Ok, before everybody screams "Bloody Murder" please actually read this post in it's entirety. The title of the thread really doesn't explain the focus of this Ebay Price Guide. So please read the whole thing, and then feel free to comment about it.
What I'm looking for is volunteers that would be willing to collaborate on a Ebay Pricing Guide. Depending on how many volunteers offered their time, we would try to cover every platform worth covering. Hopefully we could get enough volunteers, where each person has one specific system to do research on. It would be even better if we had enough volunteers to have multiple people working on the same systems, but we will have to see what the interest level is on this.
Now I understand that alot of people out there think that a Ebay pricing guide would be similar to scriptures of the Devil, and they are totally, absolutely, 100 percent against such a guide ever being created. The fear being that this guide would fall into all the wrong hands, and that it would end up making games in the "wild" go up dramatically in price.
I can understand that. And that is why this guide will be a "PRIVATE" guide. The guide won't even be posted on these forums. To ensure that nobody goes postal over this, we would keep the guide 100 percent private. The only way you get the guide is if you participate in making it.
Everybody that legitmately participates in the guide would get the end results of our efforts, and continuing participation would allow them to get quarterly updates.
Now, certainly, there are people that would be interested in such a guide, and people that would think it to be ridiculous to do such a guide. To the people that are interested, well, join on up. To the people that aren't, well don't worry about it.
The first question that most people have is....WHY? Why do you need a Ebay Price guide? Why not just use the DP guide? Well most people that are familar with the Ebay video game market and the DP guide are aware of the fact that they are two totally seperate animals. The DP guide is a very valuable source of information, especially from a rarity standpoint. But, Ebay isn't always about rarity, and Ebay isn't always logical. In fact, it's rarely logical. That leads to the next question....
Tracking values on Ebay is virtually impossible, it fluctuates too much, it's like trying to accurately predict the weather, so why try to do it? Well, certainly, trying to get a grip on Ebay valuations will be a very difficult endeavor. It's definitely not going to be a perfect science, and there are tons of variables to consider, but still, I think a decent guide could be made and then updated every quarter. Would it be perfect? Absolutely not, but I still think it's better than trying to do a few advanced searches every now and then to try to stay on top of things.
Now another thing that I want to comment on, is the whole profiteering thing. Whenever I have mentioned a Ebay Pricing Guide in the past, some people quickly understood the value of such a guide, and others resorted to calling anybody interested in such a guide as a "Ebay Profiteer". Comments like, "Look dude, this is a collectors site, you can take that profiteering shit elsewhere, this is a site for collectors, not for people that are going to try to make things even more expensive for collectors."
Now, I'm not going to say that there aren't people out there that are very much "Ebay Profiteers", but I'm not one of them. There is a very logical reason as to why I'm interested in such a guide. When I go into the wild, the flea markets, the swap meets, the thrift stores, the garage sales, etc, etc, I almost never find anything that I actually want. For example, I've never seen a TurboGrafx-16 game in the wild. Never. I've never seen an Atari Jaguar game in the wild. I've never seen a Neo-Geo game in the wild. I mostly see loose Genesis, SNES, NES, Master System and PS1 and N64. Well, for those systems, I already have pretty much everything I want.
So the reason that I want a Ebay Pricing Guide, is to be able to take it with me, to flea markets, etc, and to know what games "OTHER" people want. So if I happen to see "those" games at a very good price, I can buy them, and then either trade them or sell them to get video game items that "I" really want. It's that simple. There are so many various video game items that I want, and they all cost money, and I rarely ever find them. So I really don't see it as any high crime that I buy stuff that I'm not interested in, and sell it to other people, to get the money to buy stuff that I am interested in. It would be one thing if I was selling games and getting the money and using it for non video game related stuff, but I'm throwing that money right back into the retro gaming industry.
So I personally don't see a damn thing wrong with it. Other people might disagree, and that's fine. But I'm thinking that some people out there do the same thing as me, and they would love to see a Ebay Price Guide too.
Well if you happen to be one of those people, then volunteer for this project. But please understand that if you do volunteer for this project, there is going to be alot of work involved. Alot of tedious work. It might be a month or two before we have a decent guide, and then in another month we will have to update it. And then we will have to update it again in another couple months. And so on and so on.
I will volunteer to work on the Super Nintendo. I need somebody to volunteer for Genesis, Saturn, Playstation, Sega CD, NES, etc,etc, etc. Also, it would be great to have multiple people working on the Playstation and the NES and stuff like that. Any of the systems that have a huge catalog.
In terms of the details of how we are going to determine the most accurate values, don't worry about that now. All we need right now are volunteers. The first step is going to be to see if we have enough people to even try to undertake this project. If we have enough, then we will move onto the nuts and bolts of how best to determine the most accurate values. Then once that is done, then we can begin the actual process of making the guide. Once the guide is done, then we can share the information with everybody else in the group. And then of course we would have to continue to monitor it, and continue to udpate it to try to have it as accurate as we can possibly make it.
The key is to get as many volunteers as possible, so that each persons work load will be as small and managable as possible.
If you are interested in volunteering, then email me at tapdatazz1@yahoo.com