AdamW

I can see doing it either way, but the key thing is they ought to be clear about what they're actually doing, whichever it is. Then both people grading and people looking at graded games can know what's going on...

WATA grades seals differently per console, it's fairly obvious. Their scale doesn't say they do this, but it's impossible to avoid any other conclusion just looking at games they've graded. Genesis seals were pretty bad, so a seal in the same condition on a Genesis game vs. an Xbox game will grade higher. This isn't necessarily a terrible idea, but they really ought to disclose it and update the scale they have posted to reflect the reality of what they're doing. And yeah, the seal grade scale is not super well thought out. They need more grades between current A and current A++.

It wouldn't be that hard to get close, because it's a sturdy clamshell plastic case. There are a zillion carts out there cheap, not hard to find one that would grade well. The manual is the hardest piece but you can get to 8.5 at least even with a meh manual. And you can probably track down a 9.0 manual if you're waving four figures around...:D

it's less than 1% of the price of a sealed copy! That makes it a bargain! No, I haven't checked eBay prices, why would I do that? I'm too busy shovelling my money into this fire here.

@Columbusignoring the drama, you are going to struggle to price your thing. A variant that's uncommon but not otherwise particularly significant is a hard thing to price, because you're looking at a very narrow buyer pool; basically, people who are trying to put together some kind of variant set for which your thing is in the set ("all US SMB variants", or something), or people who are just general neat variant hounds. The latter are not likely to pay too high, really, because there are tons of neat variants out there and not all of them cost a fortune. I've got a black-ESRB SML2 because I thought it was neat and it only cost me a hundred bucks, but I wouldn't have picked it up on a whim if it'd been much more than that. If you can find two of the former, and they are both determined and have deep pockets, in that specific case, your thing is potentially worth quite a lot. Heck, if you can find one with deep pockets who's impatient you might be able to screw a lot of money out of them, I guess. But it's a very fickle thing. If you just threw it up for auction you'd be rolling the dice on someone interested popping up. It's much more complex than a variant that's rare and more widely desirable. Like a sticker sealed SMB. The market for one of those is a lot broader than the market for a late variant that's rare but not otherwise that interesting.

Paul Allen (another Microsoft cofounder) literally collected so much pop culture stuff he had to build a museum to put it in: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Pop_Culture It has some cool video game stuff, in fact. It has one of the few (I think) copies of one of Keita Takahashi's wilder game concepts, which is a kinda arcade cab with like a hundred buttons; at the start they all do the same thing, then as you go along, more and more actions get added in...

cool stuff! Are the refurbished ones actually a variant cover, or are they just stickers? they look sort of like stickers in the picture, but hard to be sure.

what is that loud beeping sound I hear? aha, it's just my sarcasm detector going off...

there's no 9.8/A++ (or, obviously, VGA 95) in the HA auction, so it won't be a direct comparison. Since the silly money market for this game is so new it'll be hard to draw any clear conclusions from a 9.6/A++ sale. I'm gonna predict it sells quite 'high', though. Bold prediction: it'll go for around what Goldin's VGA 95 went for.

Who said HA isn't involved? They can bid on these without it even being a conflict of interest!

I doubt it. That would be a huge dice roll, because if it doesn't get at least 9.8/A+ they could be in trouble on the flip. It'll be interesting to see what HA's 9.6/A++ goes for.

I mean, emulating Boktai on an emulator that lets you trigger the sun whenever is kinda better than playing it for real and having to go find a bright source of light all the freaking time. What, you wanted to play your game today? Oh too bad it's cloudy.

saw some discussion of that today. it looks a lot like shenanigans. apparently someone in one of the FB groups said they'd happily sell their 9.6 copy for $50k if the buyers were serious...:D

N64 was when real games started coming out. And by real I mean 3D. No-one plays your weird pixel jumpy games, old timer.

