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JJ Games shutting down


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5 minutes ago, TDIRunner said:

That's assuming that he knew about it up front which is what I doubt.  It would have been nice if he could have posted a warning saying that he had a buyer and everyone has 24 hours to make their final purchases, but that could also have an impact in the final sale price of the website.  For me it wouldn't have mattered since the prices weren't low enough on anything I was interested in to make one last purchase.  

The fact that liquidation prices were still outrageous at the end suggests they werent intended to sell during the sale, which in turn suggests they were intended to wind up elsewhere when the thing started.

6 minutes ago, RH said:

The reason why I don't agree with that theory is that it doesn't make business sense.  If you want to sell your shop, why take the time for the last month to stack the order book?  Plus, if I was the buyer and we had a set purchase date, I'd be a bit angry if the guy had a major sale 2 weeks before the purchase and I'd probably back out. Legally, that type of stuff is usually built in acquisition contracts, so you can't do that.

The only thing that makes sense to me is that he intended to say "everything must go" but if a buyer showed up, he'd be willing to clear the order books and turn over the shop.  Otherwise, you're shooting the guy coming in, in the foot, and who would take that deal?

Unless the purpose of your sale is to unload a lot of baggage leaving you with a strong lean inventory with which to relaunch a storefront. All that other junk will likely reaccumulate over time.

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Unrelated to the discussion of how the sell of the place went down, I am personally glad that there now won't be an influx of games entering the market and inevitably ending up on eBay, if they are picked up for cheap compared to today's prices.

I need to start selling off my inventory of stuff that I've accumulated from lots and, man, the idea of JJ Games dumping 50k games wasn't looking good for me to maximize my income.

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Just now, Lincoln said:

Unless the purpose of your sale is to unload a lot of baggage leaving you with a strong lean inventory with which to relaunch a storefront. All that other junk will likely reaccumulate over time.

Though I understand that, I will say that I had a bunch of "Junk" in my cart and at best, it seemed priced "slightly above average" and probably wasn't dropping 1% in value each day, which is supposedly what their system would do--auto adjust prices every day until demand matched price.

In my case, for many systems there are a LOT of common fillers I wouldn't mind getting, but if/when I do, I want to get them as cheap as I can and in lots.  I never got that chance and quite honestly, I don't think they were priced to move inventory quickly.  Of course, I started with NES games and maybe they didn't adjust any of their NES titles much.  Even the most common of games.

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2 minutes ago, Lincoln said:

The fact that liquidation prices were still outrageous at the end suggests they werent intended to sell during the sale, which in turn suggests they were intended to wind up elsewhere when the thing started.

 

Except for the fact that many of the prices were outrageous before the sale began.  That's simply a product of their pricing strategy which, as many have pointed out, had some flaws.  

I honestly don't care whether he knew from the beginning or not.  I don't see anything worth getting upset over.  Some people got some good deals.  No one got screwed over unless they made some kind of impulse buy without thinking.  Some time down the road the website will probably be back up with what we can only hope are fixes to the pricing.  If they don't, I will continue to not purchase from them and I'll be in no worse a position than I was when this entire thing started.  

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23 minutes ago, RH said:

I don't care if this is a troll post, it would not surprise me in the slightest if that happened. I don't think it will, but who knows if they bought the whole company just so they can control the only other pricebook on the web.

Think about it.

You know, after I considered it more, I gave yet another consideration to making The Micheal Scott Game Price Book company, and did some quick research.  On the findCompletedItems API call, they make this statement.

Quote

Be aware that it is possible to use this call in such a way as to violate the terms and conditions of your API License Agreement. Ensure that you do not store the results retrieved from this call or use the results for market research purposes.

Now, hold up.  Does this mean that GVN and PriceCharting have been, and are, breaking the eBay TOS?  IIRC, Hoagie actually waited a long time for eBay to increase his API limits and though they dragged their heels for over 6 months, they eventually cut it on.  I even think he had to petition them and give the use of his application.

So, GVN and PriceCharting, technically, need to shut down of find other mechanisms for acquiring their numbers.

This saddens me because I thought this might be the push I needed to create a competitor.

Edited by RH
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11 minutes ago, RH said:

You know, after I considered it more, I gave yet another consideration to making The Micheal Scott Game Price Book company, and did some quick research.  On the findCompletedItems API call, they make this statement.

Now, hold up.  Does this mean that GVN and PriceCharting have been, and are, breaking the eBay TOS?  IIRC, Hoagie actually waited a long time for eBay to increase his API limits and though they dragged their heels for over 6 months, they eventually cut it on.  I even think he had to petition them and give the use of his application.

So, GVN and PriceCharting, technically, need to shut down of find other mechanisms for acquiring their numbers.

This saddens me because I thought this might be the push I needed to create a competitor.

IIRC I asked jj way back if he was scraping to get best offer accepted prices and he specifically mentioned it was against tos to do that. I still don't know how gvn was doing it. Unless something has changed I couldn't figure out an API call that would give me that number.

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14 minutes ago, Lincoln said:

IIRC I asked jj way back if he was scraping to get best offer accepted prices and he specifically mentioned it was against tos to do that. I still don't know how gvn was doing it. Unless something has changed I couldn't figure out an API call that would give me that number.

Well, I know GVN was using the API, which as I mentioned, was exactly why the site didn't have any price updates for ages.  EBay blocked them for going over their API call limit.

There is a chance that JJ Games was "scraping" from web requests of the actual search results pages.  Of course, I'm sure eBay has checks in place to avoid that. But, eh, who knows.

