Are video games the next baseball cards?

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Fragems
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Re: Are video games the next baseball cards?

Post by Fragems »

As I've said before I don't think there will be a crash in the retro stuff that's not to say I don't see more moronic resellers consistently going out of business locally because they hardly move product trying to sell stuff at online prices. Really the majority of the people willing to pay the high prices you see online live in more densely populated areas such as New York, Texas, California, or etc. where there is more of a demand for it.

If you are selling locally you really need to get a feel for the market in your region you can't just go off what stuff sells for online or else your going to be sitting on a pile of inventory all day with a bunch of window shoppers. That bit of common sense doesn't keep 5+ people a year blowing a lot of time and money trying to do it though :P. Honestly this is the era of online market places brick and mortar stores really don't make sense anymore as far as collectibles go.
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Re: Are video games the next baseball cards?

Post by Tanooki »

Very true and that is a problem. My area here isn't very dense and people have a lower median income so those prices you see that look high online someone eventually scoops up, when it's attempted here it doesn't fly and it's not just video games but music, books, movies, toys, etc. I know I've said before that example of the CIB Golden Sun games at $40, I was at that store in the last hour, still there and more stuff I had seen went that was regionally priced, and other items that haven't been still there rolling another month onto the sticker where they date when it hits the shelf.

Brick and mortar have it tough, they go by online, but online doesn't always apply locally, yet I get them not wanting to feel like leaving money on the table too. It makes you wonder if it would be best if more stores like that one went the route of shopgoodwill and just don't even screw with people locally and let people duke it out over ebay or their own shop front online.
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Fragems
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Re: Are video games the next baseball cards?

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The way I feel if your in it for the money you need to go online. If your in it for the experience and meeting people within your hobby then open a store, but don't expect much of a monetary return if any for your time and effort. With a store you are either going to have to set a lower profit margin or use it as a front to sell the games that aren't worth putting online while accumulating inventory from people looking to sell there stuff. Really that's about the only upside I see to a physical location is people tend to flock there to resell there stuff. Although a lot of those people are a hassle to deal with since many bring in beat up stuff expecting to sell it for a lot more then it's worth, and when explaining the market to them most people get offended :P.

There is also taking into effect the negative impact that sites like VGPC have on the hobby since while nice tools they are horrible for determining offline prices given they don't factor in shipping costs and market/payment fees. For example an average cased disc based game from this generation is going to cost you at minimum $2.60 to ship then you have to factor in the fees which are going to be 12.9% and $0.30 for an average ebay seller using paypal. So suddenly that game that has a average price of $10 for a CIB copy on VGPC is only worth $5.80 in reality, but coming to that realization would require some actual business sense which the average reseller seems to be lacking :roll: . The funniest thing is it's a never ending cycle of resellers around here because it seems like every time one goes down they sell their entire inventory to a single person who then proceeds to make the same mistakes they did.

If you want to know what inevitably kills a collector's market and causes prices to sky rocket it's tools such as guides and price charts that try to nail down a monetary value on every individual item. If people have a tool telling them something is worth X amount of dollars they will stick to it whether it is right or wrong :roll: .
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Re: Are video games the next baseball cards?

Post by Tanooki »

Totally agree on both the eye roll topics there. It really is a revolving door of a mix of stubborn stupidity and greed and it benefits few if any, even the reseller who may get peaks here and there but usually ends up with a hoard of garbage they want too much for because they probably paid more than it was worth. And why? The lousy non-weighted failure of a tool called the VGPC. Anyone who ever throws that one out there with me trying to price something I won't even bother most times even saying anything, I just stop the conversation. Occasionally I will point out it doesn't account for quality or the mix between complete and loose, nor the 15~% fees of ebay+pp either as you did with math. I've rarely had that actually make sense to someone which is a shame, they just see a printed # and go with it.

The same thing happened in the 90s with the phonebook sized price guides that would go out monthly for cards and comics. But at least those guides did give some guidelines for quality. Games oddly seem to lack that other than well it's there, or it's complete. The other paper is this mystery of charge too much alone for it, or charge most the price (if not all) of a complete package because of it which isn't great either.
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Re: Are video games the next baseball cards?

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I think toys and Pokemon sent out the wrong message some time in the 90s. There were so many Batman/tmnt/X-Men/power rangers toys that some weren't worthy of owning or playing. The phrase gotta catch'em all to collect them all. Who wants to really collect all Pokemon characters, now there more than 500 characters than 150. Pokemon should've finished in the early 2000s. Funko pop ruined it for everyone creating bad collecting habits. Those Funko toys has no effort in design just paper weight desk junk or doorstep. They mostly look like the same. Same goes for Disney Vinylmation.
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J T
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Re: Are video games the next baseball cards?

Post by J T »

My wife says "Pokemon activates the brain's OCD cortex". :lol:
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Fragems
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Re: Are video games the next baseball cards?

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Yeah Pokemon Red version and the trading card games were definitely what dragged me into collecting. Had my trading cards up until a year or two ago. They'd been sitting in my closet for years so I gave a ton of them to a kid at my mothers church who was super into pokemon and the rest I believe dunpeal bought along with some older DBZ cards. I went ahead and threw in the other cards I had from Harry Potter, Digimon, Yugioh, and etc. since I had no real attachment to them and they were just taking up space. Only ones I held onto were my Gundam Wing cards and that was only because I like Mecha stuff.
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Re: Are video games the next baseball cards?

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J T wrote:My wife says "Pokemon activates the brain's OCD cortex". :lol:
I would not doubt that she has a point there. Even me who isn't a fan of collecting, that damned game (red-firered and yellow) something about those make me watch to catch a lot of them, even if I won't use them. Beyond that I find myself leveling them even with that boring as hell one at a time setup Pokemon uses I'll go OCD about it and work up like 20 of them at a time which makes the game move at a crawl. I can't think of another RPG if not game in general where I've pissed meaningless time like that just because it was there and goaded you into it at such a scale.
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benderx
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Re: Are video games the next baseball cards?

Post by benderx »

I found these two post articles by Racketboy

http://www.racketboy.com/retro/game-col ... et-changed
Published: May 1st, 2006 at 9:45am
Updated: January 18th, 2011

http://www.racketboy.com/retro/game-col ... in-vintage
Published: May 2nd, 2006 at 2:56pm
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Fragems
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Re: Are video games the next baseball cards?

Post by Fragems »

Really I kind of like the market the way it is though there are so many listings online that if your willing to dig/wait you can hit some good deals. If games were worthless nobody would bother posting them.

Sure there are many aspects of this market that suck, but as long as you have patience and know how to play it you'll find plenty of stuff.
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