AdamW

unless you're @FenrirZeroand the question is "am I the only one who cares about CAS?"

there are entire threads about this. the short answer is that neither WATA nor VGA officially release population reports at present. Both have talked about doing so in future, neither have put a date or details on it. VGA have been making more noise recently about getting it done soon. It's worth bearing in mind that when we do have 'full' population data from one or the other, or if you get a hold of some of the incomplete, outdated and unofficial information on some games that is floating around, you will still need to take it with a grain of salt. Grading games is not, as you can tell from this thread, a universally accepted practice. Some people are opposed to it more or less on principle. Even if you aren't, grading games is expensive and time-consuming. Until earlier this year, very few games were 'worth the cost' of grading. So the graded population of a given game could be low because it's a very rare game...but it could equally well be that the game is quite common, but the graded population is low just because not many people who have copies got them graded, for whatever reason.

They care so they can buy them off an internet auction without having seen them in person. We all know that photos never tell you the whole story. You don't have to like the system or trade things that way, but it's not as if it's a new or controversial idea, it's been around, oh, several hundred years at least (for bulk trading in things like foodstuffs or cloth). Of course there's always going to be a degree of discussion about how good any grading company's grades are. I mean, that's their stock-in-trade. Especially when there's more than one, people discussing how accurately and consistently they grade is...the system working exactly as it should. The end result should be that the company or companies which are generally believed to grade the most consistently win most people's business. In the current case, an interesting question to ask is whether there is the same level of questioning of VGA's grades, for instance.

this is pretty much how WATA got started...:D

I think you're being kind of obtuse there. You don't get a game graded just so you have someone's opinion of what condition it's in. You can get opinions for free all day long on Reddit. You grade a thing in the expectation it'll be graded according to a reliable and consistent process which allows others to have confidence in the condition your game is in without seeing it in person. The way it should work is that the person has seen a few 9.6 Game Boy games, they hear that your game is a 9.6 Game Boy game, they can have some confidence in what it looks like without seeing it in person. That doesn't work if they start giving out 9.6s to games with noticeable corner bumps all of a sudden.

because there's a wider expectation that the company's grades should be consistent and in line with the ways they claim to grade on their site?

I'm with GPX, that seems like a pretty damn weak 9.6. The 8.5 seems more arguable, anything under 9.0 is gonna have fairly clear visible imperfections. It maybe should be an 8.0, but doesn't seem egregious.

The forum software re-compresses the images and limits the resolution. Much better to put them on a dedicated service.

[edit: beaten by JamesRobot]

Never!

was anyone really keeping sealed copies on shelves in 1996/7, though? My rough guess based just on what you see people saying in forums like this and what comes up for sale is that it only started happening in anything like significant amounts somewhere around maybe 2004...

He may be the same guy who was selling copies of Pokemon Black/White/Black2/White2 on eBay earlier this year. IIRC that seller was in Venezuela and the listing pics showed he had shelves full of 4-packs of each game...

https://dqydj.com/millionaires-in-america That site reckons there are 1.45m US households with net worth in excess of $10m, 97k with over $50m, and 35k with over $100m...

The effect will only hold up if CIBs keep selling for high prices, of course. Check back in six months and see where it's at then...

They aren't expecting to get a million dollars. They're listing it for a million dollars to get it noticed. Looks like it worked!

Yeah, fair point, I should've phrased that better, but hopefully you get what I mean

This is always a risk, sure. But when you buy something as an investment, you consider - at least, anyway, you ought to consider - the potential upside, potential downside, and how long you're expecting to hold it. Unless $1.5m Person had a timeframe for realizing their investment of "about a month", it would be a mistake for them to care too hard about what another copy sold for a month later. If there's a months or years-long trend of declining prices and no indication they might recover, then they might start thinking about writing it off as a dead loss. But one lower sale within what's probably a much shorter timeframe than they were considering? Not a big issue, unless they're doing this very very wrong (which is always a possibility :>)

I mean, they didn't take an 800 grand cold shower. They bought a copy of SM64. They still have it. You're committing the oldest investing mistake in the world. The thing you have is the thing you have, not its apparent monetary value in some sale you're not involved in. If you bought 10 shares of BobCo, you have ten shares of BobCo. If ten shares of BobCo sell on Monday for a nickel, you still have ten shares of BobCo, not a nickel. If ten shares of BobCo sell on Tuesday for a billion dollars, you still have ten shares of BobCo, not a billion dollars. This kind of mindset is what causes people to sell at the bottom of market crashes, which is always a terrible idea...

