@Danny P That’s true. It does seem to go through every hobby, but games were always “too nerdy/lame” to be touched by these losers. Yet, here we are haha.
This has been so shady. In coin grading, PCGS will not only tell the population of each grade they have graded, they even estimate the total surviving population of all coins of any given mint and date. The graded games market pretends otherwise. Games that will prove out to be super common are being presented as nearly one of a kind.
Your last statement is what has confused me so much. I would assume that these "collectors" would have been around to play these games when they were originally out and would have known that something like Goldeneye was EVERYWHERE. It just shows that these people are not gamers, they literally are mindless investors going to the newest market they can rape and pillage.
I cannot believe the sealed game market, monopolized by a company that has been shady since day 1 and recently been exposed and hit with lawsuits, is crashing like this. Any individual who lost/loses money on these games is totally asking for it. But as we all know, it's not individuals buying these games but instead groups of investors. With as shady as Wata is, would anyone even trust the accuracy of their grading system if they're somehow still around years from now? I sure as hell wouldn't. But I also sure as hell wouldn't buy sealed graded games, even if they were cheap.
@@wunderjeeson you’re absolutely correct. There are a handful of influencers routinely shilling and a cadre of followers marching down the hill right after them.
@@PatTheNESpunk What’s up with all the WATA apologists (like the one you just replied to) deleting their comments en masse today? 😂 Went to reply to another “pearl clutcher” in another comment and his comment magically disappeared too. Guess it’s tough trying to use logic and facts to defend nerdy girl and Mario 64 “rarity” lol
I wonder if some of these copies that are seemingly identical but selling for significantly less money after a few months are LITERALLY the same copies, just buyers with heavy duty buyers remorse and trying to recoup whatever they possibly can. Possibly to pay for divorce court
Why aren’t the video game sites writing about this crash. They were quick to to talk about that super Mario 64 going for over $100K but don’t hear a peep from them now.
Since this whole thing happened my normal run-of-the-mill NES collection has gone way up in value but the market to buy new games has been way higher. I'd rather have my collection be worth a little less and be able to get the games I want cheaper than to have what I have at a higher rate but the market is inflated to the point that I can hardly get anything new. This whole scheme has been nothing but trouble for the collecting scene since it started getting press. I'm kind of happy to see it pop. Maybe the market will come back down to earth soon so I can fill out the collection more.
I thought retro game collecting was already getting too expensive for my liking a few years back. Now? Forget about it. I don't intend to sell any part of my collection, but it'll stay pretty stagnant on the retro side of things for the foreseeable future. However, I will say it is fun to check out what certain games you own are valued at every now and then.
The prices of games has bothered me less as a whole lately but I think that's because I've gotten into cheap alternatives like imports and PS2/PSP collecting, and now-hot systems like the SNES I already got what I wanted like 10 years ago. Or maybe it's just acceptance. Most of the unreasonable prices are due to nostalgia inflation on things like pokemon games. This bubble bursting is also probably just within sealed collecting and the WATA craze, I don't think it affects the used market as much.
100%. I'm just missing the last eight or so big ticket games, bucky, snow bros, little samson, felix... I don't need every insanely rare oddity or sports chaff just want a "complete" collection of original carts for all the good fun stuff. But atm it's out of my budget.
Not surprised that Danielle chick was rude to you at SDCC. She never seemed like someone of good character. The fact that she brushed you off because you proved her wrong just further proves what kind of person she is.
Pfft “nerdy girl”. True comic fans loathe her and when she tried to act like she was about that game life, true gamers could tell she was only about the money. In an interview she was asked what her favorite game was. She said “Super Mario hangtab” and “Mario 3 left bros”. Lol I didn’t know box features affected gameplay (in Mario 3’s case it was a minor spelling mistake in game that changed in later prints). But honestly, WHO ANSWERS that question in that way?😂
This is why in collecting the old hands always say buy what you love. Collectables are not a sound investment. Is it cool when my collections go up in value? Sure. Do I bet on it? Nope.
Well, I think the end of the covid shutdowns are why some of the retro game prices are dropping. People can get out again and so they are selling off what they got when they couldn't go out. As the games reenter the marketplace, all at once (or nearly so), they are easier to get so, as the supply goes up, the prices go down. As someone who actually wants to play the games I get (at some point), I am glad to see the prices normalizing.
I would prefer to see these frauds arrested and locked up for life, but I'd certainly rather see the market correct properly than continue in it's ruined state. EDIT: By correction I mean sealed Mario Kart 64 going for less than $100.00 again. Just to be clear.
True it's been a mess since those clowns at WATA ruined everything with their Scummy Grading Company.... Glad to see them get what they deserve, now hopefully the market can course correct and not be worth thousands of dollars for like a sealed copy of Super Mario 64, so bad dude.
Had to look it up. The Rattata version has a picture on the back of a Pokémon battle against a Rattata whereas other copies have a battle against a Meowth.
I sold a sealed Nes game ungraded about a year ago for a thousand dollars.. I invested maybe a dollar into it. Makes me feel so good that I didn’t spend the time and effort getting it graded and put up for auction.. so much could’ve happened and along the way I could’ve gotten burned. I happily took my $999 profit and went home. You never know where the market is gonna lead you
Another funny thing from the Danielle person Pat mentions, her Instagram channel used to be covered in WATA games and promoting what a great service they were and on and on. Now, she hasn't posted about WATA in a long time. And her one recent post about graded games? They are a stack of her popular graded games BUT they are all graded by VGA. Pretty funny to see that
We all knew the market correction was coming. Games like Mario Kart 64 and Goldeneye 007 are simply not rare enough (comparably) to some other grades/games. Honestly, the sealed gaming market was actually the tipping point for me to become completely over collecting in general. Video games just shouldn’t cost $500. Resellers, speculators, “flippers”, the whole used game market kinda grosses me out. I’ve been gaming since 1988 and it took all of this bs to make me want to get rid of my entire physical collection. Because, let’s be honest, it’s no longer necessary to have an entire basement full of media to play old games. The whole thing is a turn off. Sealed games is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s all mindless consumerism and a need to own “things”. People who think their 5000 game deep game collections are somehow better than sealed game collectors, I’d do some deep soul searching on that.
@@Alma-B Well obviously things cost what things cost in life (with obvious governmental influence on certain items). So in that way, yeah, games can get to well north of $500. What I’m saying is that there is no game in this world that anyone would pay $500 new on the shelf. Doesn’t matter how many features they add to Madden 24, no amount of tracks they can include with Mario Kart 12, no RPG that takes 800 hours to complete. If a game that comes out this holiday season for $500, you’re not buying it and neither am I. So what the fuck is the difference with retro games? I could kiiiiiiiiiinda see it back 20 years ago. I myself paid something like $100 for Panzar Dragoon Saga because there was just no other way to play that game. But now? With ODEs, Flashcarts, digital sales, emulators that not only match the old hardware but sometimes perform better, what is the logical point of shelling out that kinda money for a single game? Personally, I’d save myself $3000, not buy a CiB Earthbound, boot it up on my NSO enabled Switch, and take that money to fly to Hawaii…. or help out a friend…. or fucking just put it in a savings account. People are obviously free to do what they wish. But when I see completed sales for Clock Tower 2 on the PS2 for several hundreds of dollars, I am convinced those people are morons.
@@Alma-B That’s an extreme example but there are games, not even CiB, that go for thousands. And as you well know, many games go for north of 300. I made my point before and now it appears you are kinda agreeing with me: people who are spending that much money on games are not doing it to purely “play it”. That’s what I mean when I say games shouldn’t cost that much. Games becoming trophies on people’s walls is whack, imo.
I remember Eric the dentist attacking people when they made comments. His trademark was saying boom about how much money he was going to make. It’s a boom, but the implosion sort🫣
confused about the "scheme" here they're offering items for people to bid on at auction, confused why you think that should be some sort of banned behavior
@@CraigSnyder Would you pay hundreds of thousands of dollars on a VHS of Back to the Future--a movie that has been readily available for 37 years? People can enjoy collecting mint tapes but until now they've never had to pay more than a Franklin or two for them. They're taking a niche hobbyist thing and puffing the value so that normals see the headlines like "Factory-Sealed Star Wars VHS Sells At Auction For 1.2 Million Dollars" and all rush out in droves to sell their attic-dusted copies at sky-high prices, artificially bumping the cost. No, it's not _illegal,_ and shouldn't be, but it is transparently scummy and only delivers short-term gains to a very exclusive few. Like playing in a lottery where the "winner" was decided months in advance.
Damn, I thought I would be retiring on my sealed Atari 2600 games. 😂 Joke aside, that graded sealed thing can't go down fast enough. It just made the price of retro gaming exploded in the last 3-4 years. I hate that.
I've already cut my losses and am gonna switch to flash carts for everything i dont absolutely need a physical copy for, younger me would never but it just takes up too much space and WAY too much money
With the no-reserve auctions on HA, for people with high grade stuff, ebay BIN seems like a much safer selling option. Also, re: nerdy girl comics, she went hard on like 20 graded copies of SMB3 and is taking a giant bath, right now.
ebay not a good place to sell very high grade stuff do to their insane buyer protection policies (where buyer can never be wrong when making a claim) that has led to a *LOT* of fraud taking place really hosing sellers. One thing to get hosed on a $300 game, whole nother issue to get hosed on a $30,000 game. HA takes care of the seller from start to finish.
I stopped playing/collecting loose copies cause it just got so crazy. The market became unfriendly to everyone and now we get to see the same people who drove the market to these ridiculous prices now take ridiculous loses!
