Seth

Holy cow. But this sort of underscores my point about what crossover data teaches us (something I've been writing an article on). We have to remember that all VGA games graded under 95 and over 70 are in "near-mint" range (from EX+/NM to NM/M). In practice, this means that over 80% of VGA games on the market are in the near-mint range *officially*—as you never really see a 95 or 100 VGA at market (and if you do, it's irrelevant to anyone but a millionaire) and candidly VGA games 70 and below often aren't at market either (and of those that are, maybe 90% are 70 or 60, which are both still EX or EX+). Meanwhile, do the math: any WATA game under a 9.0 is *not* in the near-mint range definitionally—per WATA partner Heritage Auctions' official assessment—and even some of the 9.0 and 9.2 WATA boxes are *not* in the near-mint range because they have B+ seals or (as we've seen a lot of lately from WATA) erroneous "A" seal grades. Yet WATA games consistently sell at 25% to 75% *more* than VGA games, even comparing like to like. If you're a seller, you use WATA; if you're a buyer, I have no idea what you'd be doing not looking for VGA games first. The only disadvantage is that people don't understand the condition crossover data yet, so they don't realize that an 80+ from VGA is likely to be in *better* condition than a 9.0/A from WATA and possibly even a 9.2/A+. While sure, both companies make mistakes—VGA far fewer than WATA—as long as you review pictures before purchase, as a buyer you should *always* look to VGA first. Ultimately it's the actual condition of the item, not the fact that WATA's grading scheme is devised to be a psychological ploy, that matters; WATA's grading scheme falsely convinces us, because of how we're conditioned to "read" numbers and 10-point/100-point grading scales, to imagine a 9.0/A equals a 90 VGA. Not even close. Not even in the stratosphere of correct. And this isn't even counting the fact that your WATA case (and I have many) will almost certainly have scuffs, bubbles, detritus, and/or human or dog hair in it; is more likely to have a mis-graded game in it; and will be contained in a box that explicitly gives derogatory information about your game on it. If you graded the game from raw, you also probably waited over a year for it, during which time you had to watch (and, spoiler, will have to keep watching) WATA's brand devolve due to scandal and new competition. I guess I'm saying that I'm not actually that surprised that an 80+ VGA gets a 95 at P1. An 80+ VGA is a much higher grade than people realize, in part because the WATA fanboys have convinced everyone that (at best) 85+ [Gold Tier] equates to the very lowest end of WATA's NM tier (9.0/A). That is factually wrong—and deliberately so. It's pure WATA marketing, not reality. Seth RETRO (launches 10/19)

Actually DRob is pushing P1 to his crew now, because WATA and VGA are so backed up. But yes, believe me, I know all about the man in Brazil behind P1 (who is openly—not even hiding it—using a Kingston, Tennessee address to sell games his company graded). That's right: the only P1-graded games being sold by anyone but DRob are being sold *by P1*. Shady as hell, as you say. But mark my words, P1 has a good shot of growing given their turnaround times, passable physical product, and the absolute collapse of WATA (which backed out of Too Many Games, faces new competition from CGC [and to a far, far lesser degree P1 and UKG and VGG], has answered none of the present allegations of corruption, is increasingly sending out cases with scuffs and detritus and/or dog/human hairs inside them, has been caught in positively *fantastical* grading errors [usually involving seals] over and over in just the last two months, and is now taking over a year to return orders while not answering its customer service calls). Is P1 shady? Looks that way so far. But shadiness has never stopped the high-end resellers from using—and even pumping up—a grading service before.

