Possible Retro Game Grading Inconsistencies Come To Light Following Fraud Allegations

One of the comments on the Twitter thread does say that the red mould sticker only came into circulation recently, so that copy of Excitebike may have been graded prior to that.

However even then, if a new grading system is put into place, is it not sensible to get affected items regraded before selling?

So in the end this is just a scam?
A very expensive one, but none the less a scam.

I do wonder what will happen next? Because a people spend a lot of money for these games.

wow!
it's almost as if the market for graded games is a big scam designed to fleece nostalgia-driven people as much as possible!

Ridiculous amounts of cash being spent on these like seems there's a dodgy house of cards behind all the auctions set ups

WHO WOULD BUY A MOULDY SEALED GAME FOR 960$$?!?!?!?!

Sorry, but if people are stupid enough to buy them, then there is always going to be a market for this stuff.

I buy games to play them, not keep them in the plastic therefore not fulfilling the reason for their creation or the hours the people behind it put in to it

@eltomo Who would buy a moldy game at all?

@RupeeClock I remember hearing WATA once graded a fake copy of a game because the box looked that good.

Contents were fake, but the box looked legit. And the guy who had it graded later called em out on it.

Are you saying there are misdeeds wherever there is too much money involved? Who knew?

@Haruki_NLI What is this grading for a sealed copy anyway? Does someone know that the correct game is inside?
I also remember that all my SNES and GameBoy games were never sealed. The cardboard package was the whole package. Nothing more.

Anybody seriously surprised by any of this, the whole thing looked so suspicious right from the start.

It may have all been little more than a great scam, but let’s not forget that the most important thing is the the mythic dimensionality we explored along the way.

…

Or didn’t. Because we couldn’t touch it. Because it cost almost a million dollars and was hermetically sealed in sacred plastic.

@Chandlero if the game inside was alright and I wanted to play it I would be tempted but not for much more than a tenner!

I'll need some more proof that red vs. blue seal is actually meaningful, which is missing from the Twitter "reporting"

@dartmonkey
Thank you for continuing to cover these developments as they happen on Nintendolife!

@Chandlero I SUPPOSE you could open and clean the game itself, if you were so inclined (I'm guessing the game itself could hold up, paper is definitely gone through).
But, again, sealed collecting...

Grading games is a joke!

@Chandlero I imagine it is similar to sealed baseball cards. If you have a factory sealed complete set of 1987 Topps baseball cards, the cards are all presumed mint as long as the set is sealed. One the set is open, then all bets are off.

Like most things in life, it looks to be a "good ole boys club". You scratch my back, I'll scratch your's. I guess the red sticker person, didnt play ball, or pay certain "fee".

I will never fully understand how some find it acceptable to buy an unopened game that'll never be used...especially at some of these prices. Isn't the point of a game to play it? Sure, I have a few games in my collection I could make a profit on nowadays (the DS and 3DS markets are crazy RN), but they're all opened because I bought them to play, not leave their contents sealed in plastic. Gotta make sure they work, y'know.

I highly recommend the video by Karl Jobst that was mentioned in the article. This insanity needs to stop.

@eltomo The same kind of person that would buy a pristine, non moldy sealed game for $960 when the game itself is $20/yr to play on current consoles, free to steal everywhere, and is playable on every Nintendo console for the past almost 20 years?

Honestly I thought Nintendo was ripping us off at like $8 a game on this stuff....

@Chandlero That's a great point, now that I think about it. I don't remember NES games having shrinkwrap at all. SNES games did, I believe, I think I remember trying to leave the film on the box. But I'm not sure all of them did.

Jobst makes some pretty strong indictments of journalists, part of this whole reason this scam exists is because of clickbait.

That update is perhaps the weakest legalese denial I've ever seen. WATA needs to get better lawyers if the strongest defense they can muster is no more substantive than "Nuh uh!"

That response from the company is amazing, though. Let’s keep the pressure on them!

"Wata Games is the trusted leader in collectible video game grading and we're honored to play a key role in this booming industry that we are incredibly passionate about."
What is VGA?

@Yorumi You know... the fake market is destroying the real one. I'll explain how in few steps (not real cases):
1 - We have 10 copies of Megaman X3, each one for 100 dollars.
2 - One guy, with a mint copy, tries to sell for 1000 dollars.
3 - Months later, the 1000 dollars copy is still there... but we have only two for 100 dollars. These guys decide to sell for 250 dollars.
4 - The guy selling for 1000 dollars says his copy is now 5000 dollars.
5 - Values keep increasing, and since it is all about speculation, now everyone with a Megaman X3 copy will try to sell for 1.000 dollars.

We are not talking about a Picasso masterpiece that people would pay to see it, something done by a historical artist. We are talking about products that were made in different factories, sometimes in different versions with different boxes, with materials that people could make a perfect replica and with the risk of deterioration.
Even with "rare CDs" this is happening. Metal Slug for Neo Geo CD. You pay a lot of money for something that will deteriorate.

And yes, there are guys working hard for this kind of market. Recently I remember Xenoblade Chronicles for Wii. Its value was increasing a lot, but then, we had a kind of re-release of this version from U.A.E. (United Arabian Emirates), and there were people in forums and ebay saying that this version was cheaper, and the valuable ones should have the U.S. stamp on it.

@Yorumi LOL, yeah, I certainly get the appeal of buying actual used cartridges to actually play. Most of those come with sharpie ink on them and wrapped in rubber bands, and prices are below or slightly above OG RRP. That's an entirely sane market of people buying and selling used old stuff, same as every other medium ever. That's a cool, legit market.

