The all new 'What's it worth' thread

[StevenK]

i agree, but we know what those fees are and could easily come up with something like "take the ebay sell price and subtract x%" and aggregated over time (building a larger sample) we can determine the mean, among other statistics to build a more accurate representation of the "true" price per game. your $30 purchase and the $50+ purchase would all contribute to a mean. further we could come up with a threshold to exclude outliers and prevent skewing (uncommon bid wars). the point being, the larger the sample the more accurate price we would arrive at. it works-- and that's pretty much how all values for things are arrived at.

While this is true to an extent it ignores plenty of important factors.

Couple of examples:

How do you factor in the postage costs? If someone from further away buys the game then he will value it lower as his final price is going to have to include a higher postage cost.

Condition of the game. A straight data dump out of ebay isn't going to tell you this so someone is going to have to go into each individual sale and make their own judgement, I'm not sure how many neo games are sold worldwide on ebay every day but you can quickly get an idea of the size of the task.

I've followed market prices of products as a job in the past, and came quickly to three conclusions - 1) It's a full time job 2) It's a boring and shit job 3) At the end of all the number crunching 99% of the time it comes back to a price around about what you already knew before you started looking.

What I'm getting at is a well informed person can update the price guide fairly quickly and to a more than accurate enough level without turning it into a 100,000 line database nightmare. The problem isn't that the price guide isn't being updated accurately enough, it's just that it isn't being updated at all, ever.

 

[billbrasky]

While this is true to an extent it ignores plenty of important factors.

Couple of examples:

How do you factor in the postage costs? If someone from further away buys the game then he will value it lower as his final price is going to have to include a higher postage cost.

Condition of the game. A straight data dump out of ebay isn't going to tell you this so someone is going to have to go into each individual sale and make their own judgement, I'm not sure how many neo games are sold worldwide on ebay every day but you can quickly get an idea of the size of the task.

I've followed market prices of products as a job in the past, and came quickly to three conclusions - 1) It's a full time job 2) It's a boring and shit job 3) At the end of all the number crunching 99% of the time it comes back to a price around about what you already knew before you started looking.

What I'm getting at is a well informed person can update the price guide fairly quickly and to a more than accurate enough level without turning it into a 100,000 line database nightmare. The problem isn't that the price guide isn't being updated accurately enough, it's just that it isn't being updated at all, ever.

all good points, and that is why automation exists (100,000 lines of code or not, spending 100 hours to save yourself thousands is why anything is automated)-- because most people hate counting beans and won't on a regular basis (unless you're a boring accountant). for example, people are not manually crunching stock market figures and yes, it took many people some great deal of time (and are even calibrating today) to spare themselves the impossible computations of doing it all manually for the rest of their lives. all i'm saying is the information is out there and why it hasn't been applied to neo geo games is beyond me. http://www.rarityguide.com/ could probably quite easily just add their monitoring to their site and spare anyone from having to update anything ever again. also, postage costs should included with the sale price, if someone is willing to pay $100 + $50 shipping, then they are willing to spend $150 on the game-- therefore the game is worth $150 to them. people factor in shipping with the cost so that is all irrelevant to deduce, i think you're over thinking it. it's simply a sample of peoples' willingness to pay for something and that true of everything that has a price.

 

[RabbitTroop]

nice, i would like to see it and could probably build on it if you're interested. because besides talking about it (and people not really liking the idea) i was just going to write an app to do it since i've done plenty of work like this before.

Well, that would be pretty cool... and probably a true "what it's worth," type of thing more than any price guide here. If it could find games, add them to a table and then aggregate price over time that would be incredible. We could see when the last games sold, for how much and etc, etc. Probably would be a huge improvement to this site to have something like that. Even if you toss the price out the window, just getting a snapshot of what is being bought and sold these days would be great data to have.

 

[StevenK]

all good points, and that is why automation exists (100,000 lines of code or not, spending 100 hours to save yourself thousands is why anything is automated)-- because most people hate counting beans and won't on a regular basis (unless you're a boring accountant). for example, people are not manually crunching stock market figures and yes, it took many people some great deal of time (and are even calibrating today) to spare themselves the impossible computations of doing it all manually for the rest of their lives. all i'm saying is the information is out there and why it hasn't been applied to neo geo games is beyond me. http://www.rarityguide.com/ could probably quite easily just add their monitoring to their site and spare anyone from having to update anything ever again. also, postage costs should included with the sale price, if someone is willing to pay $100 + $50 shipping, then they are willing to spend $150 on the game-- therefore the game is worth $150 to them. people factor in shipping with the cost so that is all irrelevant to deduce, i think you're over thinking it. it's simply a sample of peoples' willingness to pay for something and that true of everything that has a price.

