Gulag Joe

Wata graded a cut off hangtab Moonwalker 9.4. They grade resealed games with only a "3rd party seal" note on the back of the box, resulting in many ignorant buyers spending thousands on a sealed game they sadly believe is genuine. These people are appraisers and their opinion should only be taken with a grain of salt. It's ok for people to want a second or third opinion, especially if an appraiser gave someone a thumbs up on a game that has a portion of the box missing. Humans are fallable and the folks at wata certainly don't wear capes and save the world at night.

I've seen a few listings use the term "true complete" or "full complete" when the lot contains the bag, inserts, and whatever else originally came with the game.

I sent an order back in May. Went the slow route too- 180 business days. From the date they checked it in, it wouldn't be due back to me until early February. Status still remains as "scanned". I'll be surprised if it comes sooner, but they did stop accepting new orders until January, so there's hope it may come sooner, but I'm not counting on it.

Those pop reports made many cards from the junk wax era actually have some value

The volatility of vintage games is comparable to that of stocks. With the amount of money changing hands for some of these games and only privileged people getting access to that information treads the line of insider trading.

I'm not sure what would happen in a situation like that. I can only speculate that they might allow cancelation in that circumstance. However, they may make a Ferris Bueller Ed Rooney request and have you "roll her ole bones down for them to take a look and then they'll dig up your bid contract" type of situation.

I asked the same exact question about a 9.8 A++ game and was told I was not allowed to know at this time.

They said so in the screen shot I shared.

HA will work with you as the seller on all of those things, so they can be catered to each individual case. Typically, payments for anything are paid in full. They do not accept PayPal but do take credit cards and echecks. They have strict rules on bidding as you have to be registered with them to bid and your credit has to check out. Its unlike eBay. They also take 10% of the final sale and also charge a buyers premium, but they have omitted the buyers premium for smaller sales. Again, everything is all catered to your situation.

This just showed up on HA. I'm a little perturbed that HA gets to know WATA population information but when anyone else asks for them you get the finger.

I'm not buying it. I'm selling it. WATA has already deemed my collection prestigious. Be on the look out for The Haters Collection, likely hitting the market when this next batch of free money comes.

LOL

Will you guys be making a documentary about this evil underground sealed video game collecting syndicate that is taking over the world? Will you be printing physical copies of it or just have it available for streaming?

Its a shame you want to hate all over me. I didn't know talking about the rarity of sealed games would jingle so many of your bells. Every single bit of your comment is speculation. "I can get a crappy cart of SM3 for cheap" bla bla bla "rare Action Comics #1" bla bla bla "nobody collects sealed games" bla bla bla "even though I don't really know that and think millions of people collect 9.8 superman underwear because they printed millions of those too" bla bla bla. You're all over the place. Many of these comments are. The name of this forum should be called "Video Game Haters". Hate hate hate.

Thats a big hoard of games, but relatively small to a collecting base that could potentially grow to over 100k collectors in years to come. In comparison, there is an estimated 1 million+ comic book collectors. All it takes to grow that collecting base is a clever marketing campaign. Just wait until WATA partners up with Steven Spielberg and every future movie has a character with a video game collection!

That does not prove anything other than there's a small demand for physical copies for one particular console. Overall, as proven above, 83% of ALL video game sales are digital. And that was 2 years ago- before the announcement of PS5 having a digital console option.

The games that are selling for six figures are "key games". Did Atwood, Indiana, or any other "pEdIgReE" collection contain cases of those games? The answer is either no, or not enough to impact the current realized prices as these prices are being driven up by more than just two bidders. Even if we do find fifty 9.8 left bros., which I personally believe is highly unlikely, it won't impact the achieved prices as the collecting market is growing rapidly by the day. A WATA 7.5 Tetris CIB just recently sold at auction for $500 on ebay. We can argue over 6 figure factory sealed games all day, but the real alarming trend is graded CIBs, not even in decent condition, selling high. I don't see that trend continuing. I think the factory sealed craze is driving up everything else.

IDK anymore. It started as a simple question and then things went downhill immediately.

Did you not see my source link and screen shot negating your claim? I will hit you up in 10 years when that factory sealed N64 Perfect Dark is worth $10 Billion dollars!

Turns out your assumption is already fake news.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/190225/digital-and-physical-game-sales-in-the-us-since-2009/#:~:text=In 2018%2C a record 83,were sold in physical form.

#SaveThisThread Ten years from now, a factory sealed N64 Perfect Dark in NM condition says the majority of all future video game releases will be digital.

People who are paying 150k for a video game certainly have enough money to pay someone to investigate your hypothetical avenue of obtaining a high grade raw copy for cheap. Only problem is, thats not happening and the hypothetical is simply that- hypothetical.

I am saying factory sealed games being put up for sale has not increased significantly to "cash in". If anything, they've remained at the same rate prior to the pandemic. They're just selling for more money these days because new collectors/investors are entering the marketplace for a variety of reasons previously mentioned.

This is where I disagree. Collectors and investors had this same thought 20 years ago when PSA and CGC came along. Hindsight is 20/20 and it turns out that high condition cards/comics, which were mostly collected and stored in top loaders or carefully kept in board bags- a small percentage end up being in mint and an even smaller percentage grade out in gem mint condition which is evidenced in today's publicly available population reports by those respective grading companies. In regard to video games, this is where the speculating comes in as many video games did not get this same treatment as very few people collected games compared to comic books and cards. With that said, in my opinion, it is not practical to conclude that one has better chances of finding a game in the raw and having it grade out high.