If anyone told me to get into this market and buy old games because they're old and rope people in for at most triple digit reasonable asking prices not a decade ago for five figures, I as a person looking from the outside in would still tell them 'your play money is not worth my damn morals.' This kind of behavior can go straight to hell. Why does anyone trust the clowns at WATA anymore?
Retailers prefer long boxes because they’re much harder to shoplift, especially with things that are four times more expensive than CDs nine points. PlayStation memory cards came in and itty-bitty cardboard box just big enough to hold it in Japan, big packaging here because of the shoplifting issue
Back when people used to buy CDs, some stores put every single album in a plastic cage thing that made it the size of a long box. They'd take the cage off at the till when you bought it.
@@TubbyJ420 as someone who used to work at a record store, no we did not. I am out of work, not to mention storage space for all of those cases would’ve been ridiculous. We did it the high ticket items, as well as hot new releases most likely to be shoplifted
No, retailers that sold games preffered smaller boxes. Smaller packaging takes less display shelve and warehouse space, so they can keep more copies on hand and display a lot more titles in shelves.
@@Aki_Lesbrinco Yes that’s why they eventually got rid of the long boxes. Too much empty space and weight to ship and having stock depth was more important. It’s why they started cutting holes in Blu-ray cases to save an ounce
A few caveats: I love your show, Pat and Ian; I have been as big a critic of WATA as Karl Jobst; like Karl my journalism is cited in the lawsuit against WATA; and while I do collect sealed and graded games, I have never spent $1,000 on one. Having said all this, this analysis (in the video) is not correct. And I know you guys pride yourself on accuracy, and so I want to help if I can. I follow this market closer than Karl-who I also respect-and am also more involved in it personally. I attend most of the auctions, I curate data on this market, I have a sizable collection (not for investment but due to emotional attachment to the games I buy), and I know what I am talking about. 1. The major force operating on this market is a historic increase in supply. There are perhaps three times as many auctions in 2022 as there were in 2020; there are more grading companies domestically and internationally (with another, CGC, coming soon); grading backlogs at WATA are now almost gone, convincing more people to get their games graded (because you can get them back in a reasonable timeframe); new old stock FC/SFC games are flooding into VGA and ending up in auctions in larger and larger numbers; 1990s "big box" grading has finally taken off; "modern" grading and collecting is now a thing, so collectors have whole new generations of games to choose from, stretching thinner the interest for any given game in a given generation and simply increasing the total stock of games graded overall; and the natural accretion processes of sites like eBay that do not delete older listings means that with each passing day there are more and more sealed and graded games for sale. There are even efforts to open up sealed-and-graded game shops online, like MinusWorlds (a tentative trend that may or may not expand). In view of all of this-even assuming no other forces operating on the market-sealed-and-graded prices would fall slightly across the board having *nothing* to do with a bubble bursting or people turning away from the hobby but simply, as I said, a historic increase in supply without a commensurate increase in demand. 2. The health of the market is determined by price floor, not price ceiling, and this video oddly makes the same mistake in criticizing the sealed-and-graded game market that the market manipulators make in lionizing it. The only difference is that whereas the latter emphasize the highest sales to manipulate buyers into thinking *all* games should be (or are) going up in price, in the video above, Pat and Ian, you are emphasizing the highest sales-inasmuch as you are seeing significant declines-to simply make the opposite (and equally false and over-broad) point, that *all* games are collapsing in price as the sealed-and-graded bubble pops. Neither view has any relevance to what is actually happening to the market. The health of a market like this is judged by the consistency of its floor compared to the cost of grading-or, alternately, by the *median* game within a grading subcategory, like "XBox games"-and by increases or decreases in price that are not spectacular but marginal. If, in a two-year period, the median sealed-and-graded game (excluding all high and low outliers to determine what really is median in a market with thousands and thousands and thousands of sales annually) goes up 7%, which could be as little as a $600 game rising in current market value to $642, that is a reasonably healthy market. But such market indicators are missed when we just look at an outlier high sale and then compare that sale to a sale of the same game a *random* period of time later. 3. There is no one sealed-and-graded video game market; there are more like thirty. The people buying sixth-gen sealed-and-graded games are not the people buying sealed Atari 2600 games, and you guys know that as well as I do. There will be times when the Atari 2600 market is down and (say) the Gamecube market is up, or the NES market is up and the Dreamcast market is down. Speaking of sealed-and-graded video games as a monolithic market is pretty silly. My own focuses are Atari 2600, Intellivision, NES, and SNES, and in my data analyses I look at floors, median games, and year-over-year comparisons-the way any responsible market analysis has to do. Year-over-year the Atari 2600 market is slightly down, the Intellivision market flat, the NES market slightly up, and the SNES market flat. I do not care about what millionaires do with their money, so I do not care about outlier high sales and neither should you-those sales are simply invitations to (even well-intended) demagoguery by those who love *or* hate the sealed-and-graded market. The changes in the market worth tracking right now are these: 1. An influx of NOS (new old stock) FamiCom and Super FamiCom games from Japan. Speculators have learned what I and many others learned long ago but never took advantage of because we are collectors, not investors (I only buy sealed games I like and admire and want to keep as art objects I am emotionally attached to from having played them): you can get games from Japan for nothing, grade them with VGA, and sell them to suckers who don't know how much NOS there is over in Japan (a ton). We are seeing FC and SFC games flooding into U.S. auctions and it is kind of sad, because realistically these games should be worth no more than Intellivision games (a great example of a system with tons of NOS). 2. The long (long) wait for CGC grading and VGA pops. CGC was poised to change the market by adding a third grading company both collectors and investors would be likely to use and honor. But they are taking forever to ramp up, suggesting they may be facing difficulties in doing so. When (if) CGC launches, however, prices will decline further because more games will come on the market more quickly that auction houses will be willing to carry (unlike, say, new-grading-house-entrant P1, which most auction houses will not carry). By the same token, the wait for VGA pop reports is taking ten times longer than it should have, but as problematically we really don't know what to do with this data when it drops because some of the VGA graded games will have been "crossed over" to WATA, making it impossible to just add the VGA data to the WATA data to determine total populations (please do not do this when the VGA pops drop). Preliminary research suggests that as many as 50% of VGA games eventually get crossed over-but it could also be as low as 25%-so VGA pop reports will throw some chaos and confusion into the market when they drop and I do not know what effect that will have. 3. The expansion of grading modern games. I have no idea why anyone would ever buy a sealed-and-graded modern game-unless you just want it on your mantelpiece-because there is no condition premium whatsoever (every game is in pretty good shape because of hard-casing, unless you are a weird obsessive who demands a 9.8/A++ instead of a 9.6/A+ and, if you are, the market for buyers is commensurately niche) and because you have no idea, and will likely never know, how much stock is out there. In other words, there is no rarity component whatsoever. But speculators have flooded into this area and, candidly, if you want to knock this market that is the place to go: guys trying to sell 9.4/A+ Breath of the Wilds for $400 should probably come in for some serious scorn. 4. The growing "big box" market. This is what I know Karl is into, and many others are getting into it as well. Prices for big box PC games are likely to increase in the months and years ahead-but here too this will only *decrease* prices slightly for other systems because, and this is the key... 5. Demand is rising, but not nearly as fast as supply. The hobby is *not* contracting; it is expanding. But way, way too slow to keep up with the increase in supply. While market pumpers say that supply is actually quite low-and for older systems they are right in *absolute* terms-markets run on the relationship between supply and demand, not absolute terms, and right now the supply for almost every system way outstrips demand (the only exceptions may be NES, SNES, and N64, which is why those markets are the healthiest, the most stable, and the most worth investing in if you are, unlike me, an investor). I personally don't think you guys need to cover sealed-and-grading collecting at all if you don't want to. Candidly, anyone in the "games are meant to be played crowd"-which I respect-shouldn't be focused on *any* collecting practices, as one doesn't need a CIB to play a game (all instruction manuals are online and boxes are just marketing) so basically *only cartridges and discs should matter to straight-up gamers* in 2022. Any discussion of *any* collecting (CIB or sealed, graded or ungraded) has nothing to do with "games are meant to be played." But *if* one is going to cover collecting also, I think it needs to be done in a way that is not simply the equally unhelpful obverse of those who pump up the sealed-and-graded market interminably. When you cover the Amico or really anything, you guys do it with sophistication and class and intelligence and a high level of detail. I do not see the same standard being applied to sealed-and-graded collecting, which is fine-you guys can do whatever you want, it is your show and I enjoy it either way-but I think it is worth having this pointed out to you by someone who admires you both very much and is not just saying that as a cover for criticism. I *really* like your show.
