Accusations Of Foul Play Surface Around Record-Breaking Graded NES Game Auctions

Yeah the Karl Jobst video does an amazing job explaining it. Kinda seems like a scummy business these guys are running

Karl Jobst made a great video on this, as you pointed out. These “buyers” are all intertwined with each other and basically sell things to themselves so they can raise the profile of their businesses. I wouldn’t be surprised if this eventually led to a crash in the prices of games like what happened with comics in the early ‘90s. Honestly, just watch the video. It’s long, but very, very good (like pretty much all of his content).

So the rich are making themselves richer through the use of auction houses. Never saw that one coming.

Karl Jobst = absolute legend

It's worth remembering that you can avoid all this garbage just by buying the games you want to play and keeping the ones you've enjoyed.

As much as I don't like the baseball card grading companies, they at least release population reports so you know how rare each grade is.

@nessisonett yeah what a novel concept.

Just a heads up that Wata Games Inc. is already using plants on gaming forums to combat what Abramson and Jobst have uncovered.

Be prepared to hear that Jobst is a "white supremacist" enabler or one himself. Among other things to try and discredit his work. I've already saw that being pushed on Resetera by some user that failed to provide any proof of it when asked.

Jobst's video shows to what great lengths Wata Games Inc and Heritage Auctions have gone to create this get-rich scheme. Investing years into the whole thing

They're not going to go down without a fight.

Ffs 3DS games were already expensive before these basterds entered the scene. Their price speculation is probably what made them even pricier. Damn!

Edit: Please watch Jobst's video. It is a long one (over 50 minutes) but it explains very well who these people are and provides background and context to their scummy actions. If you collect physical games, please watch it.

Literally no reason you should buy a copy of a game that you can easily emulate, buy the cartridge of for cheap, or play on every Nintendo console ever, for millions upon millions of dollars IMO, even if you are a collector.

@Funneefox This issue affects genuine collectors that want to own the physical games, not ROMS. So your advice only applies to people that don't care how they gain access to these games.

These scammers are pretending to be collectors but they're doing a terrible job at it. I mean they have no idea which games are actually popular.

For instance Abramson's report shows that these ignorant gibbons inflated the price of the craptacular Friday the 13th videogame for the NES. Despite the fact that said game has never been hard to find precisely because it's a lousy game.

Again, their scam is affecting anyone that wants to own physical games to be able to play them on original hardware. Like in my case.

I've tried playing 3DS games on a PC and on an iPhone and let me tell you... IT SUCKS all kinds of 4ss! Because of how they use the double screens, touch screen and microphone or gyroscope among other unique things.

😊I have JUST gone onto E-Bay to search for said Items so that I can send this article to the Sellers as my way of trolling them.

If someone is dumb enough to pay over a million dollars for something that is worth less than a hundred, they deserve to get scammed.

Yeah, this was becoming pretty obvious. Good for people to know about.

@Big_Fudge To buy and jailbreak

I was honestly going to submit Karl's video to Nintendo Life. These idiots have to be brought before the FTC again. I would expect the FTC findings banning them from operating in Coin markets should also apply to other markets such as video games 40 years later. The reason why they're being so successful... At this moment in time, they are targeting something that is just slightly outside of what they've previously been smacked with and as well they waited enough years that the people they ended up scamming have had 30+ years to forget about it.

And Nintendolife amongst many other press outlets fell right into their hands giving them all the publicity they needed, hence fueling the scam.

Whaaaat? The video games being graded and sold by the same people for massively unprecedented prices are a scam?? Now you'll be telling me that modern art auctions are just a way for rich people to commit tax evasion! Say it isn't so!

yeah, this is something "video game journalists" should be doing, that includes you NL. not some guy on youtube. props to karl jobst and pat the nes punk who's been vocal about this issue for months/years

So inflation, they are intentionally adding fire to the market just because? It's like kicking a hornet's nest just because it sounds fun

These people are insane!

@Blooper987 I knew it was money laundering anyways, that is the only logical reasoning they are doing this and a e boost to their ego because of the money they want to show off with

@GC-161
Ya got me again...tried to get that bug off my screen!

It's all a weird af shady business anyway. Who the heck decided that these guys have the authority to grade video games in the first place?
I remember seeing an article a few years ago, which I can't find, where a guy sent a game for grading, opened it up when he got it back, sent it again in the same condition, and got a completely different score... If that isn't sketchy then I don't know what is.

Yup, this is pretty much what I suspected all along: A bunch of ***** abusing people with more money than sense and/or those trying to get rich quick ruining things for everyone else. There is no genuine justification at all for any of these games costing upwards of a million dollars. A few thousand and maybe even a few tens of thousands for the really rare games, okay, but once we start getting into the hundreds of thousands and millions, it's just stupid territory. Let's not allow these greedy ***** who ultimately don't give a crap about games to taint the whole industry and our beloved entertainment like this.