That's what I'm trying to get across to you, I think it's you that is overthinking it. If you are after a particular game it would take you fifteen minutes of research on recent prices to get a very good idea of what it's selling for. Unless you're buying and selling twenty games a day you don't need anything more than that.

There are many people on here who already follow the prices closely enough to be able to fill in the price guide off the top of their head as accurately as any complex price modelling software out there, it's just that no one wants to do it as it's probably not a fun job and opens the member up to a lot of criticism from others.

Just to add to the example you've picked up on again, the game costs $50, the postage has been put on by some piss taker at $100, the seller collects. Instantly your pricing model needs human intervention to pick out the anomalies or it doesn't mean shit.

Plus, people certainly are manually crunching stock market numbers all day every day, and yes, I am a boring accountant lol

 

[RabbitTroop]

That's what I'm trying to get across to you, I think it's you that is overthinking it. If you are after a particular game it would take you fifteen minutes of research on recent prices to get a very good idea of what it's selling for. Unless you're buying and selling twenty games a day you don't need anything more than that.

There are many people on here who already follow the prices closely enough to be able to fill in the price guide off the top of their head as accurately as any complex price modelling software out there, it's just that no one wants to do it as it's probably not a fun job and opens the member up to a lot of criticism from others.

Just to add to the example you've picked up on again, the game costs $50, the postage has been put on by some piss taker at $100, the seller collects. Instantly your pricing model needs human intervention to pick out the anomalies or it doesn't mean shit.

Plus, people certainly are manually crunching stock market numbers all day every day, and yes, I am a boring accountant lol

No, not really. If a price falls out of whack it will be seen as an anomaly and good software will ignore it. No need to go in and tweak for shipping. It's all factored in and aggregated. I personally love the idea, but more for the data aspect then using it for any price modeling I'd just love to see what's selling in one simple easy to find location.

 

[Tyranix95]

Sometimes I think that worldwide shipping leads to higher prices because when your buyer looks to turn around and sell his item, he passes his shipping and import costs on to the next guy.

So, if I you sold a $30 cart, and worldwide shipping is $20, then the next price for the cart will be $50 + $20 worldwide shipping. Now, after that guy sells his cart, at $70 + 20 ww shipping, and so on and so on.

(I left import taxes and other fees out of the example to keep things simple.)

Now, when another member sees the $100 ww shipped sales thread, they get all excited start thinking that their $30 cart is now worth $100 (shipped), and try to sell their cart--for the $100 worldwide price. And the cycle continues.

And that does not factor in the eBay bidders that just outright act stupid and bid $100 (+ shipping) for $30 carts and hope they win it for less, cause they're crazy like that.

Sometimes I can't help but wonder if the arcade market is heating up a bit (maybe getting a bit too hot?) like some other collectible markets have, in the past.

 

[billbrasky]

That's what I'm trying to get across to you, I think it's you that is overthinking it. If you are after a particular game it would take you fifteen minutes of research on recent prices to get a very good idea of what it's selling for. Unless you're buying and selling twenty games a day you don't need anything more than that.

There are many people on here who already follow the prices closely enough to be able to fill in the price guide off the top of their head as accurately as any complex price modelling software out there, it's just that no one wants to do it as it's probably not a fun job and opens the member up to a lot of criticism from others.

Just to add to the example you've picked up on again, the game costs $50, the postage has been put on by some piss taker at $100, the seller collects. Instantly your pricing model needs human intervention to pick out the anomalies or it doesn't mean shit.

Plus, people certainly are manually crunching stock market numbers all day every day, and yes, I am a boring accountant lol

honestly, if nobody is going to update the price guides then give me access and i will do it. i'm not looking to have a price guide for myself to buy one game-- that is easy (i agree with you there), granted i do buy multiple games a day (not 20, but a few). i'm thinking in terms of a more accurate price guide to benefit everyone and we currently refer to two or three (ebay, mvs price guide, jnx) and two of those are out of date and not getting love so if that's going to be the case it absolutely has to be automated and that's where ebay comes in.

 

[master_d]

I found that I needed an admin page where I could login and validate auctions manually because the ebay api doesn't allow you to do fine grain searches that would only you show you sold MVS world heroes carts for example. There could be an auction that sold a a world heroes mini marquee or a lot that included world heroes or a non-working cart etc. Usually there was around 10 auctions to approve or reject daily and more on the weekends so yes it is a somewhat tedious job.

I'll try to see if I can get the software running on my laptop temporarily so you guys can see it... or ... if somebody has a host with apache, php, mysql, and python I could maybe host it with you?