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32 minutes ago, Lincoln said:

IIRC I asked jj way back if he was scraping to get best offer accepted prices and he specifically mentioned it was against tos to do that. I still don't know how gvn was doing it. Unless something has changed I couldn't figure out an API call that would give me that number.

Watchcount will show you a best offer price on a completed sale.  As far as I'm aware PC and GVN algorithms miss a lot of the sales points though.

Then there's also BIN items that sell privately when the seller sends an offer to all buyers, and I don't think PC or GVN picks up on that sale (or misquotes the sale price).  I.e. I have a $100 BIN with 8 watchers, send a $90 offer to the watchers and someone buys at $90.  I think the sale is missed entirely or viewed publicly at $100.

Both sites have limitations but are infinitely better than the alternative of no historical pricing data. 

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11 minutes ago, jonebone said:

Watchcount will show you a best offer price on a completed sale.  As far as I'm aware PC and GVN algorithms miss a lot of the sales points though.

Then there's also BIN items that sell privately when the seller sends an offer to all buyers, and I don't think PC or GVN picks up on that sale (or misquotes the sale price).  I.e. I have a $100 BIN with 8 watchers, send a $90 offer to the watchers and someone buys at $90.  I think the sale is missed entirely or viewed publicly at $100.

Both sites have limitations but are infinitely better than the alternative of no historical pricing data. 

I think they all miss when sales from a multiple quantity listing happen.   Scott mentioned that to them several times and it always fell on deaf ears.

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1 hour ago, RH said:

You know, after I considered it more, I gave yet another consideration to making The Micheal Scott Game Price Book company, and did some quick research.  On the findCompletedItems API call, they make this statement.

Now, hold up.  Does this mean that GVN and PriceCharting have been, and are, breaking the eBay TOS?  IIRC, Hoagie actually waited a long time for eBay to increase his API limits and though they dragged their heels for over 6 months, they eventually cut it on.  I even think he had to petition them and give the use of his application.

So, GVN and PriceCharting, technically, need to shut down of find other mechanisms for acquiring their numbers.

This saddens me because I thought this might be the push I needed to create a competitor.

The way it was explained to me is that ebay would only have an issue with using the stored data for market research on the entire video game category. They never seemed to have an issue with storing the data for market research on an individual item.

1 hour ago, Lincoln said:

IIRC I asked jj way back if he was scraping to get best offer accepted prices and he specifically mentioned it was against tos to do that. I still don't know how gvn was doing it. Unless something has changed I couldn't figure out an API call that would give me that number.

There was indeed a trick to getting the BestOffer prices. I'm not sure if it is still applicable as I know that ebay has made some changes in recent months. As far as I know, JJ never figured it out :-P.

1 hour ago, captmorgandrinker said:

I think they all miss when sales from a multiple quantity listing happen.   Scott mentioned that to them several times and it always fell on deaf ears.

Multiple quantity listings are a bitch and ebay's API does not provide much in terms of tracking them. I tried many different solutions and in the end it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth.

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18 minutes ago, Hogie said:

The way it was explained to me is that ebay would only have an issue with using the stored data for market research on the entire video game category. They never seemed to have an issue with storing the data for market research on an individual item.

Aaaaaah, that makes so much sense!  I mean, I have no idea why they would allow it to be done that way but it always seemed to me that you could have easily stayed within the original eBay limits if you just searched on they category.

I guess executing a bunch of searches per item was the trick.

Also, good to see you hear on VGS!

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24 minutes ago, Hogie said:

 

The way it was explained to me is that ebay would only have an issue with using the stored data for market research on the entire video game category. They never seemed to have an issue with storing the data for market research on an individual item.

There was indeed a trick to getting the BestOffer prices. I'm not sure if it is still applicable as I know that ebay has made some changes in recent months. As far as I know, JJ never figured it out :-P.

Multiple quantity listings are a bitch and ebay's API does not provide much in terms of tracking them. I tried many different solutions and in the end it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth.

Hey stranger, come on out of retirement and make a GVN 2.0 at this point.  So what if you lose a few years of pricing data, GC clearly isn't going to do anything with the site and within a few years you'd be king of the pricing algorithms again!

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2 hours ago, RH said:

Aaaaaah, that makes so much sense!  I mean, I have no idea why they would allow it to be done that way but it always seemed to me that you could have easily stayed within the original eBay limits if you just searched on they category.

I guess executing a bunch of searches per item was the trick.

Also, good to see you hear on VGS!

You are correct, you would still want to simply pull all video game data for the category. They just do not want you to evaluate the category as a whole (ie... 6,146 games were sold in 48 hours for an average cost of $24.35. At the time, I was playing around with the idea of tracking other categories... which is what put me over the limit. 😞

2 hours ago, jonebone said:

Hey stranger, come on out of retirement and make a GVN 2.0 at this point.  So what if you lose a few years of pricing data, GC clearly isn't going to do anything with the site and within a few years you'd be king of the pricing algorithms again!

Oh man. I do miss it. But I can honestly say life is a bit too busy these days to take on that type of task 😄. Who knows what the future will hold though.

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The Price Charting website is basically unusable on mobile. 

I can't switch to CAD, or change the filter so the games are alphabetical. 

I literally came in here only to say that. I'm trying to take a look at some prices and it's a piece of shit.

That is all. I guess I'll DL the GVN app again.... 

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21 minutes ago, AirVillain said:

The Price Charting website is basically unusable on mobile. 

I can't switch to CAD, or change the filter so the games are alphabetical. 

I literally came in here only to say that. I'm trying to take a look at some prices and it's a piece of shit.

That is all. I guess I'll DL the GVN app again.... 

It's not perfect, but it works fine for me. Which browser are you using?

Screenshot_20200123-204332.jpg

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