The median Atari 2600 sealed-and-graded game is $220. The median NES sealed-and-graded game is $400. The median SNES sealed-and-graded game is $550. The games you guys are talking about are literally being bought by Saudi sheikhs. I know it is fun for commenters here to talk about middle-class American fools losing their shirts but that is not what is happening. You have millionaire and billionaire international buyers who do not care if they lose money; millionaire and simply "wealthy" American middle-men who sell to those foreigners and actually make money even when the market drops (because they are still selling well above what they paid for the games sealed and ungraded); and then you have... the *actual market* we should be talking about. The one where middle-class dads are buying 7.0 CIBs of Duck Hunt for $425. The problem is, no one in these comments knows anything about that market, so instead we talk about the sheikhs and their bottomless fount of wealth. It is honestly... pretty silly. How about we have a real discussion about this market-median games, median prices, median buyers-rather than just throwing red meat around? I do not care if a Saudi sheikh buys a Koenigsegg Jesko for $3 million, so why should I or anyone care if he buys a Super Mario 64 for $1.5 million or a Sonic the Hedgehog for $300,000? It means less than nothing. I wish we could talk about real people, real collectors, the part of this market that is just people who love video games and who-even if they *are* investors (which I am not)-are just looking to buy something they like for $600 that maybe will be worth $642 in two years. Why obsess over the nonsense end of the market and call it "the market" unless the desire is to attack the *concept* of grading sealed games rather than the market? And if anyone wants to attack the concept of grading sealed games, have at it! I don't care and I am sure neither do any other collectors of sealed-and-graded games-to each their own, and those who like to judge how others live are free to do so. But *no one* can say "games are meant to be played" as an attack on sealed-and-graded collecting unless that person is *only* a cartridge collector and plays *every* game they buy regularly. The moment you move to ungraded CIB, and the moment your cache goes beyond in size your ability to play what you own regularly, it's all a matter of taste and there is no high horse for anyone to get on.
Seth Abramson I've had my issues with you in the past but I cannot agree enough with you on this one, I have been posting on every video Pat puts out some very important information that of course is ignored because Pat was against graded games from day one and the wata "scandal" fueled his narrative but no one talks about the two highest priced games were bought by actual collectors one was Brady Hill with the two million dollar Mario and the other was Serena Williams husband with the 1.56 SM64 and that's a MAJOR deal because everyone jumped on the scam train especially after the SM64 and Karl himself made that video using that as an example, he even put two million dollar scam as the header!! It's truly ridiculous to me how that video gained that popularity with ZERO evidence of there being shill bids and now that the truth comes out we hear crickets Karl helped fuel this downturn let it be known and it's the games are meant to be played crowd that really pushed that forward, I figured once those pop reports came out on early cardboard it would show how truly rare this stuff is compared to other collectibles but the damage has been done and the people responsible will not take responsibility with a follow up video on the facts not speculation. I think the key to this market now is new blood otherwise it will get stagnant again, the rarity is there in black and white as is the nostalgia, I really truly hope that Karl takes the responsibility as a so called journalist and does the right thing, please show some credibility as you buy wata graded games yourself which I find so comical it's insane. I'm saddened by what has happened with this beloved hobby and Pat was chomping at the bit for this to happen, congratulations you got what you wanted, I feel he is a disgrace to this hobby. Thanks Seth for a well written statement
What I want to know is: Even if you truly believe that Pat is completely wrong and it's a healthy market, why would you comment that? Would it matter that this video is entirely false and full of BS? Like, which camp are you a part of? All I'm saying is real collectors that aren't in it for the money would welcome a video like this, false or not. Why object to something that helps the overall perception of video games not being some form of investment? The only type of people to bring up counter arguments to this video are people that are in it for the money.
Being someone who makes a living off collectibles, an easy way to tell an investor vs collector is collectors are typically happy when prices drop as they can afford more.
I had to sell my video game collection when I went to university. Tried to buy some games again years later and the prices were fucking insane. If the prices crash more and more, then I'd be super excited to buy some of my old games back.
For the casual collector, this just means buy based on the value YOU place on it. For the flippers playing that shell game where things just change hands endlessly based on speculation and what they thing another speculator may pay, I guess the gig is mostly over. I hope you enjoyed it while it lasted, those of us that actually have some kind of enjoyment in video games are happy to show you to the exit :)
What is happening is that someone sells a game for $100,000 to an associate and all that actually changes hands is the auction house fees. But then the person who 'bought' it then has an asset (with a value determined on an apparently open market) that they can borrow against and get a $100,000 loan using it as collateral. When they default on the loan the lender gets the game and suddenly finds out it has almost no value. So the lender can then claim $100,000 on their insurance. The insurance company posts it as a loss against their profits and slightly increases their fees to cover it. This is very similar to art auctions, it is also a great way to launder money.
Thanks Pat for bringing this up. I argued with all these so called eBay you tubers going on and on about these and vhs and comics. We ran a coin and antique shop from 1979 through 89. We seen the bubbles burst on so many items. We seen the speculators come in the late 80’s which destroyed the markets. I have warned people of these auction houses as I have dealt with them for over 40 years. These auctioneers can control the items so easily. They can bid the wall, have schil bidders, lie about absentee bidders etc etc. The problem now is the internet. They simply just bid their own items up. You tried to tell people for years also about these sealed game prices. And Props to you. Keep up the good work and remember the fun is in the chase for the collector.
I'd be interested to know how many moved their crypto dollars into collecting and vice versa. Also how many of these sales discussed were the same item resold at a later date.
It was okay if some sealed games got higher and higher in price, but this was ridiculous. I’m glad these prices are falling down. It never made any sense that people would be okay with having such a narrow profit margin.
I know this has been said a million times but I still have absolutely no clue why anyone would think these prices are even remotely close to actual market value. Most of these games were not even uncommon when they were originally out. Hell, my brother worked in a KayBee Toys outlet around 2005 that had at least 50 copies of Goldeneye sent to them that they were blowing out for less than $10 a copy. There is no way that something that was produced in those quantities less than 25 years ago should ever be the price of a brand new car. These people are absolutely delusional and I'm glad they will have much less money in the future to inflate bubbles.
That Danielle person is one of the worst offenders. Her social media was always just loaded with Pro WATA propaganda. She throws alot of money around and pretends to be an expert but she is as phony as any other shill. It's all fake passion from her; its clearly all about the money. If the market for comics dried up tomorrow, she'd ditch that too. Another example is Reeces Rare Comics. They promoted graded games hard for about a year. Now they never bring them to conventions or mention them in their updates. Their original stock of WATA games are still available on their website for exorbitant prices
I only buy games I wanna play. Usually I'm fine just buying cartridge/disc only, but the one time I did buy sealed games (Dragon Quest 4 and 5 on DS for $20, and Dragon Quest 6 on DS for $90), I casually broke the seal and opened the boxes so could play the fucking games.
I bought a sealed Super Mario 64 in 2015 (my favorite video game) for $250 mint, and at the time common as wheels on a car with a simple search on E-Bay (who bought the rest of them up?). I never trusted WATA, and still have my copy ungraded. Glad to have waited, and when the dust clears I might have it VGA graded. But if it wasn't for WATA my copy would still be worth $250. I guess I'm slightly grateful for the phony BS.
The bubble peaked with N64 Games due to the simple fact that the crypto-bros trying to launder their gains into alternative assets grew up with the N-64 as their first console as a kid. This is the time for the mid-late 20's childhood nostalgia wave. With crypto busted these games will go back to being simply very expensive. in 4-5 years when the next crypto cycle happens, I'm excited for my PS2 collection values.
If you look into Heritage Auctions' history this is no surprise. They pulled the same thing with CCGs, and before that comics, and before that sports cards, and before that coins. This is their M.O. Find an untapped collector market. Pump it up in the media, pump it up with grading, convince people its an investment, and then sing arm in arm as they skip to the bank with their cronies and their customers are left holding the bag.
Yep we worked for Accugrade back in the day. I can remember the competition at the coin shows. And depending on who you knew your coin might get a higher grade. We walked away from grading when the owner saw what the others were doing and saw a chance for cash. I will never own any graded items
18:19 Pat lol .. Dropping the Price is Right losing horns haha That was great .. Holy sh*t a $210,000 loss in 10 months !!! I can't even wrap my brain around that, but as others mentioned here in the comments its tough to feel bad for these ppl that "invested" The grading of sealed games and the prices we've seen these games being sold for is something I believe will undoubtedly go down as one of the most ludicrous times in not only videogame history but also for the deceitful market and corruption behind all of it ..
If you have been thinking about it I think it's past time to start thinking about liquidating or down sizing your collections boys and girls. Do it now before these crasy prices disappear to fund your retirements and pay off your mortgages... Wow. The price for resident evil.... If I was somekind of mystic I would have been buying and keeping seal copies of games for the past 30 years. IMO this makes the comic boom look like nothing considering how many copies are probably out there vs the stupid prices. Wow
Apples and oranges. There are so many factors that go into the housing market and economy. But I get what you are saying. Both have gotten way out of hand in price and people just can’t afford it anymore. The millennials who chased these games are older and starting to hold back on spending higher grocery , gas, uncertain next few years. Speculators started dumping these six to 8 months ago. They seen that Biden administration was tanking us. Left the rubes, and collector’s holding the bag. Not to mention Wata manipulation of the market.
Hey it was really cool to meet u guys at the Li retro expo, didnt rly expect it. I only heard about the whole thing a couple days before it happened and didnt know what to expect, but i hope u guys has a good time like i did. Hope to see u guys at other stuff
No doubt there was a game value bubble. Lots of players pumped it up like mad and you could just sit there and shake your head, these are all a bunch of clowns.
its a house of cards the problem with video games and i always said it we haven’t got a clue what collectors got. Theres people out there with boxes and boxes of sealed games . Mario 64 sold 12 million don’t tell me theres not some person with a box full of them games .
Weve seen tours of some ebay sellers houses and some game hoarders. There are thousands of copies of sealed games out there. Especially the popular ones.
YOU CAN DOWNLOAD all these game for free from the internet. Then put them on a hard drive of a MODifed Game System. People aren't going spend the money for physical Carts.
Oh, people will spend money for physical, but not these insane prices. The # of physical collectors is small. The # for sealed, perhaps 1 out of 40 of those...