 

[billbrasky]

it's been about a year since i've dug around the ebay api, but i built this huge trending/monitoring thing for nike when they were selling the back to the future ii shoes on ebay (i was one of two developers on that campaign-- if anyone remembers that from 2010), it was pretty slick-- optimized api lookups (never exceeded quota, although nike was given a special account with additional privileges like higher query quotas-- was able to work within the normal quota just in case nike didn't receive special privileges) and still managed to stream the auctions with ~30 second delay across thousands of auctions (ability to turn up with extended quota to something like 2 seconds) and was super fast since things were lazy requests (only requested when needed) and cached locally into memory w/ redis to make the bottleneck with ebay's api and not our app. either way i realized some tricks for finding what you're looking for and going to see if those things still exist (i'm sure they do).

 

[master_d]

I found an older version of the app on my laptop.. I have the latest code at work, but this should give you an idea of what I was going for. The latest version uses flot (an html5 graphing tool) to print out the price trends for each cart over time and I changed how you search for unvalidated auctions in the admin panel. You can go ahead and screw around in the admin panel and delete/validate auctions since this is just a test anyway.

http://99.13.50.120/neogeo/

(*let me know if the url doesn't work... it should but I don't have an external box to test with)

If you know some tricks on how to get the ebay api to only show sold auctions for a specific cart that would be great, but I don't know how that would be possible since ebay doesn't have a giant database of every product to ever be produced. The api works by using basic key word searches and setting certain flags in the url string... similar to what you would do on their site when searching for sold auctions.

 

[Xian Xi]

I just posted a sale thread for some extra MVS stuff. The only item I don't know the value of is a complete English Fight Fever art set. I posted it at $50 OBO for now but will update when/if I figure out a reasonable price for it. Any ideas what it's worth?

$50 might sound high to some but for a complete artset I would say it's about $35-50. Not many full Fight Fever kits out there.

 

[FOMOCO&CO]

$50 might sound high to some but for a complete artset I would say it's about $35-50. Not many full Fight Fever kits out there.

What about a TSS kit nos-y (teh artz, bagged) no box/ no cart

 

[Xian Xi]

What about a TSS kit nos-y (teh artz, bagged) no box/ no cart

Probably like $50-100 or so. The buyer might pay more if it's the last thing he needs in making a full kit. About a $300-400 difference between bare cart and full kit.

 

[billbrasky]

I found an older version of the app on my laptop.. I have the latest code at work, but this should give you an idea of what I was going for. The latest version uses flot (an html5 graphing tool) to print out the price trends for each cart over time and I changed how you search for unvalidated auctions in the admin panel. You can go ahead and screw around in the admin panel and delete/validate auctions since this is just a test anyway.

http://99.13.50.120/neogeo/

(*let me know if the url doesn't work... it should but I don't have an external box to test with)

If you know some tricks on how to get the ebay api to only show sold auctions for a specific cart that would be great, but I don't know how that would be possible since ebay doesn't have a giant database of every product to ever be produced. The api works by using basic key word searches and setting certain flags in the url string... similar to what you would do on their site when searching for sold auctions.

nice this is great-- ebay keeps i think a 90 day archive of past auctions, so i mean we wouldn't be able to retrieve data older than that (if that is how long they archive). but once you start the process-- say if the scraping process started today, could at least begin archiving sold prices from 90 days ago (or whatever that trailing number of days is) to whenever (better late than never). but yeah, from what i remember you are right about the key word search. but i am trying to remember some clever workarounds, i think one had to do with knowing a store id (and figuring out how to build a list of store ids to then query). i suppose at this point though we can go PM with this conversation. i'll hit you up if i find anything along these lines. thanks man.

 

[dspoonrt]

$50 might sound high to some but for a complete artset I would say it's about $35-50. Not many full Fight Fever kits out there.

Thanks, XX. NeoGeo-Qatar snapped it up right away for the asking price. He said he'd value it around $45-50.

 

[ChuChu Flamingo]

Sometimes I think that worldwide shipping leads to higher prices because when your buyer looks to turn around and sell his item, he passes his shipping and import costs on to the next guy.

So, if I you sold a $30 cart, and worldwide shipping is $20, then the next price for the cart will be $50 + $20 worldwide shipping. Now, after that guy sells his cart, at $70 + 20 ww shipping, and so on and so on.

(I left import taxes and other fees out of the example to keep things simple.)

Now, when another member sees the $100 ww shipped sales thread, they get all excited start thinking that their $30 cart is now worth $100 (shipped), and try to sell their cart--for the $100 worldwide price. And the cycle continues.

And that does not factor in the eBay bidders that just outright act stupid and bid $100 (+ shipping) for $30 carts and hope they win it for less, cause they're crazy like that.

Sometimes I can't help but wonder if the arcade market is heating up a bit (maybe getting a bit too hot?) like some other collectible markets have, in the past.

I'll also add it doesn't help when European bros buy games when the currency exchange rate is horrendous for US so buying from US is no problem. The euro seller then resells back to US with the inflated exchange rate + shipping and then multiply this times a million and you see prices increase.

