Wata NES pop report now available

[AdamW | 713]

Seth, 20 minutes ago: "It's bizarre that I've been called arrogant but have never considered my opinion the equivalent of hard data"

Seth, 6 minutes ago: "this pop report confirms that 237 (3 years of WATA) is now the floor for how many VGA copies there are from 13 years of VGA grading, so we're talking about a bare minimum of 574 buyers you'd need"

edit: er, also, Seth, 2*237=474. Not 574.

Edited November 30, 2021 by AdamW

[Gulag Joe | 584]

One of the issues I have with Reserved Investments hot take on the population report is that he thinks 64 graded copies of a game over a period of 3 years means there's going to be thousands more eventually. Even if that is the case, which it won't be, he's not factoring in market growth and new hobby interest. It's been less than 24 hours and 23 factory sealed NES games have sold on ebay since the pop report dropped. Just wait til more people find out about these populations, especially when the Collectors Universe marketing machine starts its push.

[Seth | 168]

2 minutes ago, AdamW said:

Seth, 20 minutes ago: "It's bizarre that I've been called arrogant but have never considered my opinion the equivalent of hard data"

Seth, 6 minutes ago: "this pop report confirms that 237 (3 years of WATA) is now the floor for how many VGA copies there are from 13 years of VGA grading, so we're talking about a bare minimum of 574 buyers you'd need"

edit: er, also, Seth, 2*237=474. Not 574.

I remember how this works (from elementary school): a transient multiplication error in an online forum instantly invalidates anything a person has ever said.

Also, a comment about Jonas deeming his anecdotal experience more valuable on the open market than hard data is... somehow related to me offering my opinion for free? Check your math on that one, Adam, I actually think I was proving my own point.

[AdamW | 713]

@RETRO You didn't offer it as an opinion, though. "Confirms", "floor", "bare minimum" - these are strong words that read like you are stating an objective fact, not offering an opinion. The words "I think" are notably absent from your post.

And I didn't say your multiplication error invalidated anything. I pointed out that you made it.

Edited November 30, 2021 by AdamW

[Gulag Joe | 584]

1 minute ago, RETRO said:

I remember how this works (from elementary school): a transient multiplication error in an online forum instantly invalidates anything a person has ever said.

Also, a comment about Jonas deeming his anecdotal experience more valuable on the open market than hard data is... somehow related to me offering my opinion for free? Check your math on that one, Adam, I actually think I was proving my own point.

What is the total number of unique sealed SM3 games graded by VGA and sold compared to Wata graded sealed SM3 sold since 2012?

[Gloves | 11,790]

Hey it's me, the positivity fairy!

Popping in to say that I've not sat to read through the novel that is this thread over the last day, but I can sense a bit of an aura emanating from it. 

So here I am to sprinkle some positivity dust.

Please everyone be mindful of the humans on the other side of the screen, and be respectful of each other. You can discuss the pop reports without personal attacks, I BELIEVE in you, you CAN do it!

POSITIVITY DUST, GO!

[Seth | 168]

The basic problem in the sealed and graded collecting community is that you have people working off data, market dynamics, and core facts—which doesn't mean they get everything right by any means, but it at least means they're prepared for an adult conversation—and then you have the cultists, who tell us falsehoods like that the number of buyers in the hobby is expanding rapidly (without proof), who tell us that WATA is the only company whose pop reports we were waiting for (sorry VGA and your 13 years of additional data), who tell us that increases in the prices of the top graded copies of a handful of games means growth in the market writ large (sorry basic economics), and more. Then you have folks like Adam, who are smart, not cultists, and sometimes make good points, but it usually ends with a "Who really knows?"—which isn't ultimately helpful or interesting on a discussion board for people making hard purchasing decisions.

[Seth | 168]

3 minutes ago, AdamW said:

@RETRO You didn't offer it as an opinion, though. "Confirms", "floor", "bare minimum" - these are strong words that read like you are stating an objective fact, not offering an opinion. The words "I think" are notably absent from your post.

And I didn't say your multiplication error invalidated anything. I pointed out that you made it.

Adam, we have both been online for 20+ years. "I think" is tacit in every post on a discussion board.

But if you need it broken down, WATA has graded 237 sealed SMB3s in 42 months (3.5 years). VGA has been in operation for 13 years. Yes, it is possible that in 13 years VGA graded fewer SMB3s than WATA did in 3.5 years—keeping in mind that the WATA data isn't actually 3.5 years, but just as far as they've gotten in their backlog (likely 3 years)—but no collector or investor or reseller should ever, ever, ever make that assumption. You are being deliberately obtuse, but I can't figure out why except that you don't like me. But since this is a site for people making financial decisions, how about we put that aside and speak like adults.

