Something that I wonder about when I see the 'final' results like these NES cartridges sealed in a graded plastic box as a collectible.
Surely the market value of these will only hold up as long as they're within the normal lifespan of the people for whom the original NES is a nostalgia item?
For example: If you were born in 1978 and were 7 to 8 years old when your parents bought the original NES and brought it home with a small selection of games, that's probably a core memory for you. And probably exactly the same demographic now who will pay big money for these things.
But as this generation of people ages, do people who have no childhood memory of a NES (or SNES, or Genesis, etc) because they were born in 1999 consider these things to have any value? Will their value drop significantly when there's no longer a population of age-range-appropriate nostalgic collectors to buy them?
If these are being treated as some kind of "how many dollars per unit" valuable commodity to be traded/hoarded, is it the best possible solution to convert a collection of something like this into currency before the collectors age out of the market?
You get some inter generational nostalgia going on - I inherited my grandmothers NES which I have fond memories of playing any time I visited her.
I don’t play it as much as she did (I have modern games in my backlog to play as well) but I do occasionally buy more NES games to add to the collection.
Honestly, I don't think the average nostalgic Gen X-er is that interested in a sealed video game cartridge.
I think the "sealed, unopened, graded" flavor of collecting is always more of a niche thing, and the actual market potential of tapping into American Gen X video game nostalgia is more clear when you look at sales of the NES/SNES Mini plug and play consoles or the Nintendo Switch subscription for classic games.
Collecting is an absolute rabbit hole, and it's often intrinsically tied to the "lore" and history of the collection's theme/genre more so than a collector's personal feelings of nostalgia.
I'd love to hear about the game ROM. This post is just focusing on a new, slight variant of the packaging, as if the game is a collectible like a stamp or coin.
Ah yes, because a probabilistic text generator should be trusted to appraise a rare collectible that wasn't even known to exist as of the time it was trained.
It should be trusted about as much as any Random Internet Stranger's appraisal, as I suppose we're both aware.
I personally do trust it a tiny bit more, actually, because it demonstrably did a modicum of due diligence by searching for comparable NES collectibles that were sold in the past, having a look at some collectors' roughly known budgets, and doing some numbers off the results. This is something Random Internet Stranger might or might not have done before just talking out of their ass.
Honest questions:
After reading TFA, did you not wonder, just a bit, what the box could be worth?
Would you have taken the time to respond to my post if I hadn't told the source and just said it's "probably" worth x, instead of saying "might, according to"?
I don’t really have any doubt that these are ‘real’ - but the article author has, to me, a strange amount of confidence in video game ‘grading’, especially since he himself is an expert:
From what they could see, there was very little doubt that these games were real. Of course, the grading process would 100% confirm that, but at face value, this looked like the real deal.
confirming a game is real is one of the things psa is good at. the problem is a lot of graders act in suspicious ways when it comes to assigning scores at the high end.
you get a lot of reports about collectors sending a game in, getting a score thats obviously low for what they have and sending it again just to get what they originally expected. some of it might be human error but it could also be on purpose to make customers pay the fee twice.
there are also allegations of giving a high score like 9.6 or 9.8 to games that dont deserve it, like the record breaking mario bros cart a couple years back, to create artificial hype and get more volume at affiliated auction houses (i think karl jobst was the first one who reported on this).
and its basically confirmed that graders do "population management" where scores are based on the number and price of equal graded items on the market instead of just the quality. if high grades are too common prices go down, and if its too rare they get less trade volume and disappointed customers.
I hate grading companies, they are a part of the retro industrial complex which made old consoles (ones that were manufactured in the millions, mind you!) and games so expensive. Old stuff should be sold at old stuff prices. Look at the New 3DS, it's approaching the launch price!
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 20.9 ms ] threadSurely the market value of these will only hold up as long as they're within the normal lifespan of the people for whom the original NES is a nostalgia item?
For example: If you were born in 1978 and were 7 to 8 years old when your parents bought the original NES and brought it home with a small selection of games, that's probably a core memory for you. And probably exactly the same demographic now who will pay big money for these things.
But as this generation of people ages, do people who have no childhood memory of a NES (or SNES, or Genesis, etc) because they were born in 1999 consider these things to have any value? Will their value drop significantly when there's no longer a population of age-range-appropriate nostalgic collectors to buy them?
If these are being treated as some kind of "how many dollars per unit" valuable commodity to be traded/hoarded, is it the best possible solution to convert a collection of something like this into currency before the collectors age out of the market?
I don’t play it as much as she did (I have modern games in my backlog to play as well) but I do occasionally buy more NES games to add to the collection.
I think the "sealed, unopened, graded" flavor of collecting is always more of a niche thing, and the actual market potential of tapping into American Gen X video game nostalgia is more clear when you look at sales of the NES/SNES Mini plug and play consoles or the Nintendo Switch subscription for classic games.
Collecting is an absolute rabbit hole, and it's often intrinsically tied to the "lore" and history of the collection's theme/genre more so than a collector's personal feelings of nostalgia.
Good thing the owner talked to the author before putting them up for $15 each...
I personally do trust it a tiny bit more, actually, because it demonstrably did a modicum of due diligence by searching for comparable NES collectibles that were sold in the past, having a look at some collectors' roughly known budgets, and doing some numbers off the results. This is something Random Internet Stranger might or might not have done before just talking out of their ass.
Honest questions: After reading TFA, did you not wonder, just a bit, what the box could be worth? Would you have taken the time to respond to my post if I hadn't told the source and just said it's "probably" worth x, instead of saying "might, according to"?
From what they could see, there was very little doubt that these games were real. Of course, the grading process would 100% confirm that, but at face value, this looked like the real deal.
you get a lot of reports about collectors sending a game in, getting a score thats obviously low for what they have and sending it again just to get what they originally expected. some of it might be human error but it could also be on purpose to make customers pay the fee twice.
there are also allegations of giving a high score like 9.6 or 9.8 to games that dont deserve it, like the record breaking mario bros cart a couple years back, to create artificial hype and get more volume at affiliated auction houses (i think karl jobst was the first one who reported on this).
and its basically confirmed that graders do "population management" where scores are based on the number and price of equal graded items on the market instead of just the quality. if high grades are too common prices go down, and if its too rare they get less trade volume and disappointed customers.
It almost feels more like stamp or coin collecting, than video game collecting as I understand it.