It's this "rare collectible" thing that's strange. We're not talking a first-off-the-press print of Batman issue #0 with a typo on page 6 that was fixed in the second print a week later, only 500 were printed and only 10 are known to exist still. We're talking about a mass produced cartridge off a factory assembly line identical to all the other mass produced cartridges off a factory assembly line containing software that's available everywhere still. Being in a sealed box doesn't make it a Rembrandt canvas. It makes it a useless trinket with no special attribute beyond the fact that it's in shrinkwrap. Slick marketing to people that somehow have far, far, far more money than sense.

Weirder still, in the REAL antiques/artifacts business, usually "pristine condition" actually degrades the value. If it's too preserved, too perfect, it's actually not worth much, because the wear of use adding historical context is actually what increases the value. Furniture, musical instruments, etc, all increase in value with normal, but non-damaging wear, and decrease if they are new-in-box perfect.

This whole thing is bizarre, and I can't even figure out who the market is. Rich people, obviously....but what rich people who are looking for what exactly, plus speculators that trade it like bonds, without even caring what the object actually is.

Lol!

They will correct him.

As a Collector for Super Nintendo Games for three Decades, it brutally smells how those Prices for those Games got so high.
There is no Reason.

As a long time toy collector I can tell you grading is a complete scam, ill give you an example; when you grade something like a sealed boxed Star wars vehicle, the plastic on that vehicle is most definitely yellow, it's going to be sticky from years of plastic oils breaking down, it's going to be a mess compared to a loose version that was played with, also there could be missing or broken parts; you will never know because its sealed, your basically getting a grade on a box and only the outside of the box at that, a 9.8 on a sealed Star wars vehicle is literally meaningless.

Notice how none of these games selling big money were ever rare and the value is completely determined by how "mint" their condition is or whether it's a misprint. The misprint cases make sense but trying to sell a sealed, mint copy of a game that millions were produced of sounds sus and that's what happens most of the time. You have no way of knowing how many complete in box, sealed and/or mint items are out there.

You wouldn't get much for a mint baseball card just because the card is old or of a popular player. It has to be a rare card.

Maybe because no one has ever heard of alpha mission and everyone has heard of excitbike

@RupeeClock Problem is because of what WATA has done it does make it hard to trust VGA ratings even though they have established trust and consistency... even then grading games is kinda ridiculous, to begin with...

@NEStalgia It depends on the market. In jersey collecting, you want as close to mint as possible to help preserve the item longer (especially on old Reebok jerseys where I swear you sneeze near the thing it gets snags somehow), however even in jersey collecting if you go to the "game-worn" market you want to see the scuffs and tears as it lends credibility to the item being legit and used in-game (you can even check the authenticity of the scuffs by watching the game and watch where the player may have been hit or snagged). It just depends on the collectable.

@Yorumi LOL, seriously. I don't buy collectibles really, I've bought some limited edition things at print to become collectibles, and I collect things I already owned naturally that I think could be come collectible. Most of it is hoarded trash I'm sure.) the closest I've come is NIB vintage audio tubes for $140 a pair or so. Some of that stuff is kind of special in that since the technology was once used for military and computing, it once had a very high grade of manufacture that no longer exists because it's no longer needed for critical functions, and a lot of what was left over is beat to heck and no longer works, so there is a tangible rareness at getting certain old, well made tubes made with tooling that doesn't exist anymore and never will be reproduced. There's new tubes, but they tend not to be as good, they have thinner materials, and importantly, no longer use lead and mercury. And, naturally the one I found I liked seems to be discontinued . It probably did use lead.

But even those tubes have now inflated to the extreme, although some of that is because every year they get ever more scarce, and unlike games in a box, they're consumables that are destroyed by being used, so the supply is just going to be totally gone once they're all sold. The game boxes can be resold to millionaires long after we're buried.

@Wexter On one hand, I get it. On the other hand that sounds like a hop, skip, and jump away from Japanese burusera.....

That's a really poor response by WATA games, I really hope they get taken down soon.

So why is nobody talking about the insane prices for the Amiibos on eBay?

I wouldn't trust WATA to grade my @#$%.

@Scrubicius Amiibo prices on eBay is just scalpers being scalpers. Don't buy from them.

@BloodNinja Agreed. If there's one thing gamers can do very well, it's making enough noise to make the mainstream news pay attention. See Star Wars Battlefront 2 (2018).

@NatiaAdamo That’s right!

I'm a huge avid retro game collector and never once have I bought a graded game. I intend to play and put hands on all of my games I buy. These are usually only for people who plan to constantly resell to other buyers since they're never getting played. I can understand these going to museums, or if it's maybe one of your favorite games, sure, but collecting a bunch of graded games like this? Sealed and ungraded are expensive enough.

They charge you more if they grade a higher grade game. So of course they're going to grade things higher than they should be, they get paid MORE if every piece of garbage is a SSS 9.9999 mint condition worth 2.5 million dollars in auction(due to market manipulation by the same people running an auction company)

@NEStalgia Thanks. Very well written comment. You hit the nail right on the head with this: We are talking about video games with sale numbers around 40 000 000. There is no real scarcity that can push prices to such numbers. For comparison, just check the price for Michael Jackson's Thriller with the same condition.

"Wata Games is the trusted leader in collectible video game grading and we're honored to play a key role in this booming industry that we are incredibly passionate about."

It is clear as day they're in it for the money. Way to give yourself credibility..

"The claims in this video are completely baseless and defamatory"

Really? Prove it. Sue him. Or how about telling us what "corrections" you would make to his assertion that you're shady market manipulating scum.