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I'd say this is a win for actual game collectors, because if you have no intention to sell, a lower price is always better.

How I made 100,000$ using retro video games: 1) burrowed 1,000,000$ from my dad 2) spent it all on a copy of Super Mario Bros for NES 3) market crashed. Quickly sold the copy for 100,000$ 4) blocked my dad's number 5) 100,000$ profit secured

I was into coin collecting and baseball cards as a kid. I was around when the "bubble" popped in both markets and guess who was directly involved in market manipulation in both instances, Heritage Auctions and their friends. Those f*ckers get into any hobby collecting they can and ruin it.

I have a hard time believing the original “sale” was not just Heritage insiders moving things around.

Who would've guessed the price WAS inflated by speculators and not an actual reflection of the value of the collectibles? Besides, you know, everyone who isn't trying to pass the bag.

the silly thing is, even those lower/more recent prices are absolutely ridiculous.

They were manipulating the market with straw buyers. The initial high dollar sales went right back into the same pocket it came out of so they could re sell the items later for less but still for far more than it should be

In 2020 at a Goodwill in Arizona, I saw a later model PS1 with no box, cables, controller, and the cover didn't click shut and it was priced at $65. Last week I found one at that same Goodwill with the box priced at $15.

I run a gamestore for 25 years now and I told everybody that they should stay away from graded games since it was obvious that the companies behind the grading are shady AF. We also never bought or sold graded stuff. This crash had to happen sooner or later.

What really gets me is that it’s not like these are for actually rare titles, they’re doing this with literally the most popular video games of all time

A few years ago I sold my entire collection in one fell swoop to a retro game store. I got most of mine at flea markets and yard sales. I enjoyed the thrill of the hunt more than anything. Of course, I was an avid gamer and grew up in the early NES era but I sold my entire collection for just under $10,000 and I never looked back. I have no longer feel the need to collect the media anymore and I still enjoy gaming to this day

I'm glad that you and Billy Mitchell were able to put your differences aside and he now is one of your patreon supporters. Such a happy ending to this story.

Most normal people have been priced out of retro game collecting. Even loose cart prices are outrageous. All because EVERYTHING has to be an investment or hustle.

Gotta love that this video is basically just 12 minutes of Karl saying "told ya so" over and over again. This is great

I've been seeing this trend over several different markets, things such as fashion (watches, clothing and footwear), collectibles (Funkopops) and vehicles (high end sports cars). The pandemic brought upon a lot of speculative bubbles that popped when the money and or interest ran out.

Does anybody else remember going to yardsales around the turn of the century? Walking up and spoting a carboard box with an Atari 2600 or NES with a pile of games and getting it for maybe $10?

I'm happy for you Karl, you boldly called bs on a rigged, predatory market, stood your ground, and now your good call is on full display

Who would have thought that an industry that was being held up like a house of cards by a handful of companies would come crashing down?

Since the previous two videos wera almost an hour long I didn't have time to watch all of them until now, your work is amazing, few times I've been so glad to follow a channel in YT, no matter how different the videos could be, you always made them interesting and worth watching.

I love that I came back to you 2 years later for an update. I was telling people everything you were saying and that you were right and no one believed me lol.

Ironically, all of these games now have the additional value of being soaked in the priceless tears of unsuccessful fraudsters. My day did indeed get better watching this.

A huge crash for speculators, a massive W for gamers

Oh man I love how bubbles are always operating with the same logic: "Nuh uh there is no bubble it's just teh market" *bubble proceeds to burst* "Oh noes who could've seen this coming" If only this was limited to collectibles and not important stuff like, idk, houses

Its honestly been nice going into retro game stores and seeing prices for certain games going down.

Let's not kid ourselves: they didn't actually lose money. Those record setting auctions were basically Heritage buying the games from themselves to establish visible market prices. Now they aren't keeping up the bubble they had hoped and they need to set new values.

Seeing a game like Sonic go for such insane prices, when they were EVERYWHERE in the 90s is insane to me. Literally every kid with a Genesis had at least Sonic 1 and 2.

This is the most obvious case of fraud I have ever seen in my life. No one bought these games. I don’t believe for one second someone would buy something so worthless only to leave it for a year or two with the company and try to make more on it. It just doesn’t make sense.

This reminds me of Funko Pops… I watched people spend 300-500 on “crates” in hopes of making a future profit of 2-3x but hype died out and no one wanted even the rare ones anymore lol

I honestly feel that paying more than 3 figures for a game is just insane. I just want to enjoy a game and keep my house, thank you.