[Driftwood | 209]

6 minutes ago, Gulag Joe said:

One of the issues I have with Reserved Investments hot take on the population report is that he thinks 64 graded copies of a game over a period of 3 years means there's going to be thousands more eventually. Even if that is the case, which it won't be, he's not factoring in market growth and new hobby interest. It's been less than 24 hours and 23 factory sealed NES games have sold on ebay since the pop report dropped. Just wait til more people find out about these populations, especially when the Collectors Universe marketing machine starts its push.

What new hobby interest?

are you expecting the kids today playing fortnite to mortgage their house in 20 years to get ahold of (insert nes game here)

IT’S JUST NOT GOING TO HAPPEN

 

[DefaultGen | 5,409]

10 minutes ago, RETRO said:

Can someone offer the best possible argument for why the SMB3 market shouldn't collapse today? I'd honestly like to hear the argument from someone willing to acknowledge the facts (e.g., that whopping "237" figure is not the total pop, as we don't yet have VGA games, WATA back-log, CIB games, or the coming years of CIB and sealed SMB3s included; the buyer pool is minuscule and not growing at the same pace as new sealed SMB3s are being graded; and so on) but who is still bullish on SMB3.

There are 20 million bitcoins are people still pay 60 grand for them. In a market driven by speculation with a meaningless object, whether it's shrink wrap or 1s and 0s, all the prices are just made up.

I think the pop reports will make people bid more aggressively for the r@re highest grades or random bullshit no one one has bothered sending to Wata (make sure to bid big on the sealed Fun House on Ebay, only 2 others exist in the world!). But I think everyone knows there are 100s of SMB3s out there based on the fact that they come up every week on Heritage and they're for sale all day on Ebay (and there were 100s in the leaked pop report, and there were probably 100s reported by RETRO!) So if everyone already knew SMB3 is a commonly graded sealed game, that fact is priced in.

Also it seems like tons of sports and comic collectors are buying these, directly comparing them to their common graded thing of preference, Jordan rookies or Hulk 181 or whatever. It doesn't matter if there are 10,000s CIB copies of SMB3 and 237 are sealed, these guys come into the market and see "Oh my god only 237 on planet Earth and the population is 8 billion". It doesn't matter what the "reality" of rarity is if that's how all these guys coming in perceive it.

[jonebone | 1,307]

30 minutes ago, RETRO said:

It's bizarre that I've been called arrogant but have never considered my opinion the equivalent of hard data in terms of value. You do you, though, Jonas—marking up common NES games by 300% over their proven market value because your buyers don't have access to hard data... only your years of experience in hype.

I mean, RETRO readers would never have paid you $1,000 for a 9.2 StarTropics... but now no one will.

Come on man, you walk into every thread and turn it into some rabbling drivel with your self-centered posts like your have some infinite pool of knowledge.  Let me be blunt, you don't have one fucking clue about anything that you are talking about.  And when anyone chimes in, you immediately get defensive and with straw-man retort.  And then the best part is you make it about everyone else, when you're the only common denominator here.

But to humor you since you want to poke the bear.

I don't care if any my shit sells.  I have normal career based income and this is a pure hobby to me.  Prices low, I buy more.  Prices high, I sell more.  You keep lumping people into "resellers" when that spectrum is as broad as the full-time guy who literally hold items for ransom at insane markups to the part-time hobbiest just moving along a duplicate and breaking even.  

Last but not least, when you have an eye for condition, titles, rarity and demand, you develop a feel for what things should be worth.  No one cares about 270 SMB3s, what people are about are the collector grade copies, 9.4 A+ and any release other than challenge set.  It's simple bell curve normal distribution type of stuff.  The copies to the left of the hump in the bell curve become placeholders, bounce around and become hard to move unless at auction or priced well.  The collector grade copies are much more in demand and a seller's market.  Based on SM3 pop that's 70 above 9.4 that aren't Challenge set copies, and I bet at least 20 of those are A or less seals.  So really 50 SMB3 "collector grade" copies of one of the most iconic games of all time.  Easy to understand there aren't enough of those to go around and that one will never go for $100s or low $1000s or whatever you want to preach.  

[Seth | 168]

2 minutes ago, Driftwood said:

IT’S JUST NOT GOING TO HAPPEN

Driftwood gets it.

The Jackals have been promising an explosion in buyers for years now. It's never happened. The auctions are still ghost towns in terms of total numbers, and there's no sign that that's changing.

[AdamW | 713]

@RETROI think you're being weirdly simple-minded in this "VGA was around for way longer so it must have graded more games!" take. You don't seem to be considering at all the possibility that grading got massively more popular in the time since WATA showed up - which is strongly suggested by the fact that neither VGA nor WATA had months-long backlogs before this year, but now both of them do. You also don't seem to be considering the likely effect of mass news coverage of games - specifically WATA-graded Super Mario games - being sold for huge amounts of money.

