The tulip parallel is a good way, in Karl's video at least, to introduce laymen to the concept of speculation, bubbles and crash. It's used as an introduction to get everybody up to speed on the basics before diving into the meat of the topic. I feel like it was used appropriately here.

Greg, don’t be naive. You said it yourself. People get on the hype train. The average person is gullible and need to be protected from those with power. That’s why we have rules and law.

Grading Services and Auction houses should never merge into each other like that! Jim knows exactly what he's doing: pump and dump

How Greg was all ready at the start of the video to defend the bubble and try to explain how there were always big big investors in sealed games. But unwillingly has his eyes pulled open and forced to understand it is manipulation… worth the watch

I can respect your side of the issue since you are into the sealed gaming collecting hobby. What I am disappointed with is how you completly disregarded the impact this has on other aspects of the hobby. Regular games that are worth $5 priced at $30? Sure my collection has dramatically grown in value but adding to it also has slowed to a crawl. Places that typically were perfect for deals like garage sales have morphed into the dreaded "I know what I have" crowd. No they don't actually know what they have, but due to the publicity around these inflated prices, they want to jack their prices up as well. Many got into this hobby for nostalgia, entertainment, but also due to the affordability of the systems, peripherals and subsequent games. Some of us like to collect to play the games. I know crazy right? That said, I am fine with games holding varying values. Obviously if a game is more rare, and especially rare as well as good, it naturally would cost more than the common and easy to find games. That's just common sense. What I am not fine with is prices being inflated because people are literally breaking the law to make money and perverting the market of mine as well as others' cherished hobby.

The fact that there is a 20% fee isn't the problem itself. The problem is the conflict of interest, in that they make more money by speculating prices higher than reasonable. It's not that it's some hidden fee that's the problem, it's what it means for the auction house bottom line. Because it is a percentage, they make more when the market is speculated higher.

The amount of cope is high in this one. I like it.

dude you made it in this video - you are famous now - a star is born 🧐

Loved to get your reaction to the video. I learned so much from this overall

Interesting video, seeing a guy (and his chat) this much on the defensive from the start having to back down during the video is fascinating to behold. I respect people who, eventually, lets information overturn their egos. Few people in this day and age are capable of changing their minds if they are invested in a certain POV in any way.

People spend the most money at age 46 and people who were 10 years old when the NES was released will be turning 46 this year.

Missed this live, just rewatched it with your perspective. Great video !

Pumping up prices should not happen by these individuals or groups when conflict of interest exist. I think that's what Karl is pointing out many times. Obviously they want it to happen, doesn't make it right tho. I'm watching and commenting at the same time so I might not know what you say later:)

What happened to the weekly auction video? I saw it last night but can’t find it now.

I think Eric kind of proves that the Tulip Mania is analogous lol

Damn this video is eye opening for those not so "in the know", and even raises tons of good points for people who do know a lot

"You cant manipulate anything if you don't talk to anyone!" Yet even more reasons why silence is Golden!!

It's obvious NintendoAge was nuked because people were independently tracking the number of rare games on there

I collect coins, pretty seriously, so I've been through this before. It's happened with cards, with postage stamps, with comics, and with US coins at least three times. It's happening to you now. It's uncomfortable to see it happening to something you're passionate about. There's a lot of cognitive dissonance - I love this thing, how could this be an illusion? *Trust me*, I know how it feels. You'll know it's about over when your aunt Beatrice asks you what games she should get shares of, or how to buy an NFT.

This was an interesting video. Def learned a lot!. Appreciate ya brotha!! Good to see you an Sean make the video!!! Keep the great content coming.....Man, Wata needs a POP Report Yesterday!!!

My biggest problem is this is effecting the non sealed game market in a negative way

Oh my God! Get me the President "This is Canada." Get me Wolverine.

This Channel will grow further, nice vid greg!

“Only when the market crashes you can get into that talk”. Dude, did you even take intro to economics? It’s not a matter of if, but when. “Nobody is getting tricked by auction fees”. Are you even watching the video, he says that it’s in the auction houses benefit that the price inflates. Yes it is a scam to falsely drive up the value of products. You’re doing mental gymnastics trying to be contrarian. The value is artificial, it does matter that people will lose a lot of money because they were tricked. This is the hardest video to watch.

The high eBay listing prices are probably being used to launder money.

So… can we agree that utilizing WATA is unethical?

