a few games | essay: On Graded Games & Collecting: A Hobby At Standstill

You'll need to bear with me in this write-up. It's going to be a little dramatic. I promise it's for good reason, though. I'm writing today mainly out of gradual frustration at what appears to be a side of graded game collecting that lacks much of the collector-centrism it claims to offer.

This is all just my opinion. You may disagree and I welcome commentary/responses if anything I'm saying is far beyond reality.

TL;DR: Grading in 2023 is a a sellers hobby. If the hobby hopes to grow, it needs important changes to encourage competition and access to everyone, not just sellers and dealers.

Where are we, today?

Graded collecting has always been niche but fruitful. For many years, Collectible Grading Authority (parent company of Video Game Authority/VGA) offered affordable grading, a strong product offering, and relatively fair service speed. Sadly, in 2019 and later 2020 when the pandemic started, grading was flooded with new participants (mainly speculators and collectors cashing out on a hyped market).

Today the fall out a hyped market has been more grading companies (mainly just CGC) but lack-luster options for casual collectors. More graders has helped to aid in competition to keep the other players honest, at least.

The main graders today, CGC, Wata, and VGA, have many pros and cons to each other, and sadly the pros don't overlap. Ironically this is the biggest con, in my view. If you have a preference on a specific grader, you're unlikely to see any benefits from the other two to help offset whatever shortcomings you're experiencing.

Here's my short & sweet overview of the options:

Wata: Medium grading experience, slow turnarounds at lower tiers (2+ months), low prices, acceptable holder
VGA: More experience, slow turnarounds, high prices, best holder [1]
CGC: Much less experience, lightning fast turnarounds, low prices, acceptable holder

Let's break down in detail how preferring one grader makes it very difficult to transition to another, from the perspective of each grader.

Wata: The biggest bottle neck on collector accessibility appears to be that in order to get your games back in any timely fashion, you need to pay nearly 2x the cost of the lowest tier ($85 Speedrun at 3-5 weeks vs $50 Turbo at over two months). I've heard (anecdotally, mind you) that for a brief period, Wata was shipping the lowest tier very quickly, but may be artificially slowing down that tier to make the tiers make sense. I can neither confirm nor deny the validity of this, however I did experience lightning fast Turbo for a brief period last year. To be fair though, it could very well be submission congestion because of the recent launch of their new case design.
VGA: The primary benefits here are the high quality, minimal holder and most experienced grading of the three big players (15+ years). Sadly, you can't get any of this from the other two. VGA simply has the best holder as there's no risk of an inner liner compressing your games to the point of damage. VGA also has the most approachable grade scale (single score).
CGC: Simply put, they have the fastest turnaround (~2 weeks; in some cases, 1 week!) and competitive low price point. That said, they are the least experienced and use plastic inserts like Wata. If time is of the essence, there's no better option.

Why is it a sellers hobby?

The easiest answer is that if you pay for a higher submission tier, you get your game back faster. The main advantage to this is quicker handling of a high value game and/or you're trying to sell.

The concept of tiers at this stage of the hobby, at near rock bottom prices since 2021, doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

For many games, they sell well beyond the combined cost of a raw game plus grading fees and shipping, so long as the grade is high and the game is desirable. It's a no brainer for sellers.

What needs to change?

At least one thing must happen in the second half of 2023 for more confidence to rise in graded game collecting. Any of these would be a massive win, in my mind:

Wata adopts corner protection for the inner plastic liner.
Wata does away with their lowest tier and makes Speedrun the entry level at $50-60. They do promotions so often for discounts that I don't think folks would mind the baseline price
VGA opens its economy tier (somewhere around $50/game). Now that their backlog is cleared (spoiler for the end of the post), I think this could be doable with decent turnaround times now that half their time isn't spent on a massive backlog.

Again, to reiterate from where we are today, we mainly need more service overlap between graders. As it is today, the pros and cons of each are so deep and far from one another that it shutters both entrants and long-time collectors from wanting to participate. As a result, only sellers appear to be benefiting from grading services.

Room for growth

I know the pains of today are temporary. There are opportunities for change in a post-boom, post-pandemic market.

Here are some recent changes that give me hope:

VGA has shown major signs of improvement, for instance, having recently reopened serial lookup, online ordering, and announcing a cleared backlog. A cheaper submission tier feels imminent, even if the turnaround is the slowest in the hobby. To boot, they're updating estimated turnarounds to be much faster than the past few years (~30 working days for Archival), with room to improve with the cleared backlog.
Wata's research department shows no signs of slowing down. Dan is doing fantastic work, as is Andrew, the head grader. They also released their long-awaited holder redesign this year which fixes many of the bulk issues of the legacy design. Long term, I think they'll see great things.
Despite CGCs lack of reception to early feedback on their holder, they've made subtle changes to indicate they're listening. For example, a brand new plastic liner to prevent edge damage, and small label changes in response to concerns the seal grade isn't easy to see/read.

I hope this post is informative. If you have thoughts to share, don't hesitate to reach out. Thanks for reading!

[1] I determine "best holder" on the subjective basis that because VGA doesn't use a plastic liner, there's fewer complications and opportunities for quality mistakes and even game damage. Plastic liners have shown mainly to obscure detail, making it hard to ascertain true condition. For instance, scuffing on the liners makes it hard to know if the game has adamage, or just the liner. These issues persist with both Wata and CGC. Almost on a comically predictable monthly basis, a new anecdotal story pops up in the community of a holder issue. In one really bad case within the last month, a Wata graded game was seemingly crunched in the liner.