This entire trend of having insane prices for incredible common games simply for being unopened is so dumb. I could see it adding a bit to price but I doubt anyone who has a serious passion for collecting would drop a couple grand on something like Super Mario 64 when the cart itself is one of the most common on the system.
It's crazy but not surprising to see this bubble collapse. The same individuals involved ruined the coin market. Quite honestly it looks like video games were next on their list of scams, and VHS tapes are now on deck. I'm also not surprised folks like Nerdy Girl Comics Danielle have turned so quickly against critics. It is very true when big amounts of money are on the line it brings the worst out of folks. Pat and Ian called another Spade out, I think you 2 are batting 1000 for the decade. Keep up the great work.
Nerdy Girl was always here for the money. She's running a business, and more power to her, but I feel like you can tell she isn't passionate about what she's shilling.
Were prices really inflated in the first place if all the purported big ticket sales were fake? You're gonna tell me people willingly nod and agree that a Super Mario game, one of the most reprinted games in history, got over a million dollars, but nobody's willing to pony up over 300K for a one of a kind Sony/Nintendo prototype system? Anyone who bought ANY of the shit Heritage/WATA was shoveling to them afterwards deserves to be poor
Is it possible that there wasn't collusion per se but rather that there was only very few people with the interest and funds to buy the games in the first place? In other words, if the first copy sold for 240K and the second copy sold for 90K (and the third for 40K) - that doesn't mean the game with a certain grade was ever actually "worth" 240K, just that there was one dude who was willing to pay that..and then one dude who was willing to pay 90K and so forth. I feel like a market requires multiple participants and some sort of communal ebb and flow. Here it seems like there was never a real market in the first place.
It was not collusion you are right. All buyers confirmed on the super high priced items are very rich and successful businessmen and avid game collectors. Even if they overpaid by $40K - $100K that is a rounding error to them they make that amount in a days work. Super rich don't really care about price of collectibles, they just want what they want.
Personally, I don’t care about the super high graded sealed games. If I could not purchase one in that grade back in the day At my local Toys “R” Us, Babbages/GameStop,or other video game retailer, then it feels artificial. Yeah, it’s likely a copy that was in a box in the warehouse for last 20 years, and yeah it’s the same game me at the same factory at the same time of a copy I might’ve purchased, but still it’s a copy at a quality that you would’ve been hard-pressed to purchase back then. And so if that’s the case, then why should I be so excited about seeing one in such a great shape today? And here’s the kicker, how do you know what’s inside the box if you can’t open it?
Its only bad for the people that bought in the hype. For the people that are life long gamers are not in it for the money. Its about the hunt. Not investment.
I just don't believe any of those sales are real... even with a 60% decrease this is absolutely ridiculous. Is there a legit person out there that can show us a game like this he bought and prove that at least some of this is real?
It's already been verified who was the buyer behind most all of the six or 7 figure high profile auctions. All are very wealthy folks with big time game collections. One of them is Serena Williams husband a very successful businessman. All of this is verifiable if you'd do just 5 minutes of due diligence
Man, I never thought there would be someone with less views than me on RUclips until you mentioned Nerdy Girl Comics. Thanks Pat, that makes me feel better about myself.
this is such a weird video. i feel like you're taking a victory lap about games crashing when literally every collectible and financial category is dipping too. i mean, don't get me wrong, i'm glad i'm not someone spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on some of these games, but i can hardly look at the examples here and be surprised. We're finally dipping after 2 years of speculation. EDIT: Also, even if you factor in the dip from the last few years, sealed/graded games are up over 1000% from just 5-10 years ago. So, yeah, people in recent years are taking a tough bath on price deflation, but overall the market is still pretty healthy.
I have spend years collecting video games since 2008 I usually play them on my off time but been fascinating on games ever since I was young. I have never thought that sealed games would sell alot just because alot of us gamers would ripped up the plastic sealed and played the games. It's all stem from collecting stamps, cards, trains, tapes, and now games and cds now.
If you were collecting since 2008 you would know sealed collecting always brought in big money, even back then. Obviously not 2022 money, but still more than any CIB game. Sealed collecting was and will always be relevant.
@@poopy_fingers3324 no. Been collecting since NES days. Sealed games doesn't interest me. I'm here to play. Not looking over a glass cage game. It's not a Master painting.
@@tr1bes that’s fine. You do you. But the OP talking like sealed collecting is this new fad. It isn’t a fad. It’s always been relevant and will continue to be relevant.
@@poopy_fingers3324 it's only relevant to people that are into collecting rare and valuable. Mario 64 has been made in the millions. How is this rare? If it's a Picasso pencil drawing or one of Thomas Jefferson authenticate hand written book, then that's a gem. Or maybe the 1st Superman 3 body positions drawings. That's relevant. I'm looking at items that have became so few in numbers that it's slowly disappearing. Mario 64 and the likes of video games are made so much and given with digital games, it's not a rarity at all.
Pat you're right the people holding onto Mario 64 graded games are scared to bring them out, 9.6 A++ grades will be selling for $10,000 or less when the Dust settles because they are not rare.
Wouldn't be surprised if Wata is hiding behind the current economy in order to pass the smell test within certain demographics the same way the Amiico donned the cowl of family friendliness.
I sometimes feel like I’m one of the only people who just buy games to ummm play & absolutely don’t care not one single bit how much any of them are worth. I can’t think of a single thing I own that I care about it’s worth I open everything & use it as intended. The idea of owning but, never using or touching is beyond bizarre to me.
I collect some Switch games sealed just cause I think they look cool...they could plummet in value but I'd still be happy having a collection to have on display to just look at.
Same here. I like sealed games, I always thought it was neat and a way to confirm you have a perfect copy of a game. But the grading is bullshit and a scam.
@@Rountree1985 I understand that point of view, but there is nothing wrong with someone who collects sealed games because they enjoy it. Like this guy Bobby mentioned he just enjoys it and isn't one of these sharks trying to grade and flip stuff to some sucker. Also, most games out there have a way to still play them by simply downloading the ROM and using an Everdrive, ODE, hacked system etc so the whole "a sealed game can't be played" argument is pretty groundless to me. You can collect sealed games and still play them easily.
@@DrBizz The games I have been collecting are usually ones I've already played. I loved Bug Fables on the PC so when Limtied Run did a physical print it was something that I wanted to own. I also just got the physical print of Knights of the Old Republic for Switch and the FF7/8 Switch ports. I have indeed played these games, but something about collecting them appeals to me.
That Danielle girl sounds like she has Gambler's Remorse. The fault doesn't lie at people like Pat who "told you so"; the fault lies to those who were dishonest to not only the "market" but also themselves... but at some point, the Grim Reaper of Risk comes for all of our wallets
As someone who has been collecting since 96, this is absolutely hilarious to me. So glad to see this bubble bursting.
Hopefully itll affect cib too
Me too. It's so silly
@Danny P That’s true. It does seem to go through every hobby, but games were always “too nerdy/lame” to be touched by these losers. Yet, here we are haha.
i play runescape, party hats are fun to watch.
This has been so shady. In coin grading, PCGS will not only tell the population of each grade they have graded, they even estimate the total surviving population of all coins of any given mint and date. The graded games market pretends otherwise. Games that will prove out to be super common are being presented as nearly one of a kind.
Your last statement is what has confused me so much. I would assume that these "collectors" would have been around to play these games when they were originally out and would have known that something like Goldeneye was EVERYWHERE. It just shows that these people are not gamers, they literally are mindless investors going to the newest market they can rape and pillage.
A fool and his money are soon parted.
I cannot believe the sealed game market, monopolized by a company that has been shady since day 1 and recently been exposed and hit with lawsuits, is crashing like this.
Any individual who lost/loses money on these games is totally asking for it. But as we all know, it's not individuals buying these games but instead groups of investors.
With as shady as Wata is, would anyone even trust the accuracy of their grading system if they're somehow still around years from now? I sure as hell wouldn't. But I also sure as hell wouldn't buy sealed graded games, even if they were cheap.
influencers must be keeping the market going.. no normal person with a half a brain will drop that much money
@@joshuamatt8387 Fuck either grading company. Both are ruining the hobby.
@@wunderjeeson you’re absolutely correct. There are a handful of influencers routinely shilling and a cadre of followers marching down the hill right after them.
@@joshuamatt8387 How much do you have "invested" in this market?
@@PatTheNESpunk What’s up with all the WATA apologists (like the one you just replied to) deleting their comments en masse today? 😂
Went to reply to another “pearl clutcher” in another comment and his comment magically disappeared too. Guess it’s tough trying to use logic and facts to defend nerdy girl and Mario 64 “rarity” lol
i love how ian can barely contain his giggles during the opening 'manscaped' ad
It’s a good marketing tool.
As in, I don’t skip the ad, just to watch Ian.
Wonder how many takes it takes for him to suppress the giggles.
I wonder if some of these copies that are seemingly identical but selling for significantly less money after a few months are LITERALLY the same copies, just buyers with heavy duty buyers remorse and trying to recoup whatever they possibly can. Possibly to pay for divorce court
Why aren’t the video game sites writing about this crash. They were quick to to talk about that super Mario 64 going for over $100K but don’t hear a peep from them now.
Why do you think?
Since this whole thing happened my normal run-of-the-mill NES collection has gone way up in value but the market to buy new games has been way higher. I'd rather have my collection be worth a little less and be able to get the games I want cheaper than to have what I have at a higher rate but the market is inflated to the point that I can hardly get anything new. This whole scheme has been nothing but trouble for the collecting scene since it started getting press. I'm kind of happy to see it pop. Maybe the market will come back down to earth soon so I can fill out the collection more.