I genuinely wonder if any of the initial high sales that never left the vault even happened. Isn’t it possible that no money actually changed hands and that the “sale” was done deliberately in order to create a false value on other sales? Smells a lot like the whole NFT thing.

I knew you were right, my cousin and I have traded and sold vintage games from our collections for years, and then suddenly there was an increase, but it seemed like prices normalized pretty quickly back down

I think there is an added problem where once something sells for 100k. It makes other people start grading their games and looking for them. There is usually a second bubble where the market starts to recognize that most of the games have been found.

I sold my entire collection during this bubble out of necessity and I thought it was a huge mistake at the time. This gives me some hope.

As someone who likes collecting games simply as a hobby with no intentions to sell, I see this as an absolute win. Time to scratch some items off my list

Replace the word "game" with "action figures" and you could make the same the point. Avid gamer and action figure customizer/collector. Thank you for shining a light on the type of people that prey on our passions. A truly inhumane and degenrate thing to do. I applaud all of your efforts to spread a little good in the world. Much love and respect!

While this is of course obscene speculation, if I had money I might be tempted to get a factory sealed NES game just to pop open the plastic and get that "new NES cartridge smell" one last time. It was unique, for those old enough to have been there. Ah, time....

Hey, anyone remember back in the 90's when a speculator bubble on comic books nearly tanked the whole industry? And people were buying comics just for investment with no intention of selling it? Because the retro game market didn't.

With regard to the copies that were kept at Heritage, I'm very curious if the original sales were actually legitimate, or, similar to the NFT bubble, they were fake sales designed to inflate the bubble.

1.) the Retro game market in the US is insane, even Japan you can get vintage games for 1/3 to 1/10th the price 2.) Reselling "pickers" go to tag sales find comics, legos, games to resell. the issue is collectors are buying at the collector price, so the people buying the inflated price are "Merchers" betting on prices going up which leads to bubble pops (1990s comic bubble pop and the Funko pop crash) 3.) People dont understand they are asking NM prices for broken and damaged products, missing boxes, stains. 4.) Alot of old system and games dont last forever. Old Mac/apple computers are delaminating, in 5-10 years those SNES/N64 and PS1s may us die from environmental or plastic aging. Plastic as it ages gets brittle and discolors.

Sold Pokémon crystal for $400 US. Two years or so later it was going for about twice that on eBay for the same excellent , but used condition. That’s why the ds became really appealing for me.

I am sooooo glad to see all those people lose all that money. I’m so tired of seeing people who don’t care or know anything about video games ruin our hobby and make it a pain to enjoy our older games

This will make it cheaper for collectors to find rare games at least.

Great video Karl, always making great content

3:38 there's something about the way Karl looks when he says the end of the ad read that makes it seem like someone is just out of frame with a gun pointed to his head

The classic sign of a bubble is that people are angry when you call it a bubble. If it were not a bubble, they would not care

As a fan of TCGs and retro media, speculators are the bane of my existence. Everytime they lose is a win for me.

good work my dude seems like you have burst their bubbles, surely that would make a good game :D edit your videos together and release on streaming sites - such huge interest in this subject

Seems to me things are only valuable when they’re in sealed packaging. Which is why I’m putting all my money into buying sealed packaging. It’s the one constant of any bubble.

I have strong feelings for this and things like card collecting. I remember how me and my couple of friends who played Pokémon got laughed at and called nerds/losers for years throughout out school days. Well the pokemon card boom happened a couple of years ago and suddenly people want me to tell them which cards/games are worth the most. No one cared till money was involved

Two words: money laundering. It's been happening in the art world for a long time and I presume it's happening in the video game market now.

Glad you called this out. I didn’t have the money to buy these expensive games to resell, mostly because I buy games to play, but sad to hear people lost a ton on money. I know you jest about no one could see this coming, but it’s the same cycle we see in other products and people still fall for it

It's funny watching this happen and knowing it was coming from the beginning. The exact same thing happened when I was a kid with baseball and other sports cards. Everyone was buying and selling to make money and driving the prices higher and higher until the entire thing collapsed.

It's important to note that the overall retro game market is still inflated. This is due to two major factors. First, WATA did play a role in the overall mindset of the general consumer and collector. A lot of people thought they had gold, this drives demand. Second, there is still a lot of liquidity within the overall market. People are willing to pay a lot more now than they did in 2019. Little Samson is a good example.

