What I’d be worried about is hoards of sealed games being found. In pokemon if a set doesn’t sell well distribution dumps it and people rip it. But if a game produced more than is needed, especially back in the day, I don’t think they dumped them at half price so they could still exist (I also highly doubt they would have destroyed the excess)
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It’s a fair point! With the different prints for Red/Blue/Yellow there is a cut-off for early prints and later prints. The later prints (black esrb) are more likely to have possible case packs out there.
The sandshrew blue and red are pretty unlikely to have case packs. The rattata prints could possibly have case packs, although I’m not aware of any yet. The black esrb, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear about case packs, but even then, I’d doubt there master cases floating around. I know of a partial case of yellow black esrb, but that was only 3 and 1 was graded.
For gold and silver, it’s definitely possible. I have seen a partial case online that had 2 or 3 games from posted online years ago. Silver seems to have manufacturing issues. So even if you find a case pack, there is a real chance they are 9.4 out of the case. Crystal is pretty rare, if anyone was sitting on case packs, I think we’d have seen them by now.
Gen 3 is where I start to get concerned about availability. With emerald, there are the big boxes that potentially have protected the games, so I’d expect there to be a higher % of mint games to survive. With ruby and emerald, ruby seems to be more uncommon, but I think we need more time to flush out the copies. There was a potential find with like 20 copies of ruby and emerald. Not sure how many / if any were truly mint since they weren’t in the original cases.
For the most part, the mint copies of red and blue (white esrb) are coming from blister packs with guides, and not cases. There is definitely risk of it happening, but I do think even if a case pack of 6 get introduced, there will be short term price dips before they are absorbed.
I doubt there are pallets of these games, but anything is possible!
Pokemon: $88B
VS
Marvel Cinematic Universe: $38B
Batman: $29.6B
Spider-man: $25.4B
Avengers: $14.3B
DC Extended Universe: $7.8B
X-Men: $6.9B
Superman: $6.9B
Super Heroes > Pokemon
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The record sales for comic books have nothing to do with revenue. It’s entirely because of age & discretionary income. Most of the big players in comics are Gary’s age. If anything it’s impressive how valuable some Pokémon cards are today as comics were nowhere near those prices when the average collector age was 20-30.
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Youre basically comparing an entire genre to a single IP. So yea technically the superhero genre beats out pokemons but it takes several of all of the top IPs of the superhero genre combined to beat pokemon which is a single IP which shows how insane pokemon is.
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I agree with @smpratte on this one. High sales in the collectible world are tied to discretionary income and wealth management. Middle aged and older adults are more likely to have huge amounts of disposable income when compared to younger people, and the childhood artifacts of their time (e.g., comic books, toys, sports cards) often reflect that. This phenomenon can be seen right now in A/B/U MTG collecting. The older folks are the ones spending tens of thousands on graded power and sealed boxes.
Pokemon has a long way to go due to its younger demographic.
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I’m not sure your point is that strong when you have to literally assemble the Avengers and Justice League to make it.
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Pokemon has a strong spot among collectibles to me. For starters, it’s already rare for a childhood toy to also be enjoyed by adults as much as it is. Also it’s rare for that same childhood toy to still be enjoyed by the same kids who enjoyed them when they were young. There’s only a few things that pull that off usually. This seems like good prospects in the long-term, and as a brand it can grow in lots of ways without just the TCG. It’s already expanded into so many things now.
MTG and other TCGs and Sports card all generally have things in common with Pokemon. Nostalgia, childhood memories, wide appeal, etc. However, they have many different attributes compared to Pokemon as well. I honestly feel like Pokemon has one of the widest appeals overall and it’s generally hard to not find something to like about it. It’s also a global phenomenon, it’s not really confined to just one single place or area.
The crazy thing to me now is Pokemon seems stronger than ever in terms of popularity. I’ve shared some links in the past, but the original Pokemon creators actually thought it was going to be a possible failure when it was released in the US or outside of Japan. Little did they or anyone probably imagine it would turn into such a long running gold mine of success after all these years.
Is it really that different? It’s just two IPs, Marvel and DC. Hundreds of Super Heroes vs hundreds of Pokemon
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Is Pokémon being bigger than anything on this list something folks in here want?
Not trying to gotcha anyone just curious. Feels like moving towards these in size has been turbulent
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while they do suck at making games, pokemon has been pretty smart with the TCG ever since 2003 imo. I think they can handle the size, but absolutely need to clear house at gamefreak
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Lets hope so! I saw they made 11 billion revenue this year, up 35% from the year before.
Surely they can hire many top game designers and make the best game that ever existed.
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Im not sure anyone at gamefreak has played any other video game made in the last 10 years if they are ok pumping out what they do
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