He's joking about most of them, but deadly serious about Shantae

WATA's website does not say there's a cap on liability. It's been claimed in various places that there is one, but the website doesn't say there is. "** Liability is included in the base price for games valued below $1000. Games valued from $1000 to $2499 are gradually charged more on a sliding scale for liability. Games valued $2,500 and up are charged an additional 2% of their declared value. If we find games on an order are undervalued we may have to adjust pricing on the order for correct liability costs." We've covered this already several pages back, but the point of a policy against 'employees' getting games graded has nothing to do with whether they spend many hours at the company's office. It's to avoid the very obvious appearance of potential bias in the grading. It doesn't matter whether Mark spends hours or no time at all at WATA's office. It's silly to argue semantics about the term 'employee' because it entirely misses the point of why such a policy exists in the first place. People with their name in lights on a grading company's website should not be getting their games graded by that company, because it makes it extremely difficult for anyone to believe the company is being fair and unbiased in grading games. I agree that the video didn't actually prove anything illegal wrt the "Carolina Collection", but it seems fatuous to pretend not to see that there's a problem there. WATA isn't putting these "provenances" on labels for shits and giggles, they're doing it because they think it makes the items more prestigious in some way. It doesn't matter whether you agree or not, the point is that, again, there's an obvious issue of bias and conflict of interest if WATA is handing out these provenances to people involved with the company. Think how your argument would look made from WATA's point of view - "it's fine for us to stick a provenance on these games owned by a person involved with the company, because provenances are bullshit and nobody cares". The obvious response is "then why are you inventing them and sticking them on labels in the first place?" You're eliding a key point in saying it's fine for Deniz/WATA to pump game values because they're a startup and that's what startups do. It's fine for a startup to talk up the value of its product. But that's not what those cases are about. They're talking up the value of the product they graded. WATA's product, ostensibly, is the grading service. They can go to town with talking up how awesome their grading service is, within the limits of not telling flat out lies and so on. But talking up the value of the graded games is a different thing. There are different opinions on how problematic it is for a grader to be talking up the value of the things they grade, but it's not the same thing as Bob's Apple Co. talking up the value of Bob's Apple Co.'s apples. I also agree that the video didn't come up with much that people "in the industry" didn't know already, but it wasn't for people "in the industry". It was for people who keep seeing news stories about games selling for millions of dollars, to alert them to the stuff that you wizened oldsters already know.

It seems a bit obvious, but in this case, could you not just send it to VGHF yourself and cut out the middleman? All you'd be paying WATA for in this case is an acrylic case, a label that says PRO, a mailer to VGHF, and a four month delay...:D On this specific topic I'm with Gloves and Cody. I personally see no reason to grade a game other than to sell it. If I wanted to sell a high-end game, yeah, I'd grade it. Otherwise, you can buy acrylic cases from several suppliers cheaper than VGA or WATA sell them, and with a much shorter turnaround time...

Two and a half words that strike terror into the book collector's heart: "ex-library copy"

Well, partly true, but shrinkwrap doesn't protect from knocks or from sunlight.

@darkchylde28I think you're really kind of stretching at this point. I'm pretty sure most people spending six figures on video games know who Mario is. Maybe your grandma doesn't, but that's not really...relevant.

The blurb has some "fun" explanation of the name: ""The Dreamer Collection" refers to the original owner's lofty dream of building an incredible rental store with an immense library of amazing games"