@LinktotheFuture
So do coin grading companies like PCGS and NGC. They tell you exactly how many of each grade exists.

Magmax being on that list…

@Kieroni No the Art collectors don't commit tax evasion, they employ Tax avoidance and we all know that's fine!

@Rhaoulos
I only agree to a point.
People are inherently trusting, as a functional society requires some baseline of trust.
Exploiting someone else's goodwill with the goal of extracting value from them through no work of your own is inherently evil, but it works on a small minority of people (see the Nigerian Prince family of email scams).
The method Wata and Heritage have employed here is sneakier, but that's about it.

Sounds like the diamond industry. Artificial scarcity plus good advertising is their bread and butter.

These values suddenly appearing out of nowhere recently seemed as legit as NFTs. It was always bad and stupid, it continues to be bad and stupid, and hopefully it fades away soon.

I really don't get how "old video games" that most people sold at flea markets for like $3 became something worth thousands or millions. People really have no idea what they're doing at all, do they?

I’m too poor clever to be taken in by any of these manipulative tricks.

〜taps temple wisely〜

@Dannyyyyy I'd like to see just how "mint condition" the cartridge contacts are in the too-thin to resist humidity in storage for 35 years mint plastic wrap.

It's an artificial "commodity" from the start.

@Dannyyyyy Ahh, I see, you came here and created an account just to defend all this. So, PR for your financial stake, then?

Notice that it's only NES games they're mostly trying to flip. While the Mario 64 sale is an exception, they seem to only inflating the price for those games. The lack of SNES, Genesis, Master System, 3DO, CD-i, etc; shows that they don't care about video games. They're just flipping them for easy money. That being said, now that gamers know about what's going on, I can see that not even their Astroturfing on the matter will stop gamers from making enough noise to make the FTC and the like notice what's going on. Say what you will about gamers, but we know how to make people pay attention to us. See Star Wars Battlefront 2 (2018) as an example.

Karl Jobst is no angel himself.
He has already been part of documentaries which allegedly defamed others in the community.

I would take anything he says with many amounts of salt until you verify it with your own outside research.

@Marchop Ahhh, that's right, I used the wrong term. Thanks for the correction, silly me!

@NEStalgia hahahaha I honestly thought you were discussing with yourself for a bit there!

The Jobst video is riveting, better than most Hollywood movies.

The sealed & graded market is a scam. We always suspected, now we know.

Seeing @NEStalgia and @Dannyyyyy go back and forth had me confused as hell for a second there with the similar profile pictures hahahaha

@Bret @Eel Haha, yeah, FWIW the profile pic came after the discussion, so it was less confusion in real-time than after that fact

Should have been obvious, I know a fair number of people suggest this on every post about these auctions. But people just have such a hard time getting past the idea that a video game can be seen as a faceless commodity, and not Zelda, Mario, etc. Same reason why people struggle with the notion that Nintendo bigwigs and shareholders see them as products and faceless profit centers.

@Dannyyyyy Proof that Dain backed out, that isn't him just saying "I backed out?", preferably before the video dropped?

Brilliant video, well worth watching it to the end. I used to work in a UK games store in the mid 90s and many new games we sold were never sealed in the 1st place anyway.

Yeah ignore everything that @Dannyyyyy is peddling here.

He's claiming that the video is full of falsehoods but fails to provide a single molecule of evidence proving his argument.

He's got nothing to add besides baseless opinions and tagging himself as a "collector".

So we're supposed to believe him and not Pat, a well known collector featured in the video? How convenient. And that behavior sure sounds familiar... considering that Wata Games Inc. has also been pretending to be both collectors and an authority in the grading field since their very inception. Fact is that their only expertise is in inflating the prices of games. That's it.

And its hilarious that this guy also tries to handwave away that Wata Games Inc. being heavily involved with Heritage Auctions and the scumbag that heads it.

Watch the whole video. Jobst provides proof of what he claims. And he's also honest enough to point out that if there is no tangible proof of something that he's showing you, he'll say as much in that video.

And then, there's also the fact that Abramson's report heavily hints the very same thing that Jobst report does.

So you got at least 2 different reports from two different people. Pointing out that there's a scam being perpetrated by these bad actors from Wata Games Inc. and Heritage Auctions.

Good thing that several media outlets are already reporting on this issue already. And doing their own investigations.

Heritage Auctions has a history of shady practices like shill bidding, which I suspect is going on to drive up these game prices further than they would be. The market for sealed games was always there, but always very small. The prices we've been seeing are a combination of increased speculation and, almost certainly, nefarious market manipulation.

