

1 minute ago, OptOut said:

Nah, he got me on a technicality. This thread was not begun in the year 2021, and thus it is ineligible for a 2021 Opty! 

Chili vs. Potato gots it in the bag! 

We’ll make an exception for the first year. We’re just starting out  haha

[WalterWhiteJr. | 1,169]

1 minute ago, kell said:

I answered a question, not making a point. There is demand, for high dollar games, from collectors

Okay but again, if that demand is being generated by the artificial wata/HA manipulation, then it’s completely irrelevant. 

[Brickman | 4,041]

3 minutes ago, Gulag Joe said:

How much is CGC paying you?

How much is Deniz and WATA paying you?

[ZeldaFreak | 3,627]

7 minutes ago, OptOut said:

Nah, he got me on a technicality. This thread was not begun in the year 2021, and thus it is ineligible for a 2021 Opty! 

Chili vs. Potato gots it in the bag! 

Well I think it's unlikely this thread will go down as anything other than the greatest (well, depending on how you look at it) thread in VGS history, so I suppose it having that title is good enough, hahaha.

[Jeevan | 8,975]

10 minutes ago, ZeldaFreak said:

I mean, there's no way this can't win at this point, let's just be honest here.

not started this year!

[kell | 102]

8 minutes ago, WalterWhiteJr. said:

Okay but again, if that demand is being generated by the artificial wata/HA manipulation, then it’s completely irrelevant. 

The demand from collectors has always been there, and is increasing. I’m not arguing anything at this time. 

Fact is, there is demand from collectors.

Edited August 27, 2021 by kell

[ZeldaFreak | 3,627]

Just now, Jeevan said:

not started this year!

I dunno, this is kind of reminding me of this whole WATA situation with you having a vested interest in a certain thread winning...

HMMMMM.......

[OptOut | 8,892]

7 minutes ago, Shmup said:

We’ll make an exception for the first year. We’re just starting out  haha

 

1 minute ago, ZeldaFreak said:

Well I think it's unlikely this thread will go down as anything other than the greatest (well, depending on how you look at it) thread in VGS history, so I suppose it having that title is good enough, hahaha.

 

1 minute ago, Jeevan said:

not started this year!

 

Well, we'll have to make a new category for LEGACY thread of the year, where threads from previous years are eligible to win!

[WalterWhiteJr. | 1,169]

3 minutes ago, kell said:

The demand from collectors has always been there, and is increasing. I’m not arguing anything at this time. 

Fact is, there is demand from collectors.

Of course it’s always been there. But the skyrocketing demand has occurred in parallel with wata/HA crap. It’s directly influencing it artificially. That’s the whole point. 

[B.A. | 1,139]

21 minutes ago, a3quit4s said:

From what I remember Jeff popped in a couple times when NA had the old look to announce improvements and stuff like that. Once the site flipped over to how it looks now Jeff basically disappeared. A lot of people pinged and asked but got nothing but silence. After that we all just starting coming to VGS which became our new home. 

Maybe the ex mods or longer time community members have better information than I do. 

That's a pretty good summary of events. The only "improvement" he ever made was to add banner ads.

[Gulag Joe | 584]

You think prices are crazy right now? Just wait until those pop reports come out and the journalists start telling the world that only 500 pokemon games have been graded!

Edited August 27, 2021 by Gulag Joe

[ZeldaFreak | 3,627]

3 hours ago, karljobst said:

Hi, I created an account here so I can answer questions.

On the topic of Dain, I felt I was quite clear in the video that Dain was previously associated with the company but is not currently. That's why I said "the cherry on top, is that WHEN WATA Games was incorporated in 2017, Dain Anderson WAS the executive officer.". When I was talking about Jeff, I was using current tense (Meyer IS a director). I then further confirm that Dain was no longer with the business by saying "So this entire deal (when the deal took place) happened between 2 men that WERE or are directly involved with the company". I'm very careful with my words, and my words specifically mention that Dain was not a part of the company at the time of the deal taking place. I apologise for not stressing it more, and admittedly, I keep forgetting that it is very easy for people to misunderstand things.

I've since spoken with Dain and nothing he did was wrong, I just felt it was important to mention for transparency. I will be doing an update and I will be making this more clear. I do believe Dain only had good intentions with everything.

Jeff's statement suggests that I called him an employee. This is not correct (again, I'm very careful with my words). The reason I kept bringing up Kahn's quote was to stress the conflict of interest that arises when people associated with the company grade their own games and sell them. Being a Director is WORSE than an employee because you have more influence over the company, and there is more potential for fraud. A director grading their own games in a privileged way and flipping them without telling anyone they are a director is definitely grounds for fraud. At the very least, it should be investigated.

