they have pop reports internally. just call.
What is the reason for not having public pop reports?
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So where is the actual FRAUD and DECEPTION?
Fite DN.
Pretty awesome true collector manifesto
The part about Heritage’s CEO/Founder’s run-ins with the FTC over coin grading/selling in the 80s was pretty interesting. Hadn’t heard about it before.
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Right, I managed to finish watching the video.
The key points it makes are:
- Heritage and Just Press Play have a lot of influence with WATA’s operations and have both been quietly involved from the start - agreeing a deal for Heritage to exclusively list WATA-graded video games before the company had graded anything;
- WATA has a policy that none of their employees are allowed to grade and sell their own games using WATA even though one of WATA’s directors, Jeff Meyer, graded and has been selling items from “The Carolina Collection” they purchased;
- WATA’s director also bought out the leading video game valuation website at the same time, NintendoAge, only to immediately shut it down (speculating that this was done to hide the rarity/value of certain games);
- WATA’s co-founder Mark Haspel was buying up bulk sealed games before WATA began grading, specifically targeting major titles;
- The WATA and Heritage relationship is very similar to the NCI and Heritage relationship from the early 1980s - NCI appears to have been shut down for misleading consumers about the value of coins graded by them;
- Heritage’s co-chairman uses Heritage Auctions to increase the perceived value of items in his own collection (which he lists and buys from himself for record prices);
- Several of the record video game sales appear to be getting won by Heritage’s co-chairman and Just Press Play’s CEO - who have both had internal WATA involvement since the very start;
- The 9.8 A++ WATA 1982 NES Spiderman game is used as an example of why population reports are an important tool in determining value, as this was a game which fell more than 90% from $9,000 in May 2020 to $870 in April 2021 after a couple of dozen same-grade copies also appeared.
There’s a lot of fluff in the video for sure, but the comparison between NCI in the 1980s and WATA today is pretty strong and I think there’s a lot of evidence to back up the claims that Heritage and WATA may be jointly manipulating the market to substantially inflate the value of video games for profit. I guess this is something we won’t know for sure for another 10-20 years.
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Yeah, people are too quick to throw the baby out with the bath water over this video because they don’t agree with particular elements.
It’s also worth noting that there is governing legislation around auction companies and their obligations, which differs according to jurisdiction (also applies to shilling).
Thanks for sharing @pichufan .
Thanks for sharing. Can check out Reserved Investments in Youtube too. He spoke about this WATA-HA thingy in some of his videos.
Interesting watch.
But people are not only buying video games for making money - there are collectors who want the video games and truly appreciate them.
Although what is interesting is the % growth on some video game in the recent years have far outperformed % many Pokemon Cards and public record prices in video games are much higher then public record prices of Pokemon Cards.
We have never seen a public record 7 figure sale of any Pokemon Card but we have seen that in video games. At the same time my guess is the video game market is much smaller then the Pokemon Card market.
All of this has been public knowledge for a while if you knew who to listen to and where to look. Even Reserved Investments brought a lot of this up in 2019. The way things were done, like selling the Mario game at a headline number to people with vested interest and then going on pawn stars right after was a genius way to jump start a market. These people are not fools. I don’t know how ethical all of it is though. It was certainly not transparent.
There are some parts of the video that were silly to me, like speaking about Dr. Eric and only caring about investment…well yes, but he’s been very clear about that lol
Otherwise a good video that shows some of the key players in the market and how it inorganically became organic lol
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But this almost applies to anything, there’s always gonna be someone that truly enjoys the purchase, the thing is what % is just for the money thing, sake of enjoying it or both.
Your post is better than the actual video. Thanks for sharing that information!
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I dont have to watch the video to know that all these companies have issues with transparency. It blows my mind that these companies operate like this. At the end of the day, the buy what you like for a price that you like adage works best.
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There was some stuff in there about the NintendoAge transaction that I didn’t know, and it makes both parties look even worse than they did at the time. NA was the best game collecting resource around and the site was nuked on purchase. Imagine a TCG grading company buying E4 and deleting the entire post history - all of the research conducted, the discussions, transaction histories, everything. Did not know either Dain or Jeff had any involvement in WATA.
I have followed Pat for years and he has a sentimental idea of what game collecting should be. If he trawls a flea market for games he’ll never use - but buys them anyway because he recognises they’re underpriced and maybe he’ll flip at a convention a year later - that’s okay, because he’s a collector. If someone else beats him to that stuff to immediately sell it on eBay, they’re an evil scalper. I don’t think his sentimentality helps the case of the video. The hobby being “perverted” here, lest we forget, is competitive shopping. (edit: and I say this as someone who has collected games since 2008, and sold more or less none of them until the graded game boom this year incentivised me to get rid of a handful of items I was never going to use - but would happily prefer 2008 game prices.)
You can also tell that the average viewer is taking away from this video that ungraded/unsealed retro game price rises in the past year have been in some way affected by this WATA stuff, which clearly isn’t true. If neither WATA nor HA existed, retro game prices would still be way higher than a year ago.
I also don’t know what the purpose of including the PWCC headline twice in the video was except to send more indignant rage their way. The criticisms of WATA are specific and can’t just be extrapolated to the PWCC situation when we continue to know nothing except what eBay has told us.
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I don’t know guys. Just playing this of so casually when CGC doesn’t have a pop report while pokemon is in its biggest hype period ever. Might be more relevant than you think
CGC is far from the leader in their industry, or constantly grading and hustling record-setting prices
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I totally agree…but who is this actually effecting? Long term collectors or the new collectors who don’t know any better, who don’t know about the rarities of a 7 grade. The people on efour are fine, its everyone else im worried about. The people who have no idea how rare the stuff they are buying actually is. And who knows…maybe cgc has graded more pokemon cards in the last year than psa in the last 20 years (only cgc knows that). The selling price of a psa card effects public opinions of cgc and bgs significantly as well. And if i was starting just before a boom, well id have 1000s of cgc 7s ready to go out the door
Giving this a listen this morning. Grimy things like this go on everywhere. Doesn’t make it right but it is a fact of life.
Pay attention to the content you consume and just be aware of the motivations of the people putting it out there. Of course the WATA and Heritage companies will do all they can to pump up anything they will benefit from having higher sale pricing. Some amount of it is just reasonable advertising and I am sure there is genuine interest in these types of collectibles from many people involved, but you do have to draw a line somewhere I think. It is quite silly when you’ve got all those articles ‘hey we just bought this game and we are going to be selling it soon, go buy it because everything is headed to the moon’. Clearly they can make it so early on with a few sales amongst some inner circles of people, get the press to pick it up and then just let it go on it’s way. It is happening every day with NFT’s. I am sure some of the high end premium stuff will have good long term price trajectories just as with some of the select NFT’s, but there will be a lot of losers along the way and it won’t be the people creating NFT’s, grading collectibles, or selling them.
A lot of these same things happened with Pokemon in the past 18 months as well.
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CGC has been incompetent on their handling of the pop report but they claim to be working on it and I believe their claim because they have a pop report for their comics. Interestingly enough CGC has announced in the future they’re going to start grading video games too.