JinxtheCat

how long does it take someone to create a video like that?

Your question is referencing VGA grading specifically. Its worth noting another major grading company named Wata is also an available grading service with a difference scale - more like comics. As a general rule "most" sealed games that aren't battered to death come in at 80, 80+, 85 or 85+ in VGA scale. Anything outside that range is an outlier. a 75 is usually beat up and visually damaged. A vga score of 90 is not easy to get and a 95 is almost impossible on older sealed games (SNES and prior). VGA incorporates plastic wrap directly into their grade whereas Wata has a separate seal rating from the box condition grade. Translating VGA into Wata can be tricky and takes some experience to predict accurately.

literally had the same reaction. been decades since iheard that intro.

Be interesting to see if this (perceived) theme plays into the next round of HA auctions.....

Not to hijack this thread....but who in the world would trade an NWC of any condition for a Pokemon red regardless of condition? i'm surprised more people aren't surprised....

worked for me

Lmk if someone has a cart they are looking to sell. thanks.

Ranking the quality of the SNES games or the rarity to acquire them either loose, CIB, or sealed?

How does a modern version of the "rarity guides" produced way back when (before my time) by the likes of Digi-press etc not exist nowadays? imagine how much more information we have now then we did back then - even without official population stats. I think we could get a really close to the truth here by leveraging the digi-press benchmarks as a starting point and crowd sourcing the community to update the rankings. Is it the fear of the "secret excel spreadsheet" that gives collectors the edge on newbies that keeps this from happening? or just good old fashioned laziness. *grabs popcorn

Biggest takeaway for me on that auction was the ZERO BID for black box sticker seals. There was a huge rush of demand after the initial IG storm of stickers hit, but that's clearly done now. If you really wanted to start collecting stickers, and had no inventory that was a great auction to seed your collection. Admittedly, i was guilty of some of the hype chasing sticker craze. With the prices i saw last night, begs the question whether its even worth paying WATA to certify and grade them!!! I think we're seeing the normalization of the delta between sealed games and CIBs. CIBs were "rich" for a while there and are coming back down now. Once the newcomers seed themselves with the education of CIBs vs Sealed differences, i think this spread will stabilize.

Comic Book crash? Can i get a high level summary? not familiar....

The biggest takeaway for me is the WATA/GoCollect/Hertitage influence brought in a new tranche of people to the hobby. This is a tenuous analogy...hang with me......but the new "comicbook" crowd feel like the rich people from developed countries that travel to a relatively poverty stricken vacation destination. They bring in their strong foreign currency, spend "lavishly" relative to locals, and only stay at a few choice spots. Choice spots = high end sealed games. The economies in those destination cities/towns completely change (sealed and certain CIBs skyrocket) as the locals (old collectors) cater to the new tourist money (comicbros) as prices soar. The surrounding cities (lesser CIBs, set collectors) in that same country that the tourists don't travel to as much may experience a slight inflation rise (reasoning for so many "nos" on this poll) due to the knock on effects of the influx of new money (workers flocking to beach resorts to work for more pay = wage rise in other cities). In the end, some locals are better off (monetizing pieces at record prices), some are not (set collectors, CIBs, non-nintendo pieces), but overall it feels disingenuous. Outsiders have seriously impacted the economy and the culture and they're doing it because it's cheap holiday (or cheap investment in their eyes) and not because they truly care about the island (or games). I think that's what bothers me more than prices going up. If the core sealed collectors for whatever reason just started to get more aggressive, and prices began to rise organically from a group that truly valued the nostalgia - that feels good to me. Sitting here watching thousands and thousands of dollars dropped on graded games they don't give a frog's fat ass about feels bad man.

Velvet elf from NA and IG here