Ok you absolute legends, Youtuber Karl Jobst exposes corruption and shill bidding in the used retro video games market

[tikker]

3 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

But I agree with you,  so its not the fact they sold item for *absurd* price, its how this price was tinkered with basically?

Yes. The clever bit is that you let the market manipulate itself in a way, such that you don't even have to manipulate the auction (directlly). It's not people buying these and they don't actually "go" at these prices. As you say, if you'd just put up the most exquisite sealed copy of SMB in the Universe up for auction then sure, I could see it go for a few grand, but no sane person would plonk $2M on a game (I would hope) as it's simply not worth that. Then like you say with your example, you appeal to its rarity, sell and resell yourself or between friends so the world will hype it up saying "look it sold for X last time, who knows what the next buyer might pay!". Perhaps nobody will buy this exact copy anymore, but it gives an excuse / incentive to bid higher on the others and catching a gullible buyer who might be willing to spend $30k to complete their collection.

 

It's almost mass social engineering... clever bunch I gotta admit.

[lostcattears]

As expected... but some people have far more money then brains.

[Roswell]

10 hours ago, BuckGup said:

They must have gotten inspiration from the US economy and stock exchange. A major majority of all wealth in the world is generated from fraud it's not that radical or even new. It's seriously just a game

The stock market doesn't create money or wealth out of thin air, it moves existing money from one person/entity to another. Suggesting that fraud generates wealth is also silly, the Fed injects new money through treasury bonds to introduce new currency, that's literally the only way new money in the US comes into existence.

 

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you said and you instead mean that people accumulate wealth instead of "generating" it?

[Guest willies leg]

That's funny, I thought retro games were pacman and space invaders.

[Mark Kaine]

4 hours ago, willies leg said:

That's funny, I thought retro games were pacman and space invaders.

And they are, but general rule is like 2 gens, so PS3 gen games are now "retro" even though it doesn't make a lot of sense because graphically there isn't a big difference at all between current gen, outside of resolutions, that mostly stagnated or even regressed (sadly) 

[DeScruff]

This sounds like what happened with Rampart for Gameboy.

A couple of years ago someone wanted to experiment a claim 'Pat the NES Punk' made about resellers driving up prices. So they did an experiment choosing a game that wasn't rare by any means, but wasn't something you'd have heard about. Rampart for Gameboy (Grey cart, not the GBC version). Basically buying all copies on Ebay for a year. The average price used to be ~$3-4. They only needed to amass ~18 copies before the price spiked to $25. (At its height a 'loose' copy was $40!)

Is Rampart GB really worth that much? No!
But 'Tom' created (fake) demand for the game. People who didn't know what was happening ether assumed the game was all of the sudden popular, or didn't know it was a just a regular $4 game, and not this $40 game it became. That was in 2015, to this day the price of that game remains ~$20, for really no reason.

Now that was just a single guy doing an experiment with no intention of making a profit.... This is now companies purposely doing this with an incentive for the price to be higher. Except they going a step farther and making bids - not to win - But just to increase the price.

[Sir Asvald]

As the dude said in his video. The rich buy art. Well, they use the art to funnel in their dirty money. That's how money laundering works. Take your dirty money and clean it with buying genuine stuff. And I'm convinced that this is the same thing happening once again.