Originally Posted by
Bojay1997
All you are talking about is a self-contained bubble, not a true market. You're essentially just moving the decimal point in your head reasoning that because you sold something for $10K, it makes it reasonable to also pay $10K for something. It's like the gambler who loses his life savings but figures he had a good run because he made millions over the years. The same thing happened with comics in the 1980s. People were scooping up new issues every week and flipping them a month or two later for 3-5 times cover price only to turn around and spend that money on equaly overpriced comics being sold by other collectors or shops. The same thing happened in baseball cards in the 80s and action figures. There is zero chance something like that can last. For a collectible market to thrive, you need to have long term fundamentals like reasonable certainly about supply, consistent or measureable demand and a proximity of perceived value to market pricing. These are mass produced items, not unique pieces of art or even things manufactured fifty years ago before anyone had any conception of collecting pop culture items. Paying thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars for a video game which is not unique in any way is not something that is tied to real market conditions. I'm not saying you can't make money flipping games, obviously you and a number of other people do. All I'm saying is that if you're planning on retiring on your collection, you're probably in for a real shock down the road.
I also disagree that grading is "vastly embraced". If you look at sealed VGA auctions, it's always a matter of several dozen of the same people bidding on every item. It's the same people who hang out on the sealed game forum and Nintendoage. You certainly don't see many sealed Atari collectors or even that many sealed disc based collectors embracing VGA, it's almost all NES people. It's also not like hundreds of new VGA collectors are entering the market every day and VGA graded games are still only a very tiny proportion of all Ebay sealed video game auctions and a miniscule proportion of all game auctions period.
You're right, it is long-term collectors who don't embrace VGA. It's because we've been around long enough to understand the makings of a bubble and that things go up and down over time. Newer collectors come and go and ultimately, they overpay for stuff and end up getting burned when real life catches up and their credit card is maxed out and all they have is a small stack of games encased in plastic which are worth less than what they overpaid for them. How many 1980s comic collectors do you think have been able to take an early retirement by selling their collection? I sure don't know any, of course I was collecting 1960s comics in the 1980s, so while I'm not rich as a result, I certainly have a very nice collection that is also stable or growing in value over time.