AdamW

then you get to change the shipping address yup, it is lame.

if you're not logged in it defaults to something they pick based on your IP address, which will usually at least be in the 'right' country. You can see what it picked under "Shipping to:" at top right: that's me, not logged in, searching ebay.com for 'pokemon emerald'. You can see it autodetected a Canadian postal code for me. That's not my postal code, but it is in the ballpark. If I leave it like that, the results will only include listings that offer shipping to Canada, I won't see ones that only ship within the US.

yes. eBay searches only shows results that offer shipping to the shipping address you have set (the zip/post code set as "Shipping to:" at top right of the result list for a search). So if you search European listings with your usual US shipping address, for instance, you won't see quite a lot of listings that only offer shipping within Europe. If I want to see US listings that don't offer shipping to Canada I set my shipping location to zip code 90210... You can always access a listing that doesn't offer shipping to your location if you have the item ID or a direct URL link. But search results won't show them.

@blarky@CartChartWholesale just in case you didn't notice, the JSON that backs the human-readable tables is at https://www.watagames.com/populations/nes/nes_pop.json , for ease of calculation. For each dict in the "populations" array, if "state" is 0, it's from the 'sealed' table (1 is the CIB table, 2 is the loose cart table).

I mean, Terminator is a moderately successful movie franchise. The games, so far as I remember, were garbage, and they're not at all significant in the larger context of "the Terminator franchise". Nobody's making new Terminator movies or TV shows or whatever based on content from the ancient very meh video games. And it's not like the franchise itself is going from strength to strength; just about everything associated with it since the second movie (in 1991!) has been, at best, okay. It's nowhere near the status it had right after T2 came out.

Here's a random data point: there are 8019 sealed NES games in this population report. You're welcome.

We're all just waiting for Karl to release his greatest WATA hits VHS...

can we get a Show Off Your Teapots thread for Shawn?

Joe's just thinking ahead. He's probably not wrong!

@Code Monkeyi think they just don't include variants with a 0 count. There are no sealed white bullets punch outs either...

Ooo, I bet Seth regrets quitting now

Look, da Vinci probably did like a dozen sketches for the Mona Lisa, okay? And they're all basically the same! But there are only like two 9.8 SM64s. FACTS.

The report is dated Nov 1st. Anything that was graded after Nov 1 won't be in it.

I was trying to establish the point of bringing up the auction like it's a big deal. If you're not making a prediction about what's going to happen and whatever happens won't prove anything anyway...what's the point?

Yes, that's what I meant. Thanks for answering. So, no result would surprise you, and every result would mean you're right about things, it just indicates whether other people agree with you? Roger.

The questions were: "You brought this auction up like it's going to be super indicative of...something. What result are you expecting? What do you think that result would show? What result would surprise you?" I'm sorry if I'm being thick, but I still don't see the answers.

@RETROthat was a lot of words that didn't answer the questions I asked you, though... (also, I don't appear to fit into any of your categories, so I feel personally slighted. :>)

I mean, again you seem to be taking a weirdly narrow view of things and saying that only how common a game is should be factored into the "right" price for it. I don't buy US NES games, but if I did, I'd be much more interested in having SMB or SMB3 or Dragon Warrior than, I dunno, picks an apparently-low-pop-game-at-random Arkista's Ring (please replace random example with whatever obscure game you consider to be truly rare). I do buy Famicom games, and I absolutely want copies of all the Dragon Quests, and I'll pay a decent price for them even if some obscure game I never heard of is rarer, because they're Dragon Quest. I'm not going to buy the obscure game I never heard of just because it's rare, because I don't care about it. I doubt the seller of that Dragon Warrior did obsessive research into populations. In my experience, it's a 50/50 toss-up whether eBay sellers spell the name of the damn game properly. They picked a price and went with it. If someone pays for it, then they reckon it was worth $500. So, uh, sorry, we're rambling a bit here, but...what was your point again? You brought this auction up like it's going to be super indicative of...something. What result are you expecting? What do you think that result would show? What result would surprise you?

Dragon Warrior has always been pretty cheap for what it is, hasn't it? From a quick search, raws seem to go for low to mid three figures, and the priciest copy HA ever sold was $2340, for a 1HP first print. That seems a very low price for a game that big. Seems to me like the market's already pricing in that it's pretty common?

@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.

@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

@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.

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.

America's top soap operas are Days Of Our Lives, General Hospital and What Timmy Said To Kimmy On Nintendoage In 2005. I'm just waiting for the appearance of the evil twin of @Gloves...

Look, I live in Vancouver. We've got all the water here. So much water. Too much water. Please take some!