It makes a huge amount of difference to a certain type of collector/investor who is just playing a numbers game. This is essentially a way of injecting a rarity component to a collectible item that is not particularly rare. That's how you get to these super high valuations. There are a ton of og Charizard cards out there, but not many are 10s, so a 10 is way more valuable even if you probably can't see the difference between it and a 9.5. There are a ton of Lebron rookie cards out there, but not so many 10s. The formula is basically "desirable but fairly common item * extremely high grade = desirable rare item". It depends on graders not giving out the very high grades much, and they do tend to keep up their end of the bargain. WATA does not give out a lot of 9.8s. VGA does not give out a lot of anything over a 90. If you want a nice graded copy of a game to put on a shelf for some reason, get an 85+ or a 9.4. You don't need a 9.8 or even a 9.6. But if you're playing the collectible market investment numbers game, the 9.8 is worth waaaaay more simply because it's a higher number and there won't be a lot of them. You have one of only [a fairly small number] 9.8s in the world!

Jone's data really doesn't say what you want it to say. Out of 203 85+s in that data, exactly two crossed to 9.8/A++. That's a rate of very slightly under 1%. The correct statement is not "a VGA 85+ is (also at best) a 9.8 A++", but "a VGA 85+ is virtually never a 9.8 A++". Even out of the 90s, from a total of 34, only 7 crossed to 9.8/A++. That's a 'success rate' of only slightly over 20%, or to put it another way, a given VGA 90 is four times more likely to grade lower than 9.8/A++ than it is to grade 9.8/A++.

AFAIR cases for games shouldn't be fully sealed, some airflow is actually needed. I don't think WATA or VGA cases are hermetically sealed either. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, though.

I mean, we've known about those for weeks already? they've been listed since like July, I think. It's been mentioned in this thread more than once.

Here's a fun game you can play while you wait for your WATA returns: credit to unicornformaggi from Greg's discord, we had the idea at the same time but their card looks better than mine!

Yeah. I mean, everyone knows you grade food items with *VGA*, duh.

It actually (probably) says 78% *recycled* fiber. Eco thing from the 90s (and still common today), boasting about how recycled your thing is. It's on most/all Nintendo boxes from like the mid 90s till about 2002, I think. WATA likes to note it as it varies between box styles, but I think it's entirely redundant with the box style 99.9% of the time (all boxes of a particular style always have the same claimed recycled fiber content).

I dunno. You're paying a little over 40 a game then you've got grading, shipping, selling and holding costs to consider. Seems like a lot of work for not that much profit. But I guess it comes down to how you value the time, that's a personal call...

Neither of the US game listings offered international shipping. Americans will pay much more for American games than Europeans will, generally speaking, and almost all American buyers would not even have seen those listings, since they didn't offer shipping to the US. Someone good at eBay searching likely got some good deals.

It doesn't matter whether he receives compensation (although you can't possibly know how a private company chooses to make distributions to shareholders). It's a very simple point. Deniz told the NYT that employees could not get games graded or trade in graded games. Mark, who has his name in lights on the WATA site under Executive Team, then goes ahead and sells graded games. This is what's known in the trade as a bad look. We are in the court of public opinion here, so it's not necessary to play word games about whether Mark technically qualifies as an "employee" (and the NYT actually wrote it up as an indirect quotation in any case, so we don't know what precise word Deniz used). It's more important that a reasonable, unbiased observer who read that commitment in the NYT would not expect someone in Mark's position to be trading in graded games. The purpose of the commitment is clear - to avoid the obvious conflict of interest inherent in insiders being able to grade games or trade in graded games. On the face of it, Mark is very clearly enough of an "insider" that it presents a huge apparent conflict of interest for him to be doing so, and yet he is.

https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Half-Life:_Further_Data It's basically a patch CD for Half-Life. Remember, back in Ye Olde Dayes Of Yore not everyone had an internet connection suitable for downloading massive patches, so this sort of thing wasn't uncommon. It would update an earlier version of Half-Life to the latest, add Team Fortress Classic to it (it was a mod for Half-Life, not a standalone game, at the time), and add some extra maps and stuff. I doubt there's much of a market for something like this yet. There's barely a mature market for PC games yet, let alone weird exotica like this. May as well hang onto it for a few decades, though.