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2/ I started doing market research, curatorial journalism, and embedded investigation on America's hottest new market a couple months ago. My early findings and my hard data can be found at Proof Games, which launched in May with a focus on mobile gaming. sethabramson.substack.com/s/games

3/ The moment you start investigating video game grading, you get suspicious. For instance, every collectibles market has "population reports"—sometimes free, sometimes available at small cost—which inform hobbyists and investors how rare each item is in each type of "condition."

4/ In video game grading, there were two grading houses...and zero population reports. One 16-year-old house had gone 16 years without ever issuing one, while the newer house, Wata Games, had gone its well over three years in operation without ever issuing one. It was a red flag.

5/ The older house, VGA, had an FAQ that didn't even mention population reports—though the question VGA gets asked more than any other, without question, is "Where are your population reports?" The newer house, Wata, did the same thing—excised the very *concept* from its website.

6/ And yet there were whispers that *certain* sellers had been able to get non-public population report data—an indication of illicit market manipulation, as population report data is *insanely* valuable in a collectibles market and those who have that data have an enormous edge.

7/ At one point Wata had an "API leak"—their website interface was delivering game-by-game "pop report" data to individuals who went on the site and "liked" or "tracked" individual games. The leak was quickly plugged (it was a coding issue) but the data got out and made a splash.

8/ What the data showed was that a *vanishingly* small number of games were being graded as a percentage of each console's game library. We'll take the Nintendo Entertainment System as an example. The NES had—depending on how you count—between 800 and 1000 games in its library.

9/ What Wata's internal data showed—and again, to be clear, this *wasn't* an illegal hack, this was Wata accidentally releasing data to the public that it didn't mean to release—was that in 3+ years in operation, Wata had graded the most-graded NES game approximately 750 times.

10/ But by the time you got down to the 10th most-graded game—again, out of 800 to 1000 games—you saw in the data that Wata was grading *that* game approximately 5x/month. It made a journalist like me wonder, how often was the 50th most-graded game being graded. The 100th? 400th?

11/ At the time, Wata was saying that it needed more than three years of grading to release even *one* population report, because if it released one earlier it might be... misleading. Suddenly, investors congregating online had an inkling of what Wata was really worried about.

12/ Not to put too fine a point on it, but all the graded video games that were being sold at auction for four-, five-, six-, or even seven-figure sums *weren't rare*. They were going through Wata so regularly that over a decade you'd expect *thousands* of them in the market.

13/ Meanwhile, the *actually* rare games in the sealed-and-graded market—keeping in mind that, pre-Wata, video game collecting had almost always been marked (as most collectible markets in the U.S. are) by an emphasis on *rarity*—seemed to have been given no market value at all.

14/ When the Wata data hit online groups, it caused a stir. But in one of the most popular Facebook groups for Wata-graded game collectors, the data was quickly... disappeared. Removed. Why, you'd ask? Buyers had been looking for this data for 16 years (VGA) and 3 years (Wata)!

15/ The reason I was given for the removal of this extremely valuable data is that the moderators of this Facebook group were concerned about *Wata's reaction*—they didn't want Wata to be upset with them. That seemed odd to me as a journalist—until I realized something amazing.

16/ The realization I came to—after talking to a large number of occupants of Facebook's largest Wata-themed groups—was that nearly everyone in the groups... was a seller, not a buyer. Huh? How could that even be possible? Well, that's something this thread is going to explain.

17/ In a speculative market bubble that's been artificially created, you'd expect sellers to be ubiquitous—and that's just what's happened with video game collecting. Almost like a self-springing Ponzi scheme, sellers sell to sellers over and over, thereby sending prices skyward.

18/ As each successive seller raises the price of a game higher and higher—flipping games daily—actual earnest buyers (hobbyist collectors *not* looking to sell what they buy) get priced out of the market almost immediately. Which is unsurprising, as the market isn't *for* them.

19/ Instead, the market gets used for speculation—like a stock market. It exists to make rich people richer, with the big sellers getting very rich indeed. In this artificial market, every seller has two critical, indispensable partners: the grading house and the auction house.

20/ Because the online groups tasked with creating a "culture" around game collecting were being run by sellers selling to other sellers, and were largely populated by sellers selling to other sellers, they *could not* make an enemy of Wata, the chief grading house in the market.

21/ And so hard data that the *very* small number of earnest buyers in this artificial market had been hunting for for literally years and years was *deliberately disappeared* in order to keep the grading house that gave it away accidentally happy. Buyers' interests were ignored.

22/ The problem, of course, was that video game buyers had (have) no advocates in or around the market. The market is unregulated; no one holds it to any ethical standards; it was created by and for people with no interest in changing it; and most game collectors have shunned it.

23/ This last point is key. As a gamer since 1981, I have no issue whatsoever with earnest buyers wanting to buy "framed" like-new versions of games they've long played and loved so that they can be displayed as art. But I'm in a distinct minority in that view and in this market.

24/ When Wata emerged as a behemoth—so big it was recently bought out by an even bigger one—most longtime collectors were disgusted by the grading culture and turned away from it. A few foolish middle-class collectors decided to try to become investors and swim with the big fish.

25/ This left virtually no one in the market who was an earnest buyer (rather than re-seller) of graded games. Every online group—I went to Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, many collecting websites—either shunned grading or was composed of sellers and re-sellers *almost exclusively*.

26/ Proof Games started doing large-scale market research to try to get a snapshot of what was going on. Which games were ubiquitous but still strangely overpriced? Which games were invisible but scarce? I prefaced all my reports with essays expressing grave concerns about Wata.

27/ Eventually, I sought to publish links to these reports in one of the most popular Facebook Wata-themed groups run largely by and for sellers and re-sellers. And what followed was one of the more amazing weeks I've had in 27 years as a journalist. It was... *very* eye-opening.

28/ The market research, which was merely *public data* intended to aid earnest buyers, was descended upon in the same way piranhas descend upon fresh meat. The richest sellers in the group immediately started complaining—they wanted the information to be disappeared immediately.

29/ I was attacked in countless ways—including being accused of being a fraud, a liar, and not an attorney. (I don't mean "not a currently practicing attorney," I mean that for the first time in years of being trolled online, I had people trying to claim I'd never practiced law).