I thought retro game collecting was already getting too expensive for my liking a few years back. Now? Forget about it. I don't intend to sell any part of my collection, but it'll stay pretty stagnant on the retro side of things for the foreseeable future. However, I will say it is fun to check out what certain games you own are valued at every now and then.
The prices of games has bothered me less as a whole lately but I think that's because I've gotten into cheap alternatives like imports and PS2/PSP collecting, and now-hot systems like the SNES I already got what I wanted like 10 years ago. Or maybe it's just acceptance.
Most of the unreasonable prices are due to nostalgia inflation on things like pokemon games.
This bubble bursting is also probably just within sealed collecting and the WATA craze, I don't think it affects the used market as much.
100%. I'm just missing the last eight or so big ticket games, bucky, snow bros, little samson, felix... I don't need every insanely rare oddity or sports chaff just want a "complete" collection of original carts for all the good fun stuff. But atm it's out of my budget.
Not surprised that Danielle chick was rude to you at SDCC. She never seemed like someone of good character. The fact that she brushed you off because you proved her wrong just further proves what kind of person she is.
Pfft “nerdy girl”. True comic fans loathe her and when she tried to act like she was about that game life, true gamers could tell she was only about the money.
In an interview she was asked what her favorite game was. She said “Super Mario hangtab” and “Mario 3 left bros”. Lol I didn’t know box features affected gameplay (in Mario 3’s case it was a minor spelling mistake in game that changed in later prints). But honestly, WHO ANSWERS that question in that way?😂
This is why in collecting the old hands always say buy what you love. Collectables are not a sound investment. Is it cool when my collections go up in value? Sure. Do I bet on it? Nope.
You mean like say... Beanie Babies? Anybody who didn't learn their lesson from that either wasn't alive at the time or is completely blind.
Not only are sealed game prices crashing, retro game prices as a whole are on a downtrend.
Well, I think the end of the covid shutdowns are why some of the retro game prices are dropping. People can get out again and so they are selling off what they got when they couldn't go out. As the games reenter the marketplace, all at once (or nearly so), they are easier to get so, as the supply goes up, the prices go down. As someone who actually wants to play the games I get (at some point), I am glad to see the prices normalizing.
That Manscape ad... How are you guys able to not laugh your balls off?!
I would prefer to see these frauds arrested and locked up for life, but I'd certainly rather see the market correct properly than continue in it's ruined state.
EDIT: By correction I mean sealed Mario Kart 64 going for less than $100.00 again. Just to be clear.
No, no, I like your idea better.
True it's been a mess since those clowns at WATA ruined everything with their Scummy Grading Company.... Glad to see them get what they deserve, now hopefully the market can course correct and not be worth thousands of dollars for like a sealed copy of Super Mario 64, so bad dude.
Appreciate you talking about this as always. It's a refreshing alternative to the shills and people trying to play both sides.
GET IN EARLY!
And get back out fast, too.
Had to look it up. The Rattata version has a picture on the back of a Pokémon battle against a Rattata whereas other copies have a battle against a Meowth.
Looks like my CIB is Meowth
sandshrew/meowth is first print, rattata/pidgey is second always later print.
If anyone here has some graded games they need to panic sell, hit me up! Get out while you still can!
I sold a sealed Nes game ungraded about a year ago for a thousand dollars.. I invested maybe a dollar into it. Makes me feel so good that I didn’t spend the time and effort getting it graded and put up for auction.. so much could’ve happened and along the way I could’ve gotten burned. I happily took my $999 profit and went home. You never know where the market is gonna lead you
MC Kids with a McDonalds VHS tape
Smart man
Another funny thing from the Danielle person Pat mentions, her Instagram channel used to be covered in WATA games and promoting what a great service they were and on and on. Now, she hasn't posted about WATA in a long time. And her one recent post about graded games? They are a stack of her popular graded games BUT they are all graded by VGA. Pretty funny to see that
We all knew the market correction was coming. Games like Mario Kart 64 and Goldeneye 007 are simply not rare enough (comparably) to some other grades/games. Honestly, the sealed gaming market was actually the tipping point for me to become completely over collecting in general. Video games just shouldn’t cost $500. Resellers, speculators, “flippers”, the whole used game market kinda grosses me out.
I’ve been gaming since 1988 and it took all of this bs to make me want to get rid of my entire physical collection. Because, let’s be honest, it’s no longer necessary to have an entire basement full of media to play old games. The whole thing is a turn off. Sealed games is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s all mindless consumerism and a need to own “things”. People who think their 5000 game deep game collections are somehow better than sealed game collectors, I’d do some deep soul searching on that.
@@Alma-B Well obviously things cost what things cost in life (with obvious governmental influence on certain items). So in that way, yeah, games can get to well north of $500. What I’m saying is that there is no game in this world that anyone would pay $500 new on the shelf. Doesn’t matter how many features they add to Madden 24, no amount of tracks they can include with Mario Kart 12, no RPG that takes 800 hours to complete. If a game that comes out this holiday season for $500, you’re not buying it and neither am I.
So what the fuck is the difference with retro games? I could kiiiiiiiiiinda see it back 20 years ago. I myself paid something like $100 for Panzar Dragoon Saga because there was just no other way to play that game. But now? With ODEs, Flashcarts, digital sales, emulators that not only match the old hardware but sometimes perform better, what is the logical point of shelling out that kinda money for a single game? Personally, I’d save myself $3000, not buy a CiB Earthbound, boot it up on my NSO enabled Switch, and take that money to fly to Hawaii…. or help out a friend…. or fucking just put it in a savings account.
People are obviously free to do what they wish. But when I see completed sales for Clock Tower 2 on the PS2 for several hundreds of dollars, I am convinced those people are morons.
@@Alma-B That’s an extreme example but there are games, not even CiB, that go for thousands. And as you well know, many games go for north of 300.
I made my point before and now it appears you are kinda agreeing with me: people who are spending that much money on games are not doing it to purely “play it”. That’s what I mean when I say games shouldn’t cost that much. Games becoming trophies on people’s walls is whack, imo.
I remember Eric the dentist attacking people when they made comments. His trademark was saying boom about how much money he was going to make. It’s a boom, but the implosion sort🫣
Eric is a meme even in the graded/sealed community. He is so blatantly flake about his "passion" for games that it's cringe.
@@inasuma8180 don’t think I’ve heard him say how he remembers the hours on the game he spent. Just wants to tell everyone how much it cost🙄
0:04 Ian’s face when he hears Pat say “Smooth Sack Summer”. 😂 😂 😭 😭 💀
Heritage's VHS scheme is even more pathetic. What's next--DVD? "Hey guys, check out my factory-sealed _American Pie 3._ Look, but do not touch!"
What does the DVD feel like if you touch it? Warm apple pie?
confused about the "scheme" here
they're offering items for people to bid on at auction, confused why you think that should be some sort of banned behavior
@@CraigSnyder Would you pay hundreds of thousands of dollars on a VHS of Back to the Future--a movie that has been readily available for 37 years? People can enjoy collecting mint tapes but until now they've never had to pay more than a Franklin or two for them. They're taking a niche hobbyist thing and puffing the value so that normals see the headlines like "Factory-Sealed Star Wars VHS Sells At Auction For 1.2 Million Dollars" and all rush out in droves to sell their attic-dusted copies at sky-high prices, artificially bumping the cost.
No, it's not _illegal,_ and shouldn't be, but it is transparently scummy and only delivers short-term gains to a very exclusive few. Like playing in a lottery where the "winner" was decided months in advance.
@@visual_Memories I just saw one sell for 14$ at an auction. Sealed starwars VHS
Damn, I thought I would be retiring on my sealed Atari 2600 games. 😂
Joke aside, that graded sealed thing can't go down fast enough.
It just made the price of retro gaming exploded in the last 3-4 years. I hate that.
I've already cut my losses and am gonna switch to flash carts for everything i dont absolutely need a physical copy for, younger me would never but it just takes up too much space and WAY too much money
With the no-reserve auctions on HA, for people with high grade stuff, ebay BIN seems like a much safer selling option. Also, re: nerdy girl comics, she went hard on like 20 graded copies of SMB3 and is taking a giant bath, right now.
Is 'taking a giant bath' stock market jargon or am I missing something here lol
@@williamdrum9899 "taking a bath" "took a bath" means to lose. I've never researched the origin, lol.
ebay not a good place to sell very high grade stuff do to their insane buyer protection policies (where buyer can never be wrong when making a claim) that has led to a *LOT* of fraud taking place really hosing sellers. One thing to get hosed on a $300 game, whole nother issue to get hosed on a $30,000 game. HA takes care of the seller from start to finish.
That intro was worthy of a video all its own lol.
"No snags!" **Ian holds back laughter**
I stopped playing/collecting loose copies cause it just got so crazy. The market became unfriendly to everyone and now we get to see the same people who drove the market to these ridiculous prices now take ridiculous loses!
If anyone told me to get into this market and buy old games because they're old and rope people in for at most triple digit reasonable asking prices not a decade ago for five figures, I as a person looking from the outside in would still tell them 'your play money is not worth my damn morals.' This kind of behavior can go straight to hell. Why does anyone trust the clowns at WATA anymore?
Pat and Ian keep these WATA videos coming I love seeing these prices drop like a rock.