Of all of the things that resulted from Karl's hobby-shaking video expose, I think that the most important one...by far...is that Greg's channel has blown up! Well, 50% Karl's plug, 25% Greg's left gun and 25% Greg's right gun. :D

Wow a lot of WATA sealed games are going to be on clearance and I'm here for it lol

I’ll add one last thing. It was not ok long ago that I could buy new old stock and crack those games open. You may ask “why would you buy new old games?” Because it was a) pretty cheap (comparatively) and b) it was nice to get a disc that was scratched or a cartridge that didn’t have food stuck in the port. That is just not possible anymore. I get that the sealed game market and “regular” gamers seem to be separate groups but they aren’t THAT separate. This isn’t like coins or comic books. Those items were circulated or read, used in some way. Sealed games, they never got to live a normal life. They are trapped under plastic waiting to be played. Maybe I’m just personifying the games too much but I literally find it sad to have games sealed forever.

It feels like you want to balance, put things into perspective and not want to make this a bigger issue than it looks like it is. I agree with you 100% that all responsibility goes to the risktakers when making an investment. The issue here is that a couple of thieves look like they planned that speculative bubble, gonna get rich of it and then watch as the video game market crash. That journalistic work from Karl needs to get as much views as it can. We're not talking about risks and investments here. We're talking fraud and non-ethical practices.

Thought of you when I heard this news brah❤️

This was a great stream

Yeh i saw this yesterday too! We gotta stop being greedy. Been watching Shawn for some time he cracks me up with good info that I personally don’t use but understand and should!

The old pump and dump. Inflate the prices real high take your 20% -30% and say "thank you sucka!" for your business.

“Let’s goooo Greg!!!” -Greg 😂

I don't think this will make as big of an impact as it should, since so many general collectors are also looking to cash in. If regular people hadn't had decades to buy this stuff themselves, I could see this type of approach petering out. Given how so many of us have tons of games (and bills), though, there might be some who stick with ebay or forums, but as long as whoever is buying some of the games still pays big bucks for a few, people will still take that chance.

In some video you mentioned that the seller of the Mario 64 confirmed the sale on instagram? So is the seller a known person? Whats the instagram? Great video as always!

10:45 He never said auction house premiums were hidden fees. He only said they stand to benefit directly from raising prices.

Called it a scam on here a while back. 🇮🇪

I’m weak this was so fun to watch lmao

If media comes to Dennis and Jim asking about the big game sale, knowingly making claims to manipulate the market is literally illegal.

I hate that it took me so long to show my support. You got some amazing content my dude. Definitely subbed now. I was thinking that you looked familiar and that I have seen your videos before, then realized I have and that you got a hair cut and that’s why. Thank you for exposing these manipulators who are ruining a passionate hobby for many of us.

First off it's not sealed video game grading, it's sealed video game BOX grading. The only thing they are grading is the glue, the plastic shrink wrap, the colors and condition of the cardboard. We actually have no idea what's in the box or the condition of it's contents. Secondly without population reports the ratings are almost meaningless.

I like the Greg's different view points from Jobst's.

Do you think this video will affect the market?

WATA and Heritage will make a very compelling story on CNBC's on-going series known as "AMERICAN GREED". once the veil of deceit has finally been lifted and authorities close in with indictments.

The guy with the dad @ 35:00 talks about comic market manipulation with a graded comic behind him. Kind of funny imo.

Agreed population reports will confused some people just like it does with trading cards. A common collectible is worthless whether 1 is graded or 20 are

Nice Vid Greg.. My grandma always told me not to Trust somebody who dont activates Windows

We need more Enron references or at least pick something other than tulip mania to reference haha

“Get the Greg Games is also pretty cool…” -GetTheGregGames 💀

How is it live reaction if your preview shows you have already watched the video and not watched another Karl video by the looks of it, that surprises me even more.

Ok so I've watched your entire coverage of Karl's video (I didn't watch your conclusion at the end full disclosure). It was good to get your opinion throughout the entire thing and I agree and disagree with a couple points you brought forward. First of all, thanks for admitting that there were a lot of stuff you didn't know about this whole thing. I've been seeing a lot of backlash from people in the scene dismissing the whole thing claiming that they didn't learn anything new. Basically being elitist and gatekeeping the scene from an outsider. I feel like a lot of people are just brushing aside the whole conclusion to this video! Which is the most important part that points out that there is LEGAL PRECEDENT about this kind of practices. It's against federal law enforced by the FTC! How can someone defend that is beyond me. I whole heartedly agree with you that population reports won't solve much. Especially if there is still a lot of regrading and shill bidding going on. Finally, the point that I've been arguing a lot is that people tend to downplay the impact that this shit has on the rest of the used market. It has a ripple effect for sure! And although I agree with you that including panning shots of ebay listed is maybe not the best to demonstrate that, I must point out that when you said at the end "come on Karl, take out this BS", you happened to say it on a frame that shows a listing for a 500$ SM64 loose cart that says "6 sold". This could also be market manipulation but it also proves that it definitely has an effect on the used market as well. I'm willing to bet that they had a lot to do with the second surge that happened post covid craze. Covid is definitely not over but the initial craze was on the decline before this second surge. Good video. I enjoyed being able to discuss about it in the comments and I gave you a thumbs up because of that Diablo shrine back there :P So glad that PC games collecting hasn't been affected much lol

The disrespect. Can't believe he didn't shout you out at the end. Maybe next time 🤣

I agree what happened with Tulips and what happened with the collectors market doesn't hold intrinsic value. But don't call me Shirley

Hey, Greg! Great video! I see a lot of Sh|+ hitting the fan and spreading all over if this is true! The SEC, FBI, NTSB have starting watching all these videos! Not cool if they manipulated the video game market. We’ll see the outcome soon!