I mean, this is something you actually could analyze, even. WATA's numbering scheme is very simple; we can work out to a high degree of precision how many orders WATA processed over any given timeframe just from the tags on HA listings. I haven't figured out exactly how VGA's work - where they started, and whether the serial numbers are shared with non-game items or not - but it shouldn't be rocket science. It should be possible to get a pretty good idea of how many games VGA has graded in given timeframes as well.

oh, and BTW, I'm not treating this as a discussion about making financial decisions either, honestly. Though you're free to if you want to. I just got outbid on a Super Famicom Fire Emblem game for two hundred bucks. I cannot stress hard enough to you that I am absolutely not in the market for sealed US copies of SMB games at any price they've sold for since about 2012...:D

Edited November 30, 2021 by AdamW

[Driftwood | 209]

3 minutes ago, AdamW said:

@RETROI think you're being weirdly simple-minded in this "VGA was around for way longer so it must have graded more games!" take. You don't seem to be considering at all the possibility that grading got massively more popular in the time since WATA showed up - which is strongly suggested by the fact that neither VGA nor WATA had months-long backlogs before this year, but now both of them do. You also don't seem to be considering the likely effect of mass news coverage of games - specifically WATA-graded Super Mario games - being sold for huge amounts of money.

I mean, this is something you actually could analyze, even. WATA's numbering scheme is very simple; we can work out to a high degree of precision how many orders WATA processed over any given timeframe just from the tags on HA listings. I haven't figured out exactly how VGA's work - where they started, and whether the serial numbers are shared with non-game items or not - but it shouldn't be rocket science. It should be possible to get a pretty good idea of how many games VGA has graded in given timeframes as well.

I have no reason to believe their not backlogged with thousands of worthless copies of “modern”

and only because of clear market manipulation...

Edited November 30, 2021 by Driftwood

[Code Monkey | 2,011]

5 minutes ago, jonebone said:

Come on man, you walk into every thread and turn it into some rabbling drivel with your self-centered posts like your have some infinite pool of knowledge.  Let me be blunt, you don't have one fucking clue about anything that you are talking about.  And when anyone chimes in, you immediately get defensive and with straw-man retort.  And then the best part is you make it about everyone else, when you're the only common denominator here.

No one cares about 270 SMB3s

Nailed it right here.

I was going to respond to him as well but this post sums up everything I was thinking but wasn't going to write. I bought my sealed games for literally $5 from a flea market and left some there because at the time they weren't even worth $5. Not everyone that has sealed games is fuelling the market or worried about a crash. I have a job and couldn't give less of a shit what my games are worth.

Also, you can't add the Wata graded game quantity to a suspected VGA quantity because most of what Wata graded probably came out of a VGA case.

[AdamW | 713]

@Driftwoodoh, sure, it's very likely that a ton of stuff in the backlog is worthless GTA trilogy copies and stuff. But my point is, it's overly simplistic to just look at 3 years vs. 13 years and conclude, well, VGA must've graded at least as many copies as WATA of any given game. There are a ton more factors than that. The speculation seems pointless to me, I'd rather just wait for VGA's pop reports.

Of course, if like Seth says you're trying to actually make purchasing decisions off this data, maybe you don't have that luxury. But I'm not doing that, so, hey.

[Seth | 168]

24 minutes ago, jonebone said:

Come on man, you walk into every thread and turn it into some rabbling drivel with your self-centered posts like your have some infinite pool of knowledge.  Let me be blunt, you don't have one fucking clue about anything that you are talking about.  And when anyone chimes in, you immediately get defensive and with straw-man retort.  And then the best part is you make it about everyone else, when you're the only common denominator here.

But to humor you since you want to poke the bear.

I don't care if any my shit sells.  I have normal career based income and this is a pure hobby to me.  Prices low, I buy more.  Prices high, I sell more.  You keep lumping people into "resellers" when that spectrum is as broad as the full-time guy who literally hold items for ransom at insane markups to the part-time hobbiest just moving along a duplicate and breaking even.  

Last but not least, when you have an eye for condition, titles, rarity and demand, you develop a feel for what things should be worth.  No one cares about 270 SMB3s, what people are about are the collector grade copies, 9.4 A+ and any release other than challenge set.  It's simple bell curve normal distribution type of stuff.  The copies to the left of the hump in the bell curve become placeholders, bounce around and become hard to move unless at auction or priced well.  The collector grade copies are much more in demand and a seller's market.  Based on SM3 pop that's 70 above 9.4 that aren't Challenge set copies, and I bet at least 20 of those are A or less seals.  So really 50 SMB3 "collector grade" copies of one of the most iconic games of all time.  Easy to understand there aren't enough of those to go around and that one will never go for $100s or low $1000s or whatever you want to preach.  