It's so sad that all of those video games sit in a box never to be played. I'd love to open all the boxes and release them.

I owned a vintage video game store for 5 years and it was lucrative. I passion for video games and had an interesting business model. I would buy higher than other game stores and sell those same games cheaper than the competition. Example. Earthbound I would give $55 for a cart only and sell for $80 in good condition with no marks. The same cart being bought from another game store 2 stores down would only give $5 and would try to sell it for $120. I would have collectors willing to bring me great, rare games because they would get a fair price and would even look at places like garbage sales and flea markets knowing they could actually make money with good finds. At one point I had a complete CIB NES, complete CIB SNES, complete CIB N64 collection. That's every game in the library complete in box. Some systems I was only 1 or 2 games away from completion. I would keep it in store and it was quite impressive. I ended up selling off all my games when I got divorced to pay for the divorce unfortunately.

I get the feeling Karl's going to wind up as a pivotal figure for the history of Video game achievements, at least in the realm of speedruns and calling out problematic organizations

Some see a crash, I see an amazing opportunity to be able to play, collect, and preserve great games for lower prices

I am so tired of people selling stuff at higher prices that I stopped buying anything that is sold at ridiculous prices. Video games, collector figures, and props. The Power Rangers Legacy collection is what killed collecting for me. So many people bought everything from stores and prices on Ebay were double to quadruple the amount. Then Gamera had a collectors collection and so many people bought and sold them on ebay and my pre order was canceled. Even though I made my Pre order as soon as it was put up on Amazon, Amazon sent out the orders by random, because they said that they thought they had enough to fulfill every order. A week later I was messaged that I would not receive my copy and it was canceled. By then everywhere was out of stock and I refused to pay more on ebay for it. All this resellers bull crap killed it for me. Even if prices go way down, I don't think I will collect anymore.

honestly I remember watching that video... glad to see a follow-up

The sports cards market had a situation similar to this where a couple grading companies were found out be passing off fake auto’s as legitimate. A lot of people lost a lot of money

Imagine if these auctions were also shady, like the first "sale" wasn't real and these relatively much lower sales are the real scams

A huge thank you to Karl Jobst from all the real collectors and gamers. Your content has been very insightful, well researched and has saved many people thousands of dollars.

intresting, even in my country Poland got affected. Some museums started selling retro gaming stuff on actions online

So, a lot of these examples may not be people losing money. As with many scams and market manipulations, people buy these from themselves to drive up the price. Where the health of the market really matters is the average retro game that went from $30 to $300

This is a good thing, every game collector and fan of retro gaming should be happy about this

I sold all my stuff through heritage a few years ago. We knew then the pricing made no sense. However, when the cheque clears you don't question why it sold for 4 times what you consider it to be worth. But I no longer have a mortgage so no complaints from me.

This makes me all warm and fuzzy inside, very happy indeed. I gave up on collecting and sold my whole collection 5 years ago because the prices were getting ridiculous. Maybe it's possible to restart soon.

Seeing all those scammers, lose all that money, makes me feel so warm and fuzzy inside.

Another feel good video from Karl Jobst. Even at ~3% of their 'original' values they're still incredibly overpriced though. Hopefully they keep plummeting until they're actual market prices.

Reminds me of both the sports card and comic book markets. They crashed as well. Collectibles are crashing.

I saw a sealed and graded 9.whatever Tears of the Kingdom on sale at a collectables fair for $200. That game is still easily available on shelves. All they did was do the work of sending it to the grader

Unfortunately this ONLY Affected the grading market. The CIB Market has been dropping closer to early 2020 prices but other than that, most CIB prices have barely changed.

I've had to watch this hobby I've loved my whole life get completely destroyed by these asshats completely inflating the market. I've had to turn to emulation instead of collecting. Puts a massive smile on my face to see the market crash like this.

There have been major scams and collisions in sports cars grading that I’ve never seen videos about. A major seller had insiders with PSA (by far the biggest grading company) and managed to get thousands of doctored cards graded and they’re still floating around out there in slabs. In addition, it’s not unusual to see gem mint 10 cards with flaws that are visible even in a photo on an eBay listing. I guarantee it was submitted by a preferred customer or someone who had a grader in their pocket. News of it really has not spread because so many sports card collectors are addicted to it (including the grading aspect) like a drug. They don’t want it to be true. I don’t even think many videos have been made about it, despite it being exhaustively documented online. There has been endless corruption at PSA.