Jonas, (1) 150% is a gaming-wide average. You and I know that the in-demand games have seen 300% or more increase in just 18 months, and in some instances 100% increases in the last 120 days. Price Charting does not confirm your claim that spikes like this are common. Yes, we may see 50% increases for certain games over a two-year timeframe (though surely you know, as Pat Contri and Ian Ferguson have covered on the CUPodcast, that NES prices in particular were plummeting, not rising, until WATA came along) but nothing like this. I understand that you like to note that you've been collecting for a little over a decade—which is not actually that long in the grander scheme of video games hitting their 50-year anniversary next year—but your anecdotes do not trump hard data. (2) I am trying to figure out what universe you're in that you think CIBs a long-time collector would want—the guy from the video wasn't a dude in his first year of collecting, looking for a Top Gun—are "$100 to $250." Graded CIBs in public markets are now $500 to $2,500 depending on title and grade, and raw CIBs are $500 to $1,000. Saying you don't feel sympathy for a CIB collector right now is like saying that everyone in America, if they just save enough, should be able to *collect* flat-screen television sets or lower-priced laptops in the midst of a pandemic and economic downturn. C'mon, man, I know you make a ton of money annually, but you can't be serious with this view of how the average person lives. (3) You put a $999 StarTropics on eBay a while back, and I thought that was good of you—a reasonable (obviously insane, but in our times reasonable) price for the title (though it's the #11 most commonly graded title on its console) and grade (decent but sub-investment). I know that your crew pretty much agrees not to sell things for under $1,000 in order to destroy the three-figure market as soon as possible, thereby eliminating the chance of collecting graded games for anyone in the middle class, so I admired you for that listing. (I also admired your "crossover" article, as I have told you before, as it exposed how much more likely a *buyer* is to find value in VGA-graded games rather than WATA games; it was your article, ironically on the WATA website, that convinced me that all buyers should prefer VGA games not merely as a matter of business ethics but dollars-and-cents and bang-for-buck. Not surprisingly, and indeed I suspect this is why WATA published the article, it also implicitly made the case that *sellers* should always use WATA. Virtually no articles in this space are ever intended for buyers—only sellers—which is both telling and explains why WATA, which you advised at its founding or shortly before/after, would have wanted to publish your hard-data analysis of crossover grades.) Anyway, your copy of StarTropics did not sell at $999. You re-listed it, and it still did not sell. You've now dropped it to $899 and it hasn't sold. During the period all this was happening, I bought a same-condition VGA copy of the game for hundreds less (proving my point about the "crossover" issue). Meanwhile, DRob is cutting YouTube videos begging friends like Dan Riga to buy his games—and admits that no one is buying them. I don't doubt that you or anyone can make money on Heritage, but this idea that you or Tom Curtin or whoever is making bank on private sales is undercut by DRob conceding he can't move any of his product in private sales to his fellow high-end resellers. As far as you saying I only watch eBay when the 25 markets I track are listed on my website and in my data... I can't help you there. What you've said is wrong. I attend every Heritage weekly and signature and, just to be clear, I own a large number of graded games from both WATA (mostly) and VGA (a few but now, as I noted, my primary focus). I've bought things on Heritage and have a game being looked at by WATA right now. I am not a dilettante—I just don't run with crowds or hang out on private boards, which is why you don't know about me or my collection. While it's true I don't know you or your collection, you have to excuse me if I can't accept your representation of private transactions with anonymous individuals for unlisted prices in a market rampant with corruption whose public-facing components (including the hard data of sales) are distressing and turgid. You have a motive to present things a certain way and, as you say, I don't know you. (4) Jonas, I did not say you "hype the market." I said you are a reseller, which you are. I said that you are part of a group of high-end resellers who have no idea how to expand this hobby beyond overseas millionaires and your fellow high-end resellers—which you are. You haven't even contested me saying that, or offered any example of how those in your set are working to expand the hobby. None of this makes you a bad person, and I am not calling you a bad person. I am saying you are not a steward of the hobby, nor are your fellow resellers, unless and until you come up with even a single idea—just *one*—about how to make it accessible to more people and thereby expand your buyer base. If it's "very easy to move good stuff," explain to me why one of the highest end sellers—DRob, who pretended to be a pleb interested in raw Atari product to help Deniz on Pawn Stars—is on YT videos repeatedly saying he can't move his stuff. And you haven't responded to those noting that the Heritage sales are the same games over and over in a one-year cycle, or the fact that the once-robust three-figure marketing is evaporating, or how CIB prices for the games collectors actually want are now in the four figures (CIB, mind you!) or anything else. All you seem to have is denigrating this longtime collector from the video we're now discussing by saying he should spend more time outside playing with his friends.

It's even stranger than you imagine. My website tracks 25 markets, and apart from the auctions almost nothing sells—ever. Sealed and graded games just sit there untouched, seemingly forever, at prices no one would seriously consider. I exaggerate just a little, of course—the comic book shops that sell graded games may move one or two a month from what you can see online, and across all consoles and grade types and grading houses eBay might see ten to twenty sales total a month, which is nothing obviously—but the games always sell when they appear at auction. Strange, right? At Heritage, the really expensive games are bought by a small number of anonymous millionaires, many of whom (I believe) are overseas. But yes, the resellers are buying a ton and then trying to sell them to the millionaires—or one another. It's a shockingly turgid, blind, stupid, immature, out-of-control market, and the resellers are well aware of the fact that they don't have the imagination or foresight to do any of the obvious things to try to build a low- to mid-range graded-game fan base. In fact, they've done the opposite of what any sensible person would do: they've ensured that the most common and popular games, the ones a new entrant to collecting might be interested in as a sort of gateway to the hobby, are impossible to afford. I don't know how this all ends up, but neither do they. All I know is that they are not growing the market horizontally, only vertically, and it will likely be fatal to this bubble they've set up. Don't know when.

