goldenpp72

No disasters but the scale of moving them all safely was horrifying to say the least. I bought tons of super durable totes and used packing material I had amassed over years then removed the art inserts, etc that could be damaged due to temp/humidity changes. It was over 7000 games and associated furniture, equipment, etc. Actually i'd guess that if you were to put the entire contents of it into one Uhaul, it would fill their 27 foot ones to the brim. I was so relieved to find nothing was damaged since it was a 1000 mile trip.

I would but i'm planning on redoing my entire photo set since I've redone a lot of it. Guess i'll just enjoy the ride for now

Just now, doner24 said:

Mine is definitely a little skewed because of some shrewd reselling, but I’m talking about full sets of CIB, not just the top games. You are still missing the point though, games certainly been be used as investments if done right, just like stocks, but not so large scale because of volume. It’s literally been shown it works in other collectibles. 

I never said it can't be used as an investment, just that it's not a smart one if you're in it to make money. It's the difference between saying I want to make some money versus a lot of money. You're buying the games because you want them, buying them as an investment when much easier and more lucrative options exist is my point. This would be like someone telling me I work at Mcdonalds to make money when they had the option to make 20 dollars an hour elsewhere, i'd call that an interesting decision if nothing else.

If you look at the stock market as a whole, in its entirety from the last 10 years, it's about 2.5x higher now and that's with everything factored. This disregards that you can actually buy and trade them at will with no challenge.

2 minutes ago, doner24 said:

Once again, try the market. Don’t just cherry pick the best performing stock of the last 2 decades. 

Games increasing 10x over would likely be considered a form of cherry picking since that is hardly the rule but an outlier as well, especially if only factoring the last 10 years. 

Just now, tbone3969 said:

I hear what you are saying.  I'm just trying to justify my expensive hobby/habit.  lol

I always tell my wife "Don't worry honey.  If I needed to sell them we would make money."

 

My lady friend is absolutely on board with it because she knows how it increases in value and would rather I get it now than later, but as you likely know it can take months or years to find something regardless of what you're willing to pay. That's kind of the main thing with all this, it's valuable because it's tangible and challenging to find. Hell I remember trying to find a CIB copy of Bomberman Quest for like 7 years, it got to a point I wasn't even sure it existed with a box because there was no photographic evidence. It took someone on Nintendoage posting a picture of it to show me it existed. 

Could I resell it now for what I paid or more? Maybe, not sure, but would I? Hell no, i'd have to be nearing homelessness. It wasn't an investment, I just really wanted it and would be sad to part with it, I have no attachment to stocks though and they can feel free to make me all the money they want

Just now, tbone3969 said:

Call it what you want but it happens everyday.  Your telling me if you buy a game for $50 and two weeks later you sell it for $150 you tell the IRS about it and pay taxes on the gains?  Cmon dude.  While you are technically correct lets talk about real world moves here that put money in your wallet.  Sure If I sold a Stadium Events for 20k I would inform the IRS but that's about it.

Oh I won't tell them shit, i'll circumvent those eBay fees too if I see an opening, just saying in the event we go into say, a cashless society and more advanced systems are in place, it might not be practical and it's tightening up every year i'd say. Still it's a nominal difference in the grand scheme, i'd be curious to meet a person who bought the holy grail games and had any idea they would raise in price, most of the time it was just some person who shoved it away in a tote and forgot about it not knowing what would happen. I think most of us collect because we love the hobby, and didn't factor the money element of it even if it matters now. It's simply not a viable thing to consider an investment unless you can tell me you knew the rares and patterns back then and were holding off for just such an occasion.

1 minute ago, tbone3969 said:

Another thing I consider is that when I sell a stock that I made a little money on I have to pay capital gains tax.  When I sell a game I pay no taxes.  That is huge for my wallet.  And yes I know about the 20k 1099 reporting requirement on eBay.  I just make sure to never go above 20k and I sell a bunch via cash deals.  If you factor in capital gains tax then games win hands down as far as an investment.

While true, that is effectively tax evasion. To my understanding selling things even in a garage sale, you're supposed to pay on it, even if no one does. Stocks being so easily traced might be a disadvantage but the world is catching up, a lot of us have to pay sales tax on eBay now for example, making it even less efficient on the margins. 

1 minute ago, tbone3969 said:

Well I have been collecting games for 25 years and while stocks are much easier to invest in I get much more joy out of collecting video games.  I have been in the market for about 15.  My games have performed much better investment wise.  i also love the thrill of the hunt.  Finding a break out stock at a cheap price isn't as fun as finding a box of CIB NES games at a thrift store for 50 cents each (which really happened to me.)  That score was actually the reason for my first post ever here on NintendoAge.  Is it possible to dig that old post up?  That would be cool.

Collecting used to have a thrill to it (not so much to me now due to the way the market has shifted) but again that kind of brings in an element that is irrelevant and perhaps concerning. A person who enjoys finding an item but doesn't really like it enough to keep it and then in turn wants to sell it when it increases in some way, that's not really a collector or a smart investor, it's more like a hoarder who knows how to make a decent margin off of what they horde i'd say. 

