AdamW

Oh, I think you're right that that's what it comes down to. But I think, realistically, nobody knows how future demand is gonna pan out, especially at that end of the market. Seth doesn't know, DetonatedGerbil doesn't know, you don't know and I don't know. Are sufficient numbers of rich people, in ten or twenty or thirty or whatever years, going to think it's neat to own a sealed copy of Super Mario to keep the price in that 6-7 figure range? I have no idea. I don't think anyone can say for sure.

I think you can argue this point either way, for sealed NES games at least. For newer things, especially anything like 2000 or later, whatever wata's numbers turn out to be, you can be sure there are way more out there. But for games from the 1980s, sealed...eh, I can see the argument that there aren't many more around to be found. Especially of games like SMB where it's pretty widely known at this point that sealed copies are worth serious money. Comic books turn up because people read them once when they were a kid then threw them in a box that got put in an attic nobody looked in for decades. stuff like that. That will absolutely be the case for open video games. There are likely quite a few open SMBs lying around in attics that'll be found over time. But sealed ones...I'd say it's at least arguable there won't be too many. Not many kids would've got a new video game and never opened it.

Just a couple of things to note... 1. Looks like the data we grabbed from that generous API endpoint a few months back was quite substantially overcounted for most games. I guess when they changed their minds about how to describe variants, they didn't clean the DB up very well. So we can't trust the numbers from that data, by the looks of things. 2. Doesn't look like there's a single sealed 10 for NES yet.

It's dated November 1st, says at top right.

Not one but two 'cinematic' universes! It's a bargain at anything under 5 figures! I'm still amazed the kinds of people who bid big on these things haven't gone completely bananas for Kingdom Hearts yet. Do they not realize what a crazy IP goldmine it is?

BTW, for another theory on why this takes a while, it could be as simple as sorting out prints. Going by the data we got a while back, these were not sorted out very well at all - there are often five or more different entries for the same print. It's possible that there's a mapping somewhere else in WATA's internal db which wasn't exposed by the previous API results where they mapped those items better, but if not, it would take a while to do that work even just for the most "significant" games. To give just a small example of what I'm talking about, there's only one "white bullets" print of Punch-Out, but WATA has variously described it as "*No Rev-A, Round SOQ, White Bullets", "*No Rev-A, Round SOQ, White Bullets (No Code)" and "*No Rev-A, Round SOQ, Small Warranty, 5-Digit ZIP, White Bullets (No Code)" at different times, and each of those shows up as a different 'box variant' in the old API return data. If WATA doesn't already have an internal mapping somewhere that knows that those three are really "the same" print, then just building that out for a few hundred games with multiple prints is a lot of grunt work for someone to do.

Puerile whining, you say?! Well, it is always nice to be recognized by an expert...

The auction people create one thread, and then occasionally answer questions and announce new auctions in it. There's an entire forum for buy/sell/trade. If you just created a Retro thread and posted your five paragraph self-horn-tooting posts there, I could happily ignore it. But nope, you're all over the rest of the threads, crowbarring another pump for your blog in every three words. Good lord. I mean, when you say "I may have some insight to offer here" it might be nice if you actually had some insight other than a bunch of self-promotion. With egregiously unnecessary boldface.

Can we get Seth his own forum to promote Retro in so I don't have to read five ads for it every time I come here? yeesh.

Dunno about GoW, but not necessarily on the Emerald. That game's been cooling off for like seven months at this point, as people seem to be figuring out it's not rare. You can't take the HA prices from early this year as a reliable comp at this point, I don't think. I hadn't actually spotted this before, but there's a hell of a comparison for that game on HA - a 9.6/A+ sold for $31.2k in July...then another 9.6/A+ sold for $6,600 in the October sig. Yikes. So you can't necessarily look at the $72k for 9.8/A++ in July and say another 9.8/A++ would do close to that if they sold one now.

I saw a couple people mention they're getting non-DVD-case orders back faster than DVD-case ones ATM, so seems like they may have run out of DVD case holders again.

I've no idea what "advice from HA" you're referring to in WATA's case, honestly. HA frequently make obviously wrong claims about games in their auction descriptions that WATA does not make (e.g. they constantly claim that second print Super Mario Lands are first print, and in the most recent signature they correctly identified a first print Pokemon FireRed as such, but then claimed a first print LeafGreen was "mid-production", I'd be livid if I were the seller). WATA was not the source of any of those claims, HA screwed it up on their own. I don't think HA knows anything about games that WATA doesn't, rather the reverse.

I mean, that's based on all-market sales from 12 years ago, so it's of rather limited relevance, you'd think. There are obvious reasons why prices of games being bought for actual play would bump around the holidays, but it doesn't necessarily hold true for four- to six-digit sealed games being bought by rich people to put on a shelf. They're not likely to be buying them as holiday gifts, or with money received as a holiday gift. I think a lot of HA records were set in the November 2020 auction...

Who Framed Roger Rabbit will be a significant movie pretty much forever as one of the early examples of a feature-length live action / animation combination. But I agree with you that doesn't mean it makes any sense to value the tie-in game much at all.

WATA graded a few games for platforms they don't usually handle, either as a mistake or as some kind of test. They show up for sale occasionally.

yeah, sorry, I should've quoted to make that clear!

I was just replying to 3rdstrongestmole to suggest the most obvious way I could think of that you could get a low box grade in a high seal grade.

easiest thing I can think of is sun fading. UV hurts the wrap too, but more slowly. It'd be more immediately evident on the artwork than the seal. Rusty staples going all the way down to 7.0 sure does seem harsh, agreed...

they graded a bunch of systems very briefly, possibly by mistake or as some kind of trial, last year. there were WATA-graded DS games in today's auction too. They haven't opened those systems again since.

you have my $5!

They were different prints, apparently. I am not up on the Sonic 1 prints, but it seems the $438k one was actually the first print, this one was more like third print.

Welp, that was awkward for Otis: Pokemon prices were, uh...bizarre? Sandshrew Red 9.8/A++ for $150k seems super soft, but Rattata Blue 9.8/A++ for over $100k seems high if anything. Both Yellows seemed soft, Crystal and Emerald didn't do great, but FireRed went bananas...then LeafGreen kinda tanked. Would've helped if HA hadn't fucked up the prints though (the LeafGreen was also first print, it was not mid-production).

yeesh, it was just a dumb joke man, no hard feelings!

How do you suggest people get experience?

No price before the end of an auction means anything.