OK, let's put it on the table.

You have been wrong about everything and you acknowledge none of your errors. You are a WATA shill who enables that company's unethical conduct. You are a price-gouger who takes advantage of people lacking hard data and then attacks anyone who provides hard data. You are motivated purely by profit, as proven by the fact that you do nothing to expand the consumer base in this hobby and appear to have no interest in doing so.

I am angry at rich liars without ethics, so I come in hot over and over. I am being provocative—but accurate—because the high-end reseller community deserves to be provoked. It is ruining what could be an amazing hobby and denigrating an art-form I value and teach at the university level. I believe in advocating for vulnerable people and wrongly disfavored ideas and you and your crew believe in self-enrichment, whatever you may self-mythologize about yourselves.

But since you want to go into specifics, OK. It is not market analysis to disappear the entire data-set below high-near-mint condition for each NES title, especially when you and your crew do this on the supply end but not the demand end—which is dishonest as hell. If you're going to erase 70% of the WATA-graded SMB3s (which is likely a minuscule fraction of the total population due to the current data not including 13 years of VGA grading or WATA's backlog), you also have to erase all the buyers who can't afford or don't care to pay for high-near-mint sealed and graded copies. We can judge how many such buyers exist because we can see how many people track auction sales at HA and elsewhere and how many actually show up to bid. If there are 70 highest-end SMB3s from WATA in 36 months, it is reasonable to imagine at least another 70 from VGA in 13 years. And a market can only support high prices if there are few copies available relative to those who want them. If there are 140 highest-end sealed SMB3s, you have to show proof that there are (say) 420 to 560 buyers for such games for the market to bear continued high prices due to a supply-demand imbalance, and you can't establish that data-point because there aren't buyers in anything like those numbers. In fact, we have lots of hard data to show that that specific buyer pool is about 30 people strong and isn't growing.

You and your crew have been told these facts over and over and over and over and you never respond to them intelligently, which is why I presume bad faith and get angry. Because I do not think you are stupid—so deceitful is the only option.

In other words, stop pretending you don't understand what I'm upset about—and who I'm upset at, and why I'm speaking with this tone—because you understand perfectly well.

Edited November 30, 2021 by RETRO

[ApebitMusic | 130]

16 hours ago, ExplodedHamster said:

Well, so much for the rudabega or whatever theory. This stuff is rare as fuck compared to other collectibles.

This. Can't wait to see what Pat Contri has to say.

[Code Monkey | 2,011]

27 minutes ago, AdamW said:

edit: er, also, Seth, 2*237=474. Not 574.

The count is also 234, not 237 so the error is additive.

[3rdStrongestMole | 430]

11 minutes ago, Driftwood said:

What new hobby interest?

are you expecting the kids today playing fortnite to mortgage their house in 20 years to get ahold of (insert nes game here)

IT’S JUST NOT GOING TO HAPPEN

 

Uhh...  wait, I'm pretty sure Deniz wasn't even born when the SNES launched, much less the NES. So your arguments actually nullified by the very person who helped create the thing that the threads about

[Code Monkey | 2,011]

Back to more important news, it's interesting to see where the priority is. People aren't sending in the games not worthy of being graded and you can see where the truly uncommon games sit with Sword Master, Battleship and Dragon Fighter all with low counts. Most of the 1994 releases are 1 or 2 and some are even absent.

[Driftwood | 209]

there are collectors who have no interest in sharing or discussing the size of their collection. 
there are many raw copies still in back wall hobby shops, to assume these pop reports are reflective of the rarity or definitive of numbers is inaccurate

[Seth | 168]

6 minutes ago, Code Monkey said:

most of what Wata graded probably came out of a VGA case.

You don't even realize how insanely cultish this fact-free claim sounds. Yes, there are cross-overs, but to use that as proof that WATA data is total population data is so dishonest that it's breathtaking.

So if you're not motivated by facts and you're not motivated by money, you're going to have to clarify why you feel the need to spread disinformation. Because I don't get it, otherwise.

[Seth | 168]

4 minutes ago, Code Monkey said:

The count is also 234, not 237 so the error is additive.

I'm sorry, but you and your crew don't get to police minor addition or multiplication errors when you deny the utility of any math to this scenario by wishcasting figures that have no bearing in reality.

[Seth | 168]

7 minutes ago, ApebitMusic said:

Can't wait to see what Pat Contri has to say.

I suspect he'll say that he was right—because he has been and is.