1 minute ago, tbone3969 said:

Not everyone is wise enough / lucky enough to invest only in Amazon.  Of course that would be better.  i'm talking about a diversified portfolio where you are look at a 7-9% annual return maybe even less.  

 

Investing all you money in Amazon would be like investing all your money only in Stadium Events, NWC carts, Little Samsons, etc. 10 - 20 years ago.

There are many stocks like that though, if you were to take the most holy grail of all video games and put them against the holy grails of stocks, stocks will win, and if you were to use simple volume as a method, stocks will REALLY win, because for every Little Samson there are about 1000 other games that sit there barely increasing in value. If you were to look at the stock market as a whole over a decade it's easily worth more ratio wise than gaming.

And again, this disregards all elements such as dividends and the ability to trade much more of it, etc. The idea of picking Amazon was simply to refute the cherry picking that goes on, for every Hagane there are many more Amazon like stocks, and of course the fact most people 20 years ago, they weren't buying more than a single copy of a game, they just happen to now own something worth something you know? If someone were to say today, I want to invest and make money, i'd very much never even muse the idea of games because the return time period is simply too huge and too small, it's a fun asset to collect that has a strong history of growing in value fairly well, that's it.

3 minutes ago, tbone3969 said:

Your collection only increased 50k on an initial investment of 225k?  If that is really the case then, yes you are right, stocks would have been better BUT how did it only increase that much?  If you got in 20 years ago your collection should have doubled or tripled in value by now.  Not sure what you were buying 20 years ago.

I meant this year with the covid boom as it were, I didn't begin 20 years ago but I did maybe.. 11 or 12, I'd say double is about right. Though the amount of work and effort that went into that, now that's another story. Anyone who has collected for a decade or two probably know's it isn't quite that simple

12 minutes ago, doner24 said:

See below this post of yours. 

If your growth was 10x, Amazon was 30x over 10 years, see my point? It just doesn't work out no matter how one can slice it, it's an investment in that it's an asset you attained that has grown, but it's not something someone should be doing specifically to make money if that is their goal.

6 minutes ago, doner24 said:

Well I’ve invested heavily in both video games and stocks the last decade plus with the caveat that my games are a hobby. I’m $30K into my games and they are worth $300K, I think anyone that thinks that is foolish is a fool. 

Curious, was that over 10 or 20 years, or more? I'd like to know what configuration of games did that and why stocks wouldn't do better. If you bought into Amazon 10 years ago at 118, they are worth 3,200 now.

9 minutes ago, doner24 said:

You are missing the point, the returns on games have beat the market the last decade, without fail. It’s the scale that can’t match the market and why your friend is a multi millionaire, I.e. he’s likely trading many stocks at a time versus one sale of $400 to $1200. 

Sure, the point being that unless you're buying the right games and buying massive amounts of them only to wait decades, there is no logic in using them as 'investments' especially since the immediate return is almost entirely pointless in comparison. Someone who tells me they are 'investing' money in videogames comes off as a fool, someone who considers it a viable asset that is growing in value, sure, that's fine.

https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/amzn

Nothing in gaming can achieve this, not even the most extreme cases, and there are a lot more Amazon level stocks out there then there are Haganes.

55 minutes ago, doner24 said:

Your Shantae example isn’t helping your argument as that would literally beat any financial market you could play % wise. Multiply that by thousands of games and you could see why some people actually consider their collection an investment. It’s no different than more mature collectibles like comics and baseball cards. People have been making mints speculating on them for decades. 

People who can read the market and buy in, sell, and rebuy in, etc, will make infinitely higher amounts of money. One of my friends from NYC is a multi millionaire and I seriously doubt a single collector ever became as such due to flipping videogames. Once again there is a huge difference between working with something liquid such as cash where you can effectively keep placing back what you're earning because it's a generic thing, versus selling something you might not be able to regain. If I sell my Shantae today for 1200 and think maybe it will lower to 800 later and rebuy it, I made 400 bucks, I also risk it increasing and never being able to get it at a price I can pay again. I lose nothing specific when I invest the market, but I lose something physical entirely in the other instance and also have to deal with all the issues that can entail (scum bag buyers, storage, risk of storage, etc).

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/stock-price-history

There is of course the obvious ability to make more immediate huge amounts of money if you truly have the talent to read markets, where as no such thing exist in gaming typically, we have no potential for something to just double next year on any good authority, but with stocks you can take 10k and turn it into a million if you truly are great at it. Of course, not all stocks have risen as the one I linked, but not many games have increased in a meaningful way either. Those Atari 2600 games or 60 percent of the NES library still haven't raised that much unless you bought them new in their release and kept them sealed.

I'm not saying money can't be made, I could effectively make double my money back i'd guess and that would be a pretty penny, but I had I never started collecting and made smart market decisions i'd likely be much more wealthy today, I just didn't have the foresight then. I can take 50k and turn into 100k if I have such a read on the market, but you can't do that practically with videogames, videogames usually require many many years if not decades to appreciate as such. 

If you want another example, Shantae came out in 2002, Amazon stock in 2002 was 10 dollars, now it's 3200. Even if the normal person bought one copy of Shantae and put 30 bucks into Amazon, they would have made almost 10000 dollars on that money. Some person might say well DUH that's AMAZON, well guess what, most games don't become Shantae or Little Samson either.