Tbh, when I was seeing those auctions, I felt like it was bogus. I actually thought the buyers were just driving the price up to mess with sellers. Heck, I remember back in 2006 or something someone sold me like multiple sealed NES games for about $30 each, among which was Mario 3, Megaman 3 and maybe Final Fantasy. So there's a LOT more of these sealed games out there.

@Dannyyyyy Psh! Your doing a lousy job at convincing anyone that Jobst's or Abramson's reports are false. Thanks to your failure to provide any evidence beside your baseless opinions on them.

As a matter of fact, your entire counterarguments is to try and discredit the ones behind this report.

Exactly as I said in my 1st post here that a Wata Games Inc. plant would probably do.

You have only proven me right, cupcake.

@Dannyyyyy Yeah, nice try. You keep saying it's clickbait and that the video is wrong, but you never seem to say why it's wrong other than throwing insults at those who dare question your reality. Also, you ONLY just joined today and this is the first place you comment on? If you're really a collector, how's about you show us your collection? As the old Internet saying goes "Pics or it didn't happen."

@Dannyyyyy I don't know, you show me. It's your collection. But if you really want to prove me wrong... Do you have any copies of Sonic 3D Blast for the Japanese Mega Drive?

@Dannyyyyy Well then, how about PANIC! for the Sega CD?

@GC-161 I mean even if he is a white supremacist, it doesn't make his point wrong.

@Dannyyyyy Let's not talk about each other's mothers because I don't want to remind you that you made your own mother waste 9 months having you. So let's move on from that, shall we?

Now again... you haven't proven that Abramson's work is flawed. You haven't proven that Jobst report was false either.

Instead you want us to believe that Wata Games Inc. is a legit company that sells one of the best selling N64 games in history (there are literally millions of said game out there) for the same price as a Lamborghini.

Wata Games Inc. is obviously manipulating the market to make us believe that an extremely mainstream game such as Super Mario 64 costs the same as an expensive and limited edition sports car. Think about that.

What's next? Sell a copy of GTA V for 2 million?

These guys are a bunch of bozos that look at a popular game and immediately assume that it should cost millions.

Now take some of your own belly fat and slide off this site, man. Stop shilling for Wata Games.

Anyone with patience will eventually get their games cheaper because of this, as it draws games to the market. I feel bad for the suckers who don't have patience though. It's just an eternal fact of life that some people lie and cheat and scare monger to sell you stuff. There is no solution other than to understand it.

@GC-161 Got a link to that supposed thread with the guy?

I don't understand how these games have risen so much in price in such a short amount of time. A graded 9.8 game that sold for $100k in 2019 is suddenly being sold for 5-10 times that much in 2021?

@Dannyyyyy the fact that you own a prototype and have not dumped and preserved it on the internet tells me everything I need to know about your integrity, where your loyalty lies, and what sort of person you are

@jorel262 Watch the full video about the accusations on https://youtu.be/rvLFEh7V18A . In theory, they are basically selling the games to each other so that way the market becomes inflated into a bubble and they can unload
an undisclosed amount of product to unsuspecting chumps who think these games have sold millions of copies worldwide are worth the insaine asking price. They unload everything before the bubble bursts and not be stuck with the bill when it does. Heritage Auctions did this exact thing in the 1980s with coins and the comic examples of the 1990s have been explained a lot, but here is a refresher. The reason Golden Age comics are so valuable is that they were disposable media in the 1930s and used as pulp for the war effort in the 1940s, so when people bought up large amounts of 1980s and 1990s comics thinking they'd be valuable they were worth almost less than the cover price after inflation as millions of copies sold because of the inflated bubble so people stopped buying these issues so the market bottomed out. Video games are a mass-market item that has been circled around game stores for over 30 years and odds are have storehouses full of sealed NES and SNES games as unsold stock. This is just the latest money-making tactic that comic fans have been enduring since the 1990s and I fear gaming could meet a similar fate as comics as all the signs are there...
basically, these SOBs are trying to fan the flames and not be left with the bag when the prices get to such a level and the information about how not rare a lot of these games from the late-80s to early 00s are not as rare as these guys claimed they were.

On the bright side when the bubble bursts in theory it will be super cheap for a few years to buy rare games as speculators try to unload the stock they have.

@Dannyyyyy It seems exceedingly obvious how you are a plant to do damage control for these scammers. Shameful!

@jorel262 Obviously the scammers have a lot to do with that. I have noticed how when values seem highly inflated and they don't make any sense, there is usually a good reason for that, and it's your intuition telling you how something is wrong.

This type of thing is far from being new though, this just sounds like a standard tulip bulb situation, something that gets insanely inflated and becomes an investment for people who have no idea what they're doing just because it's so inflated. Eventually people catch on to the scam though, and it sounds like people are finally catching on to this scam.

If people are willing to pay the price... That's how value works. Bubble it may be. I still can't believe people pay me 40-80$ for the box and manuals of my childhood N64 games.