There were a lot of assumptions about my motives or what I do and don't know (a lot of them wrong) but I would love to answer any questions you have.

I do want to echo what others have said in welcoming you to the site, however, I do also want to make something else very clear: I don't know if you have any intentions on sticking around at all after this whole situation blows over and/or reaches some sort of resolution, but if you do have any interest in doing so, I will say that the community here is honestly lovely. The people here are great, and are generally speaking very welcoming. The reason I say this is because, as you can imagine, it's kind of a volatile, cutthroat, us vs them situation within the community right now, so things are a bit hectic, and I don't want that fact to do anything to taint your view of this community as a whole.

Obviously you're clearly getting a good amount of support judging by the reactions to your posts, but I just wanted to make it abundantly clear that this one super active thread in a very hectic time in the community doesn't necessarily reflect on what this community is like as a whole. Just wanted to get that out there.

But yes, with all that said, welcome!

[Dumars2001 | 164]

2 hours ago, jonebone said:

Man this thread is just like the video game market itself.

Everytime it hits a new high and accelerates in terms of page count, it just breaks out and hits new highs again and again!

My only comment to @karljobst is that your "experts" of Pat (a cart only collector) and ReservedInvestments (who has been saying Wata games were a bubble for 2.5 years now) weren't exactly relevant experts.  Analogies I saw thrown around were asking the electrician to do the plumbing in your house.

You could ask any longtime sealed collector with 10+ years experience for what they think of market values and see what kind of response you get.  For the record I thought Mario 64 was going to go $250k-$300k at the time and $1.6M was Earth shattering.  The point I'm making there is that while the hobby has accelerated and gone parabolic way more than people realize, there's still "intrinsic value" in the collecting community that have been way higher than before.  I get unsolicited messages not quite daily but at least a few times a week from people trying to buy high grade sealed games out of my collection.  

The highest of the high is definitely influenced by fractional ownership (can send stuff to stratosphere), but there is simply 10 fold more organic demand from collectors / speculators / investors than there was at the beginning of 2019.  You have a lot of the old crew still here that never left and tons and tons of new blood.  Of course higher demand equals higher prices, though we got too high too fast IMO, but you can never estimate how much people will FOMO.

This assessment is so on the money!

[ICrappedMyPants | 302]

1 hour ago, a3quit4s said:

@karljobst - thank you for the video and connecting some of the dots that many had long been suspicious of. Thank you for defending @Dain_ as well. I don’t think any of us really wanted to lump him in with people like Jim and Jeff at the end of day anyways. 
 

I don’t mention Deniz as I agree with @jonebone that there isn’t a CEO on the planet that doesn’t try to hype up their own company, it is literally their job. While Karl and others point out very well that Deniz should not be assigning value to items he is basically selling through HA, people have a basic responsibility to themselves to say hey, this is CEO of the company grading the game telling me it’s worth a million dollars. Maybe I should take that with a grain of salt. 
 

WATA making additional money off the perceived market value of your game, that they determine, should be a huge red flag. 

Given the nature of this specific business, hyping up the business is one thing, but basically hyping up the collecting industry which you grade games for and will directly profit from is another. In most cases, I’d agree with you, but some professions are, and should be, held to a higher standard. There’s a reason why the professional accounting industry became so heavily regulated after Enron and Worldcom.

Edited August 27, 2021 by ICrappedMyPants

[mlbfan10 | 340]

On 8/25/2021 at 9:16 PM, ExplodedHamster said:

I am trying to understand why it would matter to people who never bought or cared about sealed games to begin with (I am talking well before WATA and this surge). I have seen people rail on this for a decade, well before I ever bought a sealed game, and I have never understood it. Why do people who love games so much spend so much time crapping on people who do something different with their time instead of playing the games they love? We are mortal, time is finite. There’s just always been a lot of what I would consider unnecessary negativity.

I absolutely agree. As a sealed collector and eBay seller I've heard this argument since I started collecting sealed in 2009. I don't understand why anyone cares what I do with my games. It's not like I don't own my actual copies of my games when I was a kid or don't have a love for gaming. Still have my SNES and N64 and all the games, even have my original Super Mario RPG CIB from 1996 and it's my prized possession. But somehow because I want to use my knowledge of gaming plus my hobby of flipping games to fund my collection and family this doesn't fit in with what some say the community is and should be.

[CIB_Wholesale | 418]

---Dain quote:

"Here's some context:

I left WATA in September, 2017 (legal papers were signed on October 18, 2017):

 

"

 

Deniz sent me an email in March 2018 saying Dain was on the advisory board

 

Deniz :

"I apologize that the last time we tried to connect I was unable to disclose any information over email. Because of the earlier stages of the company there were confidentiality issues that I couldn’t circumvent. Now there is no issue though.