Retailers prefer long boxes because they’re much harder to shoplift, especially with things that are four times more expensive than CDs nine points. PlayStation memory cards came in and itty-bitty cardboard box just big enough to hold it in Japan, big packaging here because of the shoplifting issue
Back when people used to buy CDs, some stores put every single album in a plastic cage thing that made it the size of a long box. They'd take the cage off at the till when you bought it.
Makes sense. Costco will put small items on a piece of cardboard the size of a surfboard.
@@TubbyJ420 as someone who used to work at a record store, no we did not. I am out of work, not to mention storage space for all of those cases would’ve been ridiculous. We did it the high ticket items, as well as hot new releases most likely to be shoplifted
No, retailers that sold games preffered smaller boxes. Smaller packaging takes less display shelve and warehouse space, so they can keep more copies on hand and display a lot more titles in shelves.
@@Aki_Lesbrinco Yes that’s why they eventually got rid of the long boxes. Too much empty space and weight to ship and having stock depth was more important. It’s why they started cutting holes in Blu-ray cases to save an ounce
A few caveats: I love your show, Pat and Ian; I have been as big a critic of WATA as Karl Jobst; like Karl my journalism is cited in the lawsuit against WATA; and while I do collect sealed and graded games, I have never spent $1,000 on one.
Having said all this, this analysis (in the video) is not correct. And I know you guys pride yourself on accuracy, and so I want to help if I can. I follow this market closer than Karl-who I also respect-and am also more involved in it personally. I attend most of the auctions, I curate data on this market, I have a sizable collection (not for investment but due to emotional attachment to the games I buy), and I know what I am talking about.
1. The major force operating on this market is a historic increase in supply. There are perhaps three times as many auctions in 2022 as there were in 2020; there are more grading companies domestically and internationally (with another, CGC, coming soon); grading backlogs at WATA are now almost gone, convincing more people to get their games graded (because you can get them back in a reasonable timeframe); new old stock FC/SFC games are flooding into VGA and ending up in auctions in larger and larger numbers; 1990s "big box" grading has finally taken off; "modern" grading and collecting is now a thing, so collectors have whole new generations of games to choose from, stretching thinner the interest for any given game in a given generation and simply increasing the total stock of games graded overall; and the natural accretion processes of sites like eBay that do not delete older listings means that with each passing day there are more and more sealed and graded games for sale. There are even efforts to open up sealed-and-graded game shops online, like MinusWorlds (a tentative trend that may or may not expand). In view of all of this-even assuming no other forces operating on the market-sealed-and-graded prices would fall slightly across the board having *nothing* to do with a bubble bursting or people turning away from the hobby but simply, as I said, a historic increase in supply without a commensurate increase in demand.
2. The health of the market is determined by price floor, not price ceiling, and this video oddly makes the same mistake in criticizing the sealed-and-graded game market that the market manipulators make in lionizing it. The only difference is that whereas the latter emphasize the highest sales to manipulate buyers into thinking *all* games should be (or are) going up in price, in the video above, Pat and Ian, you are emphasizing the highest sales-inasmuch as you are seeing significant declines-to simply make the opposite (and equally false and over-broad) point, that *all* games are collapsing in price as the sealed-and-graded bubble pops. Neither view has any relevance to what is actually happening to the market. The health of a market like this is judged by the consistency of its floor compared to the cost of grading-or, alternately, by the *median* game within a grading subcategory, like "XBox games"-and by increases or decreases in price that are not spectacular but marginal. If, in a two-year period, the median sealed-and-graded game (excluding all high and low outliers to determine what really is median in a market with thousands and thousands and thousands of sales annually) goes up 7%, which could be as little as a $600 game rising in current market value to $642, that is a reasonably healthy market. But such market indicators are missed when we just look at an outlier high sale and then compare that sale to a sale of the same game a *random* period of time later.
3. There is no one sealed-and-graded video game market; there are more like thirty. The people buying sixth-gen sealed-and-graded games are not the people buying sealed Atari 2600 games, and you guys know that as well as I do. There will be times when the Atari 2600 market is down and (say) the Gamecube market is up, or the NES market is up and the Dreamcast market is down. Speaking of sealed-and-graded video games as a monolithic market is pretty silly. My own focuses are Atari 2600, Intellivision, NES, and SNES, and in my data analyses I look at floors, median games, and year-over-year comparisons-the way any responsible market analysis has to do. Year-over-year the Atari 2600 market is slightly down, the Intellivision market flat, the NES market slightly up, and the SNES market flat. I do not care about what millionaires do with their money, so I do not care about outlier high sales and neither should you-those sales are simply invitations to (even well-intended) demagoguery by those who love *or* hate the sealed-and-graded market.
The changes in the market worth tracking right now are these:
1. An influx of NOS (new old stock) FamiCom and Super FamiCom games from Japan. Speculators have learned what I and many others learned long ago but never took advantage of because we are collectors, not investors (I only buy sealed games I like and admire and want to keep as art objects I am emotionally attached to from having played them): you can get games from Japan for nothing, grade them with VGA, and sell them to suckers who don't know how much NOS there is over in Japan (a ton). We are seeing FC and SFC games flooding into U.S. auctions and it is kind of sad, because realistically these games should be worth no more than Intellivision games (a great example of a system with tons of NOS).
2. The long (long) wait for CGC grading and VGA pops. CGC was poised to change the market by adding a third grading company both collectors and investors would be likely to use and honor. But they are taking forever to ramp up, suggesting they may be facing difficulties in doing so. When (if) CGC launches, however, prices will decline further because more games will come on the market more quickly that auction houses will be willing to carry (unlike, say, new-grading-house-entrant P1, which most auction houses will not carry). By the same token, the wait for VGA pop reports is taking ten times longer than it should have, but as problematically we really don't know what to do with this data when it drops because some of the VGA graded games will have been "crossed over" to WATA, making it impossible to just add the VGA data to the WATA data to determine total populations (please do not do this when the VGA pops drop). Preliminary research suggests that as many as 50% of VGA games eventually get crossed over-but it could also be as low as 25%-so VGA pop reports will throw some chaos and confusion into the market when they drop and I do not know what effect that will have.
3. The expansion of grading modern games. I have no idea why anyone would ever buy a sealed-and-graded modern game-unless you just want it on your mantelpiece-because there is no condition premium whatsoever (every game is in pretty good shape because of hard-casing, unless you are a weird obsessive who demands a 9.8/A++ instead of a 9.6/A+ and, if you are, the market for buyers is commensurately niche) and because you have no idea, and will likely never know, how much stock is out there. In other words, there is no rarity component whatsoever. But speculators have flooded into this area and, candidly, if you want to knock this market that is the place to go: guys trying to sell 9.4/A+ Breath of the Wilds for $400 should probably come in for some serious scorn.
4. The growing "big box" market. This is what I know Karl is into, and many others are getting into it as well. Prices for big box PC games are likely to increase in the months and years ahead-but here too this will only *decrease* prices slightly for other systems because, and this is the key...
5. Demand is rising, but not nearly as fast as supply. The hobby is *not* contracting; it is expanding. But way, way too slow to keep up with the increase in supply. While market pumpers say that supply is actually quite low-and for older systems they are right in *absolute* terms-markets run on the relationship between supply and demand, not absolute terms, and right now the supply for almost every system way outstrips demand (the only exceptions may be NES, SNES, and N64, which is why those markets are the healthiest, the most stable, and the most worth investing in if you are, unlike me, an investor).
I personally don't think you guys need to cover sealed-and-grading collecting at all if you don't want to. Candidly, anyone in the "games are meant to be played crowd"-which I respect-shouldn't be focused on *any* collecting practices, as one doesn't need a CIB to play a game (all instruction manuals are online and boxes are just marketing) so basically *only cartridges and discs should matter to straight-up gamers* in 2022. Any discussion of *any* collecting (CIB or sealed, graded or ungraded) has nothing to do with "games are meant to be played." But *if* one is going to cover collecting also, I think it needs to be done in a way that is not simply the equally unhelpful obverse of those who pump up the sealed-and-graded market interminably.
When you cover the Amico or really anything, you guys do it with sophistication and class and intelligence and a high level of detail. I do not see the same standard being applied to sealed-and-graded collecting, which is fine-you guys can do whatever you want, it is your show and I enjoy it either way-but I think it is worth having this pointed out to you by someone who admires you both very much and is not just saying that as a cover for criticism. I *really* like your show.
The median Atari 2600 sealed-and-graded game is $220.
The median NES sealed-and-graded game is $400.
The median SNES sealed-and-graded game is $550.
The games you guys are talking about are literally being bought by Saudi sheikhs. I know it is fun for commenters here to talk about middle-class American fools losing their shirts but that is not what is happening. You have millionaire and billionaire international buyers who do not care if they lose money; millionaire and simply "wealthy" American middle-men who sell to those foreigners and actually make money even when the market drops (because they are still selling well above what they paid for the games sealed and ungraded); and then you have... the *actual market* we should be talking about. The one where middle-class dads are buying 7.0 CIBs of Duck Hunt for $425. The problem is, no one in these comments knows anything about that market, so instead we talk about the sheikhs and their bottomless fount of wealth. It is honestly... pretty silly.
How about we have a real discussion about this market-median games, median prices, median buyers-rather than just throwing red meat around? I do not care if a Saudi sheikh buys a Koenigsegg Jesko for $3 million, so why should I or anyone care if he buys a Super Mario 64 for $1.5 million or a Sonic the Hedgehog for $300,000? It means less than nothing. I wish we could talk about real people, real collectors, the part of this market that is just people who love video games and who-even if they *are* investors (which I am not)-are just looking to buy something they like for $600 that maybe will be worth $642 in two years. Why obsess over the nonsense end of the market and call it "the market" unless the desire is to attack the *concept* of grading sealed games rather than the market?