Game grading and NFTs are really WTF right now. This bubble has to burst, it's ridiculous.

thats shady as hell man lmao taking my games to vga instead.

i welcome the pop reports - won't hurt my atari 2600 halloween and texas chainsaw massacre - it will help it. the hobby is here to stay, the bs has to go though.

37:10 It is not that simple on “how is anyone getting f’ed over” because of the predatory nature of how Wata presents trends in the media and how Otis is to this day paying KZfaqrs to cheerily promote buying shares in Wata games hinting that the prices are on the up and up. People don’t have to be forced to buy a game share for it still be the case that they were preyed upon in a situation with an asymmetry of power and information. Especially if the intention is to pump and dump, people they are selling on getting in on it now are being preyed upon. Not everyone is going to have a deep dive understanding of things and they might have a parasocial relationship with the KZfaqr telling them to go for it. Maybe that’s the first they heard! I just saw John Riggs doing these sort of promos on a video he posted today, it makes my stomach turn. It’s too predatory to simply put the onus on the common person and say “ya fools is ya fault ya got burned, congrats on the winners.” Is that really how we socially want to handle this sort of thing? People in power here like Heritage and Wata have an insight and level of control over the direction of this that it does reach the threshold of a regulatory body to investigate as well as raising of public awareness.

daaamn, just damn.

What they are doing in the grading industry between Wata and Heritage is equivalent of the digital currency guy that offed himself. So, yes illegal

it shows u prewatched the video in the first 10 seconds, we can see the red time watched under the thumbnail

There is currently a lawsuit

I haven't watched your entire reaction to Karl's video (which I have watched), but after about 10 minutes, I just want to say I think you were too disrespectful, condescending and reactionary to the content of Karl's video, which I thought was really well put together and was clear so that everyone could understand the points he was making with absolutely no knowledge of the subject matter. This man obviously put a lot of work into it, and has a lot of evidence, and the way you treated the content during the first 10 minutes was quite disgraceful and uncharitable. You need to be more rational and posses an active mind when being presented with new ideas before dismissing them out of hand so quickly - it's highly arrogant. Even if you thought he was wrong, there were more mature ways for you to act as a content creator.

🤯🤯🤯

who was behind that 30K sale and purchase. dont be nieve after watching karls video

Why would someone crack and regrade a 9.8?!

This propping up of prices doesn't just affect ignorant speculators! All of the versions of the games will continue to go up as a result of this as well, which will make them more difficult for the every day person to purchase them at reasonable value or at all due to more competition. You can try to condescendingly dismiss this all you want, but pricecharting and other sites show this is happening. Many games have increased by 5-6x their original amounts even without the box and manuals just over the last couple of years. Also, even if this does just hurt speculators, it's still hurting people. These companies are doing some pretty shaddy stuff to prop up the prices and regardless of how many people are affected, what is wrong is wrong. There's laws against this unethical behaviour for a reason. If it was just stupidity, I would agree with you, but the unethical behaviour driving it is a real problem.

Throughout the video, the primary impression that I got from you is that as long as one does not personally take the speculative bait, no harm, no foul; the key insight that you provided while reacting to the video is that Deniz Kahn was an avid, well-known video-game collector well before founding Wata Games. I briefly tried to find out what the oldest third-party coin-grading company was, based on what Diddles said (he didn't include "third-party" but without that qualifier, basically any coin-dealer from the beginning of unofficial standards in the late 1800s would count as a first-party coin-grading company), and it seems to be ANACS, a company founded by the American Numismatic Association in 1972, which originally just certified whether the coins were genuine and didn't even slab them; I don't know whether ANACS started grading coins, whether by the ANA's own standards or otherwise, by the time NCI was founded. (Later on, Diddles said that ANACS was founded in 1979, but maybe that's the year when it started grading, rather than just determining whether a coin was genuine.)

When you talk about Eric and you make a parallel with crypto to demonstrate that no one is getting scammed, I feel like it's a bit unfair to compare crypto, something with no collectible value with a physical collectible object. I believe that what Karl was trying to convey is that the people who actually collected these things to own them and keep them for the joy of collecting were the ones getting scammed because they were now being forced to pay a manipulated price to expand their collection. You could argue that nobody forced them to do so but it's still shitty to financially bully someone out of their favorite hobby.