20 minutes ago, tbone3969 said:

Really.....  have you seen the increase of games recently?  Over a ten or twenty year period I would say they easily outpaced the market gains.  I don't know anything about real estate but the returns on vintage games have been amazing.

Yeah. My collection has raised from like 225k to maybe 275k, so 50 thousand dollars across thousands of games. While the increases have been impressive overall and extremely so in specific instances, it isn't anywhere near enough to bother. I've spent over 10 years collecting and I can make almost 6 figures a year just by working, if I was looking to 'gain' by investing i'd be pumping money into stocks and other things. I made 20k profit out of an Apple stock back a few years ago in just a year, the only reason I haven't been able to keep at it were multiple moves and job changes but I hope to learn more about investing and get more growth out of it in the coming years.

It's bizarre to me that people have money to play with, enough to play with to buy old videogames, but they somehow come to look at them as an 'investment' when far superior options exist if you care to learn about them, options that don't involve losing something you may actually want. Then again, almost everything I own is something I find interesting and want to own it, i'd rather all of my stuff had cost a dollar simply because I wanted it, not because it 'might pay off one day'. I suppose if you just casually bought a bunch of stuff for 5-10 bucks and it's worth thousands it would make sense, you didn't have a lot of money and now you can have more, but when I already spent 400 bucks on a copy of Shantae it being worth 1200 now, 800 isn't going to change my life.

I would need to be able to make enough money to change my life to consider it, otherwise I can just keep working and making money that way while investing like most people do. You also have to look at it from a practical sense, while one stock might not gain you a double profit, you can pump in and out as many as you'd like, so if you know what to do and have say, 10k to throw around, you'll get a lot further than when dealing with things as limited to find such as impossible to find videogames. 

I suppose it all just boils down to different people and opinions, I have an area setup to a degree that merely being in the room makes me feel happy, it's magnificent to me. If I just had a few old games lying around worth thousands and didn't really want them anymore sure, though to be honest considering i've always been at odds with sealed collectors and such as well, it's probably just down to the fact I don't buy things I don't actually ever want to use, if I wanted to do that and make money, i'd buy stocks, sterile as they are it serves that function.

If you're looking at it from a 20 year period, that still makes no sense, you'd literally have to store, take care of and offload that item and do so with the proper timing, trading and profiting off videogames is in no way the smarter way to make large amounts of money. Give a smart investor and game collector 10k right now, and they will make far more making intelligent decisions in any normal investment market than they would with games. If it's just about the money to you, you could be doing a lot better than storing your copy of a game that may either be worth 5k one day (unlikely) or your game that went from 40 to now 80 years later. When you consider how much a mint shape copy of say, Mario 3 is worth today vs when it launched combined with inflation, the odds aren't in your favor unless you were sitting on tons of discounted copies of Shantae, Hagane and Little Samson for decades.

No, i'd feel like an idiot if I amassed all this stuff only to try and flip it for profit. I could have been investing that money in real estate or stocks and done much better, I actually want to own the things I have.

It's very frustrating to click half of your collections only to have it error

Bit of a mess since it was just put in place but, this is probably the last major thing to add to the area

I've been putting some stuff online here and there but I figured before going anywhere else with it i'd let people here have a run since I know people like to buy NES stuff. Here are some pictures, if any serious offers come through I will open the cart for you (I did this back when I obtained it so I know it's legit, but i'll let you see too) Please note the 2 mild punctures on the back, otherwise it's a beaut. I don't have an up to date trade list setup at the moment but I have interest in nice shape boxed NES/SNES/GB/GBC/GBA titles, so if that's an option you'd be interested in i'd be happy to make up a list, but otherwise i'll just field offers no worries. Having not done trades before i'd be a bit wary though unless there is some system in place to assure safety, as I can't imagine just sending this out with nothing on the hook. Paypal is my normal means of money transactions otherwise. Hit me up if you have questions or offers, but I'll want to field options.

Pictures 

Narrowed the list down, figured i'd bump once more just in case

I own one of each of those, they're alright.

12 hours ago, Fleck586 said:

You haven't seen this house. 

I think it's more that having collected and gone through quite a bit of trouble over 15 years to collect, it would be hard to imagine parting with it unless it would basically result in never having to work again or some other life changing amount of money. My house is pretty nice but certainly not a million dollar mansion or anything so maybe  Between my lady friend and myself we make a healthy wage so I guess I just look at, work and save for 2 or 3 more years or sell off what took me half my life to amass. 

That said peoples priorities and interest change, as long as you won't regret it there is nothing wrong obviously, and it is a good time to sell.

As someone who has a collection that is worth the cost of a house, I can't imagine selling it for a house, but maybe i'm not old enough yet

I mean the system was designed to play arcade games and 60 fps is very important in those games. It makes sense it was balanced as such, but that mentality is long gone now sadly. Hopefully we see more and more performance modes since I much prefer 60 fps with checkerboard resolution vs 'native' 4k at 30 fps.

Def not a full set, just my personally desired set you could say