And if anyone wants to attack the concept of grading sealed games, have at it! I don't care and I am sure neither do any other collectors of sealed-and-graded games-to each their own, and those who like to judge how others live are free to do so. But *no one* can say "games are meant to be played" as an attack on sealed-and-graded collecting unless that person is *only* a cartridge collector and plays *every* game they buy regularly. The moment you move to ungraded CIB, and the moment your cache goes beyond in size your ability to play what you own regularly, it's all a matter of taste and there is no high horse for anyone to get on.
Seth Abramson I've had my issues with you in the past but I cannot agree enough with you on this one, I have been posting on every video Pat puts out some very important information that of course is ignored because Pat was against graded games from day one and the wata "scandal" fueled his narrative but no one talks about the two highest priced games were bought by actual collectors one was Brady Hill with the two million dollar Mario and the other was Serena Williams husband with the 1.56 SM64 and that's a MAJOR deal because everyone jumped on the scam train especially after the SM64 and Karl himself made that video using that as an example, he even put two million dollar scam as the header!! It's truly ridiculous to me how that video gained that popularity with ZERO evidence of there being shill bids and now that the truth comes out we hear crickets
Karl helped fuel this downturn let it be known and it's the games are meant to be played crowd that really pushed that forward, I figured once those pop reports came out on early cardboard it would show how truly rare this stuff is compared to other collectibles but the damage has been done and the people responsible will not take responsibility with a follow up video on the facts not speculation. I think the key to this market now is new blood otherwise it will get stagnant again, the rarity is there in black and white as is the nostalgia, I really truly hope that Karl takes the responsibility as a so called journalist and does the right thing, please show some credibility as you buy wata graded games yourself which I find so comical it's insane. I'm saddened by what has happened with this beloved hobby and Pat was chomping at the bit for this to happen, congratulations you got what you wanted, I feel he is a disgrace to this hobby. Thanks Seth for a well written statement
@@SethAbramson Thanks for the insight! We hear so much about these high-end purchases and hear so little context around them.
TLDR
What I want to know is: Even if you truly believe that Pat is completely wrong and it's a healthy market, why would you comment that? Would it matter that this video is entirely false and full of BS? Like, which camp are you a part of? All I'm saying is real collectors that aren't in it for the money would welcome a video like this, false or not. Why object to something that helps the overall perception of video games not being some form of investment? The only type of people to bring up counter arguments to this video are people that are in it for the money.
Being someone who makes a living off collectibles, an easy way to tell an investor vs collector is collectors are typically happy when prices drop as they can afford more.
I had to sell my video game collection when I went to university. Tried to buy some games again years later and the prices were fucking insane. If the prices crash more and more, then I'd be super excited to buy some of my old games back.
Super Mario 64 investors: "I'm waiting for the 30th anniversary" lol
I mean....if you are gonna spend that kind if money on a video game, you deserve to lose your ass. What were these people thinking in the first place?
Absolutely brutal. Difficult to feel terrible for everyone involved, though.
For the casual collector, this just means buy based on the value YOU place on it. For the flippers playing that shell game where things just change hands endlessly based on speculation and what they thing another speculator may pay, I guess the gig is mostly over. I hope you enjoyed it while it lasted, those of us that actually have some kind of enjoyment in video games are happy to show you to the exit :)
This is the game collector's market having been through a time of speculation, coming out of euphoria and heading into the denial stage.
What is happening is that someone sells a game for $100,000 to an associate and all that actually changes hands is the auction house fees. But then the person who 'bought' it then has an asset (with a value determined on an apparently open market) that they can borrow against and get a $100,000 loan using it as collateral.
When they default on the loan the lender gets the game and suddenly finds out it has almost no value. So the lender can then claim $100,000 on their insurance.
The insurance company posts it as a loss against their profits and slightly increases their fees to cover it.
This is very similar to art auctions, it is also a great way to launder money.
thanks for your assertion without presenting a single instance of evidence of this actually happening
Thanks Pat for bringing this up. I argued with all these so called eBay you tubers going on and on about these and vhs and comics. We ran a coin and antique shop from 1979 through 89. We seen the bubbles burst on so many items. We seen the speculators come in the late 80’s which destroyed the markets. I have warned people of these auction houses as I have dealt with them for over 40 years. These auctioneers can control the items so easily. They can bid the wall, have schil bidders, lie about absentee bidders etc etc. The problem now is the internet. They simply just bid their own items up. You tried to tell people for years also about these sealed game prices. And Props to you. Keep up the good work and remember the fun is in the chase for the collector.
I'd be interested to know how many moved their crypto dollars into collecting and vice versa. Also how many of these sales discussed were the same item resold at a later date.
$48k for Mario Kart 64 is still insane. Plenty of room to fall further imo.
It was okay if some sealed games got higher and higher in price, but this was ridiculous. I’m glad these prices are falling down. It never made any sense that people would be okay with having such a narrow profit margin.
Still watching this in July of 2023 and it STILL brings a smile to my face lol
I know this has been said a million times but I still have absolutely no clue why anyone would think these prices are even remotely close to actual market value. Most of these games were not even uncommon when they were originally out. Hell, my brother worked in a KayBee Toys outlet around 2005 that had at least 50 copies of Goldeneye sent to them that they were blowing out for less than $10 a copy. There is no way that something that was produced in those quantities less than 25 years ago should ever be the price of a brand new car. These people are absolutely delusional and I'm glad they will have much less money in the future to inflate bubbles.
That Danielle person is one of the worst offenders. Her social media was always just loaded with Pro WATA propaganda. She throws alot of money around and pretends to be an expert but she is as phony as any other shill. It's all fake passion from her; its clearly all about the money. If the market for comics dried up tomorrow, she'd ditch that too. Another example is Reeces Rare Comics. They promoted graded games hard for about a year. Now they never bring them to conventions or mention them in their updates. Their original stock of WATA games are still available on their website for exorbitant prices
I thought she was the person from American Pickers
I only buy games I wanna play. Usually I'm fine just buying cartridge/disc only, but the one time I did buy sealed games (Dragon Quest 4 and 5 on DS for $20, and Dragon Quest 6 on DS for $90), I casually broke the seal and opened the boxes so could play the fucking games.
I bought a sealed Super Mario 64 in 2015 (my favorite video game) for $250 mint, and at the time common as wheels on a car with a simple search on E-Bay (who bought the rest of them up?). I never trusted WATA, and still have my copy ungraded. Glad to have waited, and when the dust clears I might have it VGA graded. But if it wasn't for WATA my copy would still be worth $250. I guess I'm slightly grateful for the phony BS.
The bubble peaked with N64 Games due to the simple fact that the crypto-bros trying to launder their gains into alternative assets grew up with the N-64 as their first console as a kid. This is the time for the mid-late 20's childhood nostalgia wave. With crypto busted these games will go back to being simply very expensive. in 4-5 years when the next crypto cycle happens, I'm excited for my PS2 collection values.
If you look into Heritage Auctions' history this is no surprise. They pulled the same thing with CCGs, and before that comics, and before that sports cards, and before that coins. This is their M.O. Find an untapped collector market. Pump it up in the media, pump it up with grading, convince people its an investment, and then sing arm in arm as they skip to the bank with their cronies and their customers are left holding the bag.
You reminded me that when I was collecting coins as a kid, graded coins were just barely beginning to be a thing. Talking late 80's, early 90's.
Yep we worked for Accugrade back in the day. I can remember the competition at the coin shows. And depending on who you knew your coin might get a higher grade. We walked away from grading when the owner saw what the others were doing and saw a chance for cash. I will never own any graded items
18:19 Pat lol .. Dropping the Price is Right losing horns haha That was great .. Holy sh*t a $210,000 loss in 10 months !!! I can't even wrap my brain around that, but as others mentioned here in the comments its tough to feel bad for these ppl that "invested"
The grading of sealed games and the prices we've seen these games being sold for is something I believe will undoubtedly go down as one of the most ludicrous times in not only videogame history but also for the deceitful market and corruption behind all of it ..
If you have been thinking about it I think it's past time to start thinking about liquidating or down sizing your collections boys and girls. Do it now before these crasy prices disappear to fund your retirements and pay off your mortgages... Wow. The price for resident evil.... If I was somekind of mystic I would have been buying and keeping seal copies of games for the past 30 years. IMO this makes the comic boom look like nothing considering how many copies are probably out there vs the stupid prices. Wow
Something similar is happening to the housing market right now.
@@Abstractpossom Losing 70% or more in a few months is not a "shifting market."
Apples and oranges. There are so many factors that go into the housing market and economy. But I get what you are saying. Both have gotten way out of hand in price and people just can’t afford it anymore. The millennials who chased these games are older and starting to hold back on spending higher grocery , gas, uncertain next few years. Speculators started dumping these six to 8 months ago. They seen that Biden administration was tanking us. Left the rubes, and collector’s holding the bag. Not to mention Wata manipulation of the market.
Still, these prices are nuts for video game items, even if they are rare….
Hey it was really cool to meet u guys at the Li retro expo, didnt rly expect it. I only heard about the whole thing a couple days before it happened and didnt know what to expect, but i hope u guys has a good time like i did. Hope to see u guys at other stuff
@12:00 Long boxes were originally for PC.
No doubt there was a game value bubble. Lots of players pumped it up like mad and you could just sit there and shake your head, these are all a bunch of clowns.