 

As mentioned, we are opening a certification company. We have been working towards this for well over a year to ensure that all the issues in the market are addressed and that we provide a service and product that elevates the video game collecting industry to the level it needs and deserves. At the end of the day, we are collectors first.

 

We are gearing up to launch in just over a week. Our founders include myself, Kenneth Thrower, and Mark Haspel who was CGC’s President and first employee during its inception in 1999.

We strive to help advance the industry and elevate video game collecting by addressing the top concerns and needs in the retro video games industry, including the lack of transparency within the marketplace and the risk of acquiring accurately valued and authentic items. We stand for objectivity, transparency, and confidence through our grading process, standards, and the competency of our team.

Our team extends well beyond the founders and includes collectible industry experts who are a part of our team and Advisory Board. These thought leaders have helped and will continue to help provide us with their objective opinions to achieve our mutual goals of elevating this industry from one based in nostalgia to one reflecting the art and historic value of games that we envision it reaching. Many experienced individuals within the video game domain such as Dain Anderson, Dan Maresca, and Josh Byerly sit on our board and are involved, but we also have several experts that span ancillary collectibles fields with deep expertise in certification sitting on our board and involved including, but not limited to, Jim Halperin (founder, Heritage Auctions), Josh Nathanson (founder, ComicLink), Matt Nelson (founder, CCS/Comic restoration expert and CGC head grader), and several other comic, coin, and certification experts. Additionally, Jim’s involvement is one that extends to investment, and we will be setting up in about 4-6 months to have Wata’s games in premium auctions on Heritage, where they will reach the million registered bidders/collectors. We will begin accepting consignments shortly after launch for these auctions — we believe our presence in Heritage’s auctions will expose video game collecting and trusted certification to all the ancillary collecting markets in a transparent and trusted manner. As I alluded to, we are not just opening shop to put games in cases and assign grades — we are here to grow the market and the community, and to elevate the standards.

Our physical product is both standardized and highly secure. It is tamper-evident, aesthetically forward, and technologically advanced. Our objective, standard, and transparent scale provides all the information collectors need to know about their certified games, accurately, from condition state information to pertinent labeling, significance, provenance, and variant information.We have a much more sensitive scale than what exists and are growing beyond the sealed market. More importantly, as I mentioned, we strive to grow the community by leaps and bounds. We are delivering objective standards conducive to the market needs, allowing for tracking and comparing of games against current market value, and empowering individual collectors through access to quality resources. Further, our network of dealers and distribution partners such as Heritage Auctions provide credible channels for buyers and sellers of collectibles both within and outside the video game market.

 As collectors first, with backgrounds in other matured collectibles markets yet specializing in video games, we are addressing the fundamental flaws that have been circumvented in the video game market that prevent it from growing to its potential and that hinder involvement from key players and investors in ancillary markets. We set out on this venture over one year ago because we believe this is what the industry needs to move forward. There are many sellers of video games (and only a handful of your caliber!). But without objective, quality, trusted, and meaningful standards, the market will continue to be limited in its growth by a lack of confidence. 

We are debuting our launch in tandem with the C2E2 convention in Chicago where we will be setting up for the 100,000 attendees, this April 6-8. I had been aiming to share the many more details of our exciting venture with you for some time, as I believe your stake in video games is closely aligned with our goals and vision for the future growth of the hobby and market. I will attach the early-submission program that we offered to select individuals, which includes at the bottom a spot in the Attendee Guide for C2E2 so you can see a couple shots of our games and some high-level information. 

Please reach out at any time if you have questions or would like to discuss this further.

All the best,

Deniz"

Edited August 27, 2021 by SealedWholesale

[kell | 102]

13 minutes ago, WalterWhiteJr. said:

Of course it’s always been there. But the skyrocketing demand has occurred in parallel with wata/HA crap. It’s directly influencing it artificially. That’s the whole point. 

I mentioned one segment of demand, collectors. Which has organically increased which will lead to higher prices. I have not referenced speculators, including institutions, at all. 

[Californication | 1,490]

1 minute ago, kell said:

I mentioned one segment of demand, collectors. Which has organically increased which will lead to higher prices. I have not referenced speculators, including institutions, at all. 

I don't think you understand what organic means.

[GPX | 1,374]

 

 TLDR time!

Currently 3 main groups:

1. Nothing much to see here.

2. Yes there is something to see.

3. Can’t we all just get along?

[Brickman | 4,041]

Well I’m off to bed and will probably wake up to 50billion pages to read. My only saving grace is Karl is in the same Timezone, so hopefully he has fallen asleep at his desk or went to bed haha.