Its a partial version of fine art and money laundering with some possible tax evasion. Is what it sounds like. Calling something an investment and dumping it to get lower taxes,with market manipulation. Who would have thought our childhoods would turn into crime like this.

As someone who literally does not give a single solitary strawberry scented shit what my collection is worth, I'd just like to thank you for this video Karl. I very very rarely comment on youtube, but this video is music to my ears and has absolutely made my day. Thanks again man, keep up the good work! Much love from the UK

I suspect money laundering is involved and the buyers don't really care if they lose 50% as long as their money is laundered.

This will take a while to have a ripple effect on second-hand markets like eBay, Sega Saturn game prices are still insanely high.

"the problem is not collecting grading ort auction houses its greed" words to live by

This video makes me happy. As a (now former) 20-year video game collector and (current) video game store owner, I commented on the original video saying this needed to be brought to light, and now that it has, now that it's gotten as big as it has, and now that these grifters are actively losing their shirts, I couldn't be happier. Sure, I've a small bit of money tied up in sealed games (just bought some sealed NES games somewhere near the end of July-early August), but not enough to where I'd be concerned about losing money selling them at current going rates. Then again, I'm not an investor or a speculator...just a former long-time collector and store owner. The cheaper these games get, the more real collectors that can afford to collect 'em, and the better I feel about selling sealed games to those collectors.

They didn't lose money, they were initially selling the game to themselves at 6 figured to inflate the price, then at re-auction found people willing to pay them 4-5 figures for the same game at what looked to be a discount. Their purchase price was probably a fraction of what they sold it for.

I’m glad people are waking up to the idea of sealed video games being a pointless waste of money. They become an acrylic encased paperweight, never to be used. I can understand buying an open box that you can actually use, but to seal them up and use them essentially as trading cards, defeats their entire purpose. Obviously supply and demand are what drives the market, but I do not believe the demand is legitimate, the whole idea behind the demand for a game, is that it’s rare, limited supply, good condition, and you can play original hardware that very few people can without the use of emulation.

Speculation whether it is for crypto, NFTs, collectibles or even artwork is just another form of gambling, and the thing you have to remember about gambling is that it is rigged against your favor. The main ones winning are mostly those running the game, while everyone else mostly loses.

Reminds me of the comic book crash. You had comic companies printing, multiple covers in consumer volume as “collectors items“. Nothing that’s produced in high volume and isn’t destroyed through use is usually highly collectible. In order to be collectible, something has to be rare. Very few things from Nintendo are rare. Maybe some stuff related to failed consoles, but common cartridges from successful consoles are too high volume.

As an auctioneer myself, I assume this company doesn't just take money for the grading, but also a portion of the auction price through their services. I'm an auctioneer irl and we take a 20% cut on the final sale price, plus tax, both from the buyer and the seller. So if something sells for 100, we get 120 from the buyer, and give 80 to the seller - plus tax. So anyone who bought a game and sold it through the same company not only lost a lot of money in general, they also paid a lot more and got a lot less than the prices you actually see. It's common to do a lower 10% fee for really high price items, but I haven't actually checked this company's prices myself. I just wanted to point out that the losses are almost certainly even bigger than you think because of the fees.

You've heard of the Videogame Market Crash of 1983, now get ready for its long awaited sequel: *RETRO VIDEOGAME MARKET CRASH* ...oh wait, wrong kind of market

Never get into a collectible market without knowing real estimates of existing copies. Problem was.. and still is.. nobody really knows. How many warehouses are still out there with boxes of unsold games from 85-2000? Who wholesale purchased unsold old games from retailers? How much attrition are we looking at? Comic books have come down pretty hard, but didn’t crash anything like this , because it’s a much older hobby, with very accurate records of print runs, estimated existing copies etc. I wouldn’t call this a bubble. This was something else. Bubbles involve regular people. No regular person was paying $20-100 thousand + for a game. This was rich people flooded with insane money, thinking only 1 or two copies existed of this stuff. They wanted this generations Action comics #1, and they were played, or scammed into believing these were one of a kind, when someone had boxes of them.