They've gone up for different reasons. Carts have gone up because during the pandemic more people are gaming because they are home more. Carts are clearly not going up because of grading because at this point very few of the games being graded by the six or seven grading houses out there are loose carts. Talking about whether prices going up is "okay" or not is a red herring—a trap. When I said that prices had gone up for CIB over 150% in 2 years and that that was insane, my point was that it was and is unusual and that it did and is pricing people out of a hobby they have enjoyed for decades. That's what the video the OP was writing about was clearly discussing—not whether he had gotten lucky at conventions in the past or whether he properly appreciates his friends and spending time with them. Because no one specifically has a "right" to any particular hobby (in the legal sense), it is sort of impossible to say whether it is morally okay when prices explode; it is not, however, difficult to say that it is sad for many people, unless you lack empathy—in which case one will simply bathe oneself in self-justifications perpetually. The gentleman in the video certainly did talk a lot about "eBay plus," and I can't speak to whether it is a good idea to buy games at a convention (though having been to many conventions I will agree that prices obviously should be lower at conventions than outside them, as it is logically absurd when they are higher—it defeats the theory of how/why you can convince people to spend a lot of money to come to a convention in the first place) or how the prices at TMG this year compare to eBay right now. But I don't think any of us doubted this man when he said that prices were higher than they had been previously (pre-2019) and that games he previously could have afforded he now cannot. Even the OP did not call this man a liar. My nit to pick with the other poster was not about whether it is okay for prices to go up or down but whether he was misrepresenting this man's basis for being concerned about his ability to continue in the game-collecting hobby. You can justify price changes however you like, and you can pretend that extraordinary price changes with an obvious cause are just part of the normal up and down of the collectibles industry even when you know they are not and are specifically caused by speculators, but it's not going to bring back into the hobby people who were priced out of it. The reason Jonebone and others are struggling to sell many of their games is that there aren't enough low- or mid-range buyers—and the reason there aren't enough buyers of this sort is because everyone but millionaires and resellers is getting priced out of the hobby, even as resellers like Jonebone celebrate every new price record set. They can keep shooting themselves in the foot interminably if they like, that's not my business.

Jonebone, if you watched the video, you know he wasn't talking about loose carts. Loose cart prices have gone up only slightly in the last few years, and he certainly wasn't complaining about Contra being $32 instead of $18. Nor was he speaking of sealed and graded games—he didn't want any and didn't express any envy whatsoever of those who did and/or who were buying sealed and graded games at TMG. He seemed to fully understand that this was others' bag and not his. He was talking about CIB games—which on average have gone up *over 150%* in price in just 24 months, which is literally insane. It's happened because of speculators in the sealed and graded market. They buy CIB games and send them off to WATA, VGA, and now P1. You know this. You do this yourself. So you know *exactly* what he was upset about—you know exactly what he was able to get CIB games for in 2018 versus today—and you also know it has nothing to do with luck. You're too smart and too self-aware to be this disingenuous, man. That was a really disappointing post by you.

Hi Adam, I think you'd agree that this is a gross oversimplification. While high-end investors and re-sellers won't generally be happy with under a 9.2 if they're collecting (for what reason I can't for the life of me figure out, but that's another matter) ubiquitous hard-shell modern video game titles that post-date the grading craze (and therefore may still exist in warehouses and private caches in volume) rather than actually rare and valuable cardboard titles, where there's actually a condition premium, even in that submarket an exceedingly rare game—such as there are any—in 8.5 box condition would still be valued. Those of us who collect cardboard are (a) dealing with older and more fragile games, where there's a condition premium and grades are generally lower so an 8.5 might be considered just fine, (b) dealing with game libraries that have some legitimately rare games that almost never come on the market, in which case an 8.5 is terrific, and—the most obvious—(c) may be actual collectors (non-investors/non-resellers), in which case the visual appearance of the box is what matters most, and an 8.5 will display very well while still being a high enough grade that if one were to try to re-sell it many, many years from now (considering the rarity and generation of the item) it would probably perform admirably at market. Heck, an 8.5 copy of 1942 (NES) just sold for over $4,000, and that actually *isn't* one of the "rare" sealed-and-graded NES games (though it's also not "common"). A better analogy is Sword Master or Journey to Silius, which just came up at Heritage and would have gone for $1,000+ easily whether they were 8.5 or 9.0 or 9.6. You just don't see those games in sealed and graded condition, at any WATA grade. But then there's a whole separate dynamic that these conversations miss, because they're largely participated in by resellers and investors who've lost all sense of perspective. *Some people don't have millions of dollars*. For Jonebone to say that "no one" would want a 7.0/A game is to say that everyone who is in this conversation or *should* be in this conversation is made of money and/or is a reseller/investor. I can easily see a collector who can "only" afford to collect their favorite games in 7.0/A condition, as even those games will generally go (at least in the NES era) for $300 to $700 per (sealed), which already makes collecting at volume nearly impossible for most people. As game-collecting becomes more popular, there are going to be more middle-class folks coming into the conversation—and that's a very good thing. And more non-speculators—also a good thing. I think a lot of people would be turned off by these conversations that don't take into account game generation, title rarity, or collector budget. The simple fact is that there *is* no "most collectors" and shouldn't be. Everyone collects differently. While there's an argument to be made that VGA is the better grading service for collectors because (a) the games are approximately 50% to 70% as expensive like-to-like, (b) the grading QC is better, (c) the cases have fewer bubbles and scuffs and internal contaminants, and (d) everything under a 95 or above a 70 is officially in the "near mint" range (EX+/NM to NM/M), whereas anything under a WATA 9.0 is *outside* the near mint range (and whereas almost the only items you'll ever find from VGA on the market are under 95 and over 70, WATA has flooded the market with sub-9.0 items and 9.0-and-over items that are in garbage condition and didn't deserve that grade)... that's a different conversation. Seth