Hey Pat you guys forgot to check the prices of the most important ones; The Amico physical products 😏
God I hope someone got them graded
its a house of cards the problem with video games and i always said it we haven’t got a clue what collectors got. Theres people out there with boxes and boxes of sealed games . Mario 64 sold 12 million don’t tell me theres not some person with a box full of them games .
Weve seen tours of some ebay sellers houses and some game hoarders. There are thousands of copies of sealed games out there. Especially the popular ones.
Thankfully games are crashing all around. Look at pricecharting. All the games have already crashed or just peaked and are starting to crash.
The drop is quite the story, but 48k for MK64 is still asinine. I'll just sit here calmly playing my copy still hooked up to my TV thanks.
Buying graded games is just a stupid idea. Especially from a company like wata that is known for their shady business practices.
The time to sell was at the peak of the bubble. As with everything. And the WATA guys need to be behind bars. Maybe share cell with Tommy Tallarico?
If only someone had warned us about this…
YOU CAN DOWNLOAD all these game for free from the internet. Then put them on a hard drive of a MODifed Game System. People aren't going spend the money for physical Carts.
Oh, people will spend money for physical, but not these insane prices. The # of physical collectors is small. The # for sealed, perhaps 1 out of 40 of those...
This entire trend of having insane prices for incredible common games simply for being unopened is so dumb. I could see it adding a bit to price but I doubt anyone who has a serious passion for collecting would drop a couple grand on something like Super Mario 64 when the cart itself is one of the most common on the system.
It makes zero sense. Another tulip mania speculation frenzy
It's crazy but not surprising to see this bubble collapse. The same individuals involved ruined the coin market. Quite honestly it looks like video games were next on their list of scams, and VHS tapes are now on deck. I'm also not surprised folks like Nerdy Girl Comics Danielle have turned so quickly against critics. It is very true when big amounts of money are on the line it brings the worst out of folks. Pat and Ian called another Spade out, I think you 2 are batting 1000 for the decade. Keep up the great work.
Nerdy Girl was always here for the money. She's running a business, and more power to her, but I feel like you can tell she isn't passionate about what she's shilling.
Could I get WATA to grade a bottle of ball toner?🤔
I would try
Saw this coming miles away and no one believed me.
Were prices really inflated in the first place if all the purported big ticket sales were fake? You're gonna tell me people willingly nod and agree that a Super Mario game, one of the most reprinted games in history, got over a million dollars, but nobody's willing to pony up over 300K for a one of a kind Sony/Nintendo prototype system? Anyone who bought ANY of the shit Heritage/WATA was shoveling to them afterwards deserves to be poor
this was always shady and was eventually going to come crashing down
Is it possible that there wasn't collusion per se but rather that there was only very few people with the interest and funds to buy the games in the first place? In other words, if the first copy sold for 240K and the second copy sold for 90K (and the third for 40K) - that doesn't mean the game with a certain grade was ever actually "worth" 240K, just that there was one dude who was willing to pay that..and then one dude who was willing to pay 90K and so forth. I feel like a market requires multiple participants and some sort of communal ebb and flow. Here it seems like there was never a real market in the first place.
It was not collusion you are right. All buyers confirmed on the super high priced items are very rich and successful businessmen and avid game collectors. Even if they overpaid by $40K - $100K that is a rounding error to them they make that amount in a days work. Super rich don't really care about price of collectibles, they just want what they want.
Personally, I don’t care about the super high graded sealed games. If I could not purchase one in that grade back in the day At my local Toys “R” Us, Babbages/GameStop,or other video game retailer, then it feels artificial. Yeah, it’s likely a copy that was in a box in the warehouse for last 20 years, and yeah it’s the same game me at the same factory at the same time of a copy I might’ve purchased, but still it’s a copy at a quality that you would’ve been hard-pressed to purchase back then. And so if that’s the case, then why should I be so excited about seeing one in such a great shape today?
And here’s the kicker, how do you know what’s inside the box if you can’t open it?
Its only bad for the people that bought in the hype. For the people that are life long gamers are not in it for the money. Its about the hunt. Not investment.
Who needs NFTs and crypto when you can enjoy the price crashes of sealed, physical game products?
Wata is turning out games in 6-8 weeks now backlog is done
That Price is Right SE was so on point 🤣
I am happy Ian and Pat get to experience Smooth Sac Summer
With that in mind, I think Pat has the smoothest Sac
Hahahaaa took me a second good one
And there is no real guarantee that what you see on the outside is what the game actually is on the inside.
I haven’t seen drops like this since kazuya’s birthday at the Mashima compound.
The Heritage scam revealed crashed that market
I just don't believe any of those sales are real... even with a 60% decrease this is absolutely ridiculous. Is there a legit person out there that can show us a game like this he bought and prove that at least some of this is real?
It's already been verified who was the buyer behind most all of the six or 7 figure high profile auctions. All are very wealthy folks with big time game collections. One of them is Serena Williams husband a very successful businessman. All of this is verifiable if you'd do just 5 minutes of due diligence
Man, I never thought there would be someone with less views than me on RUclips until you mentioned Nerdy Girl Comics. Thanks Pat, that makes me feel better about myself.
13:40 I bet many criminals are laundry money on heritage
this is such a weird video. i feel like you're taking a victory lap about games crashing when literally every collectible and financial category is dipping too. i mean, don't get me wrong, i'm glad i'm not someone spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on some of these games, but i can hardly look at the examples here and be surprised. We're finally dipping after 2 years of speculation.
EDIT: Also, even if you factor in the dip from the last few years, sealed/graded games are up over 1000% from just 5-10 years ago. So, yeah, people in recent years are taking a tough bath on price deflation, but overall the market is still pretty healthy.
No need to let actual facts get in the way of a prolonged RUclips rant!
The people buying these don’t have money issues like a drop in the bucket for them
sigh, another flaming wreckage.
I was never a fan of graded sealed games especially from WATA (shady).
I have spend years collecting video games since 2008 I usually play them on my off time but been fascinating on games ever since I was young. I have never thought that sealed games would sell alot just because alot of us gamers would ripped up the plastic sealed and played the games. It's all stem from collecting stamps, cards, trains, tapes, and now games and cds now.
If you were collecting since 2008 you would know sealed collecting always brought in big money, even back then. Obviously not 2022 money, but still more than any CIB game. Sealed collecting was and will always be relevant.
@@poopy_fingers3324 no. Been collecting since NES days. Sealed games doesn't interest me. I'm here to play. Not looking over a glass cage game. It's not a Master painting.
@@tr1bes that’s fine. You do you. But the OP talking like sealed collecting is this new fad. It isn’t a fad. It’s always been relevant and will continue to be relevant.
@@tr1bes Same.
@@poopy_fingers3324 it's only relevant to people that are into collecting rare and valuable. Mario 64 has been made in the millions. How is this rare? If it's a Picasso pencil drawing or one of Thomas Jefferson authenticate hand written book, then that's a gem. Or maybe the 1st Superman 3 body positions drawings. That's relevant. I'm looking at items that have became so few in numbers that it's slowly disappearing. Mario 64 and the likes of video games are made so much and given with digital games, it's not a rarity at all.
Pat you're right the people holding onto Mario 64 graded games are scared to bring them out, 9.6 A++ grades will be selling for $10,000 or less when the Dust settles because they are not rare.
19:34 the DDS has been surprisingly quiet lately 😂😂😂😂😂
Wouldn't be surprised if Wata is hiding behind the current economy in order to pass the smell test within certain demographics the same way the Amiico donned the cowl of family friendliness.
Little birdie told me he invested into cryptocurrency
I sometimes feel like I’m one of the only people who just buy games to ummm play & absolutely don’t care not one single bit how much any of them are worth. I can’t think of a single thing I own that I care about it’s worth I open everything & use it as intended. The idea of owning but, never using or touching is beyond bizarre to me.
Manscaped tagline should be "Trim your bag without trimming your bag"
The Dentist is crying now
240 grand for a Sonic??? Did Jaleel White autograph it? 😂😂😂
Feels like people coming out of a drunken stupor
It’s so funny when I comment telling people this bubbles gonna burst and people get nasty lmao
I collect some Switch games sealed just cause I think they look cool...they could plummet in value but I'd still be happy having a collection to have on display to just look at.
Same here. I like sealed games, I always thought it was neat and a way to confirm you have a perfect copy of a game. But the grading is bullshit and a scam.
Games are meant to be played. Stop collecting sealed games.
@@Rountree1985 I understand that point of view, but there is nothing wrong with someone who collects sealed games because they enjoy it. Like this guy Bobby mentioned he just enjoys it and isn't one of these sharks trying to grade and flip stuff to some sucker. Also, most games out there have a way to still play them by simply downloading the ROM and using an Everdrive, ODE, hacked system etc so the whole "a sealed game can't be played" argument is pretty groundless to me. You can collect sealed games and still play them easily.
@@DrBizz The games I have been collecting are usually ones I've already played. I loved Bug Fables on the PC so when Limtied Run did a physical print it was something that I wanted to own. I also just got the physical print of Knights of the Old Republic for Switch and the FF7/8 Switch ports. I have indeed played these games, but something about collecting them appeals to me.
That Danielle girl sounds like she has Gambler's Remorse. The fault doesn't lie at people like Pat who "told you so"; the fault lies to those who were dishonest to not only the "market" but also themselves... but at some point, the Grim Reaper of Risk comes for all of our wallets
I'm lucky the games I enjoyed 35 years ago were £2.99 and are still £2.99 now so I can afford to rebuild my collection!