This reminds me of a story from the 1950s about the speculative stamp market and how the main character is interested in a 50,000 dollar stamp. His family tells him "Sure, and you can spend the rest of your life paying for it" but he replied, "I'm not going to buy one, I'm going to SELL one" so he sets out to steal one from a giant covered in gold... because morality stories can get weird. Turns out, the only reason it was worth 50,000 was because there was a rich guy with excess money willing to pay for it... and paid for it he did... twice... for the same stamp. Moral of the story: A fool and his money are soon parted. That was 70 years ago and while what we're "booming" over may be different, the fools are still the same.

what it's funnier to me it's not just the ridiculous prices, its the fact that those prices are for pretty common games that you can easily find on ebay, or flea markets 🤣

My family won so big off the sheep that bought all these super inflated retro games. Between the bubble created by the grading companies (that are biased and their bottom end is all that matters) and covid, I was able to sell an attic filled with game cubes, mario and zelda-link/ metroid games, gamecube gameboy players adpaters and loads of shit I had sitting up there for almost 20 years for a nice tidy high 6 figure sum. I had worked at a games shop in the early noughties and purchased boat loads of nintendo stock from the owner for £1300 when he retired and was closing the doors. He wanted it gone and I bought it all (boxed new and some used) for his cost not what it was on the shelf. When covid hit I knew it would be the time that people born in the late 80s and 90s would be going through their nostalgia phase and I made an absolute mint. Foolish people were buying games at £100-$150 quid a piece plus the gamecube gameboy adapter boxed was fetching £200 quid each and I had 11 of them boxed plus the open ones. It was just nuts, Think of every big thing to come out in a decade, buy the items when they go out and pop them in the attic or a dry storage unit of some sort and 20 years later sell those items for a mint. I was a 70s child that kept all my G1 transformers (some kept boxed but all boxes kept complete) and sold them for an absolute bomb in 2010 when people would reach mid 30s with disposable income and feeling nostalgic after realising their childhood was over. I did this in the 90s with ps1/n64, pokemon (buying 30 unopened boxes of 1rst edition poke cards/ lego and again in the early 2000s with game systems. Just pay attention to whatever heavily marketed crap comes up mid decade, buy it in duplicates and be set every decade for selling it but you have to get in on the upswing to avoid this bubble popping. This games crap blew my mind feeling what I was doing was selling memories but these people were shaping something unreal. But I have avoided buying or selling anything that is graded that is not my lego or comic books as all my comics were cgc graded 1978 to 1998 and all being xmen/various spiderman titles and spawn. Really watch what interest people, hold on to it in small supply and resale it 20 years later. If you constantly stock over the years you are eventually constantly selling. If space is hard for you, look for small items but avoid funko crap- anything marketed to collectors is trash that everyone has and will hold on to.

The fact that you can easily compare bought price with the price those people sold the game for, is already enough to prove it's speculative. If it weren't, people would by to keep with some exceptions

While nowhere near the prices they were i still feel like 38k for a video game is insane.

The entire collectibles market is down like 50% since 2021. Mostly driven by economic factors and that the initial spikes were not sustainable. For video games it's even worse because of the clear market manipulation taking place in the first place. I do actually wonder for many of these games whether a transaction actually took place though. A number of these original sales seem highly dubious to me, and I wonder for a number of them if a financial transaction even took place, and it wasn't just a fantasy sale that didn't actually take place, just the same person selling to themselves effectively.

Tomb Raider "started" on the Saturn, as it was released first. It wasn't a port to Playstation though, it just happens that the Sega got an exclusive release for a short period last minute while negotiating. Although the extra time did mean that bugs were fixed in the PS version that were found after the Saturn release.

IMO the "market" doesn't include the fraud we've seen from WATA , Heritage and others. The market as it accounts for 99.9% of buyers and sellers seems to be generally as stable as it's been in the past few years, inching upward if anything. We're talking about games that don't approach $100, not the horseshit thousands asked by scammers.

There's something ironic about Yuji Naka asking if it was a scam, considering he turned out to be a financial criminal himself.

I hate this stock market mentality when it comes to nerdy stuff. Like i wanna collect retro games and general nerdy collectables, but i can never afford it cause these people hike the price up when using it as an investment ordeal. I end up just having to wait for a massive crash, cause they all end up crashing hard at some point. Cause outside of hobbying, they have no real value.

The prices still look way too high to me, but I am not a collector, so maybe collection items do ask for a premium of 10x-100x to the original price. Still, much better than the previous 1000x-10000x prices.

this last 3 years have been crazy for the used/old game market I just didn't knew it got THIS crazy! at least in my country second hand consoles are starting to adjust, a good example the new 3ds