AdamW

I gave up on that a while back, it was just too much work - it took hours a day. AFAICS lately, sealed/graded prices have dropped like most of the rest of the market, CIB prices have held pretty steady since I was cataloguing them (but not carried on shooting upwards).

I must apologize to the group for becoming a filthy, filthy grader. What can I say, they cut the prices! My arm was twisted!

yeah, the bottom one is a pretty early one! I don't know if anyone will ever value cart PCB dates especially, but it's cool to have early ones I think

More JP trash!

Hey, they *are* sealed!

FF7 came in a few days ago, so here's my JP sealed FF collection! 1 and 3 are claimed "unopened", but I suspect they're probably opened. 6 is unopened, and all PS/PS2 ones are sealed.

Late reply, but - @Seth, yes, punitive damages would be a different story, but it just seems super unlikely to me that's a plausible result from the case. I'm not a lawyer and you are, it's just my opinion / guess. I'd be super surprised if this thing winds up in an award of punitive damages against WATA. But maybe I'm wrong! We'll find out. edit: also, judging from your twitter feed, I am confident you are familiar with the concept of "rhetorical excess", which I will cite in my defence regarding my characterization of the lawyer.

FWIW, I think Seth's dead on with these paragraphs from his post: "Needless to say, we’re a long way from even asking this question. We don’t know if this lawsuit is really intended or will be filed; we don’t know if enough people will step forward to become members of any prospective certified class (and we must be mindful of the fact that most WATA customers, especially high-volume resellers of graded video games, will be loath to publicly be at odds with WATA in any way); we don’t know if a suit of this sort can survive summary judgment given the deliberate lack of any regulation of the collectibles industry that the United States Congress has now permitted for decades (to the massive financial detriment of individual investors); and finally, we don’t know that any such lawsuit, if it successfully certifies a class and survives a motion for summary judgment filed by Collectors Universe, won’t quickly be settled prior to any in-court litigation with an undisclosed out-of-court settlement. Given that the amount any individual video game collector would be likely to receive from any such payout would be small—as it will be hard to establish compensatory damages beyond refunding some customers the monies they paid to WATA (which admittedly, for some WATA customers, will be in the many thousands of dollars)—the real question here is really whether this lawsuit is being filed so attorneys can get a fat chunk of any punitive damages awarded by a civil jury or established by an out-of-court settlement. Indeed, one imagines that the real angle for any law firm involved in this is seeking punitive damages more so than trying to calculate how much any single customer is “out” because of missed market opportunities (which is fuzzy math at best)." Seth, does the fact this has been 'filed' now mean it'll definitely at least reach the point of summary judgment? Or does the law firm still need more class members to step forward for it to be worth their time to proceed?

Late to this thread, but - @darkchylde28, the problem I see with the claims cited is, they didn't cost anyone much. If anything. A civil suit isn't a crusade of good against evil; it's a fight over money. If you "win" it, you get awarded some money to compensate you for what you lost. So let's say these lawyers show that WATA gave a turnaround time of X days for $100 but didn't honor it. Okay. What did that cost somebody? Seems to me it'd be pretty hard to show that it cost anyone more than $100. So, okay, you win your lawsuit. This means you will be awarded...$100. After you pay your lawyers you have about negative $10,000 left. If the lawyers could get a bunch of people to join a class action and win it, maybe there'd be enough bread in that for the lawyers to make out. But the class members would get, you know, a coffee each. Maybe. The only way I can see someone trying to show a substantial loss would be to argue that if their game had come back at just the right time they could've sold it for lots more money, but that seems highly speculative in such a frothy market. I wouldn't want to bet any judge would buy that line of thinking. If you want to see WATA punished by the righteous sword of justice, a civil claim by some ambulance-chasing two-bit Reddit lawyer is not going to do the job. The body that enforces FTC regulations, for instance, is...the FTC. If the FTC announces it's investigating or sanctioning WATA, that'd maybe be a big deal. This doesn't look much like one.

Finally found me a copy of SMA4! Details updated. Interestingly the box code is -2, so one of the earlier prints must have a non-sequential or duplicate code (I'm guessing it's the Walmart one). Cart is rev A. Does anyone know what the difference between the original and rev A ROM is for SMA4? I can't find anything about it on the internet. For packins it has DMG-USA-14 (health and safety), T-AGB-USG-USA (the Coral Pink DS Lite ad that's common in late GBA games), and the game-specific Nintendo Power ad AGB-AX4E-USA.

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.

Yes. Now feel shame!

I think we're done here.

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.

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.

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...

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.

@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.

@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'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...

wow, those pokemon prices made no goddamn sense. Also HA still trying to front that NFR Halo was employee only, and any green screens SML is first print. siigh.

Epic necro sequel: one thing about the "Adrenaline pack" theory that I didn't know was, did those copies come sealed? Today it occurred to me to look up copies of the other game in that bundle - Amped. And hey, if you search 'amped nfr xbox' on eBay, you get a bunch of hits...mostly from Canada. And one of them is sealed: https://www.ebay.com/itm/114824970670 so, that seems kinda indicative. Unless there was a special limited employees-only release of Amped as well, and one of those copies just happened to stay sealed and somehow wind up in Canada.

Oh, yikes, it's a lot more complicated than that. There are four different US box prints of SML with DMG-ML USA on the box flap. Two of them likely came with the DMG-ML-USA manual. All four of them, plus the fifth and sixth box prints, which had DMG-ML USA-1 and DMG-ML USA-2 respectively on the tabs, came with the DMG-ML-USA cart. There are eight manual prints, which came in differing ranges of the box prints. Please refer to If you want to be grading CIB accurately, you're gonna need to know this kind of thing for at least significant titles like SML.

Dunno if it's just the way you took the pictures, but it looks like there might be a slight crease across the top front of the SMA2?

WATA grading it as sealed means that they GUY-RAN-TEE this isn't just any old used copy with a sticker slapped on it, no sirree Bob, it's a gin-u-wine unopened original sealed copy. I know nothing about PAL Mega Drive releases or the properties of said sticker, so I dunno how they decide that or whether you should trust them. But that's the claim.