My first reaction to watching this is might be a good idea to buy sealed graded games pre-fraud ha ha ha. Much higher grades on many than the games deserved. Moving forward we *may* be seeing much tougher grading by WATA, VGA, etc as a knee jerk reaction to all these claims. Then again, maybe the games graded pre-2021 will be tainted in a way. Is there any way to determine at what date a particular game got graded?

It is Tuesday night. Where is Greg!

great stuff - nuanced opinion. I agree fully, the real OG market of collecting games is still solid -- the speculation on top of it is all artificially driven and will correct and backlash

Since these high sold listings of Zelda and Mario and the sale to PSA instantly after that weekend, I had bad feelings about this whole stuff. But what I actually don’t understand within all these manipulation stuff is, why wouldn’t wata/heritage grade maybe one of these high end games with a 10? If they manipulate as far as in the video said, wouldn’t it be more smart to just put a 10 into this whole scenery?

thing is you also have to take in account reproduction cart's/ disc's that are out as well long with the retro market in japan as well they sell retro games/system's at retail price's and such so with retro game collecting can be pricey even with out the ah but i feel they are trying to scam ppl out there cash this time the co founder of the ah might get jail time for fraud

Population reports wont hurt the industry

My mans can't afford youtube premium. give him the subs and likes y'all

Sorry again got to comment, been subbed to Pat the NES Punk for years, and he is a total anti sealed snob

Lol, all the downvotes. You sold your soul to Wata, Greg!!!

Ok you got my sub. You made some great points with the spillover rebuttal.

So i'm guessing the next video from karl jobst will be how Greg works for WATA as a director lmao

It is stupid. I can't stand people who collect games they don't play. Games are for gamers to enjoy.

I find it odd how Karl presents this video as if WATA graded games will affect retro game collecting as a whole; collectors wanting to actually play the games they collect won't be affected since they are buying "decent" condition games that wouldn't grade high at WATA. WATA grading WILL affect sealeds/high grade completes, but people shouldn't worry about their hobby becoming unaffordable if they're just buying loose copies of games. The people responsible for causing loose copies to go up are other average joe collectors/enthusiasts, who keep games with no intent to sell. Not WATA. Less games on the market and more demand = prices go up.

pat the punk also went on pawn stars to pump up his cart

first

I think it’s very unethical what some people directly involved in the grading and auctioning of the games are doing, but I don’t understand the issue about “non gamers/collectors” being the ones buying the games. This is just like any other speculative market. What? Am I supposed to think or feel bad about someone investing 100k of their own money in sealed video games because they may or may not know the true value of the item? It’s his 100k and what is true value anyway? It’s always a pump and dump at some point, one can only hope that the one holding the bag in the end (in this case a sealed video game) can at least appreciate the shelf trophy he/she got hehe. I mean whoever entity paid 2 million for a game is not a victim in my eyes, that old thing about risk and reward.

how does someone compare graded video games to tulips instead of sports cards or pokemon cards?

just get adblock it's free

I think the people who played these games are the new rich and this is what they mean to them, comics were the same, so it makes sense as games were so undervalued for so long, look at nfts with crypto punks going for over 2 million

“9.8 A++ ‘slightly higher’ than 8.5 A+” -> lol. It sounds like the critic doesn’t even collect sealed.

Correction incoming.

Lmfao you're like "wow what a surprise these guys want to make money of course they'll do/say this/that" as if it was fine. You honestly seem to not give a shit about the ethical side Karl very much pointed out. Even in your "confrontation interview" you kept saying "yeah no I agree, but you know maybe blah blah". What even is your stance on all of this ? It's blurry af and you sound like you're cornered to agree with what Karl said about this whole situation.

Activate Windows

reserved investments is not even close to video game expert lol..pop reports are so off in comic books it is not even close to reliable

Graded videogames are pure trash.

I have to laugh at "collectors" crying about the prices skyrocketing. We've seen prices come up for YEARS. Look at how pricey shit like Little Samson has become over the last decade and a half. All but the most common of games have been priced out of the people who actually want to play the games. Thank god for emulators, and no sympathy for any "collectors."

you seeing yourself, amazing, population reports can still be manipulated, the way things seem to be going we are going to have naked short selling of games in dark video game pools soon. Also your side mouth check out Gregs games channel out comment hahahahahahah

"Get rid of this shit, Karl." I'm with you on this. People ALWAYS make a big deal out of high price listings. Remember when your Disney VHS tapes were going to "make you rich?" People always bring it up, and it doesn't even make for a funny Facebook meme anymore. There will always be random listings with cartoonish prices. Seeing a $10,000 eBay listing for a loose Link to the Past isn't evidence of anything, nor is it news, nor is it noteworthy.

C'mon Greg listen to yourself.