Everytime I see a for sales thread oh these look priced nicely, oh wait it is euros or dun dun dun pounds.

 

[billbrasky]

I'll also add it doesn't help when European bros buy games when the currency exchange rate is horrendous for US so buying from US is no problem. The euro seller then resells back to US with the inflated exchange rate + shipping and then multiply this times a million and you see prices increase.

Everytime I see a for sales thread oh these look priced nicely, oh wait it is euros or dun dun dun pounds.

well i think if you're mistaking euro prices for us dollars then that's a completely different problem and since ebay list directly underneath all items in foreign currency (current bid, shipping, etc.) in us dollars (while on ebay.com). that's a complete non-issue, most people will recognize the conversion rate and be like oh, yeah way too much with shipping. also, i could see people in europe willing to buy games from the us because yeah, the euro is stronger than the us dollar-- however, sometimes shipping from the us to europe makes it not worthwhile for even the difference in exchange rates. so this idea that everytime a game changes hands (eg. us <-> europe) the price of the game continually goes up is just not right. if this were true all things would never go down in value (and this is not true, maybe less the case for neo geo however). a fine example of how all things have a limit, even MOTW MVS (for at least up to today) take note:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEO-GEO-MVS...779?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item1c3021dc73
http://www.ebay.com/itm/GAROU-MARK-...280?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item1c30062c90

nobody is willing to fork out $200+ (yet) for a loose MOTW MVS cart (w/ shipping) and these have already been relisted because sellers are becoming a little too greedy (and now that there is nobody else selling their MOTW for less, these sellers are price fixing). the point is they need to sell these games (something isn't worth something until it's sold) and to make a profit and well we don't know their margins BUT we do know the ebay/paypal/shipping fees so we can at least assume that the starting ask ($175) is enough to cover that and still be worthwhile to them. but chances are they've purchased these games for no more than $100 and are working with quite a hefty margin (in terms of %) and well people keep buying them and at least today that isn't the case. point being so long as nobody gives in-- the price will come back to reality and we'll establish a more true and less inflated market value which honestly is probably shy of that $175 shipped. but if what you say were true, these wouldn't have seen a 2nd round of trying to get $200 BIN and having no takers.

either way, i'm working on an ebay aggregator and applying my degree in economics to it-- just going to staple that worthless thing to it. but instead of discussing it further i'm just going to make it happen and hopefully in the end people can accept the figures it produces and who knows maybe become an accepted price guide.

 

[IDCHAPPY]

The exchange rate is always going to be an issue, but it doesn't take much to work out reasonable £/€ equivalents.
Big hugs to James for giving a valuation, the first in the thread after 30 odd posts

 

[ChuChu Flamingo]

I was being sarcastic in not noticing the euros or pounds.

Most Neo Geo AES games are in europe now, at least thats what ive been seeing in the for sale threads. I've seen it with other retro stuff especially the neo geo. The exchange rate was terrible.

and yes the shit goes up between each seller. Just look at the whore known as metal slug AES when it keeps changing hands or JP AES games. There is a good reason most aes games are in europe.

All I am saying is it a contributing factor, not the sole reason.

 

[billbrasky]

I was being sarcastic in not noticing the euros or pounds.

Most Neo Geo AES games are in europe now, at least thats what ive been seeing in the for sale threads. I've seen it with other retro stuff especially the neo geo. The exchange rate was terrible.

and yes the shit goes up between each seller. Just look at the whore known as metal slug AES when it keeps changing hands or JP AES games. There is a good reason most aes games are in europe.

All I am saying is it a contributing factor, not the sole reason.

i agree my man, and yeah i don't think anyone can apply reason to the aes world. that is just insane and goes against a lot of conventions. seriously if i were to pursue a ph.d in econ i'd study the aes market

 

[LegoSlug]

Looks like both of those overpriced MOTW carts sold....

 

[rcantor77]

This is a great idea fro a thread... and a long time needed. The Price Guide on here is a joke.
So Rot... can we make this sticky...?

As for master_d's eBay Price Grabber, he showed it to me last year and it is awesome... it takes it out the anomolies, averages the sales and gives you good idea of the price. I have been waiting for him to finish it and then announce it himself, but now it looks like he is going to have to finish it and make it available for everyone.

 

[Tacitus]

I'm typing up a post now on market expectations, mainly due to this MMAO shit.

We need your help policing this stuff, I get tired enough monitoring the rest of the site! If you see something pop up, alert a mod or post in suggestions.

 

[Dr Shroom]

I'll also add it doesn't help when European bros buy games when the currency exchange rate is horrendous for US so buying from US is no problem. The euro seller then resells back to US with the inflated exchange rate + shipping and then multiply this times a million and you see prices increase.

Everytime I see a for sales thread oh these look priced nicely, oh wait it is euros or dun dun dun pounds.

All according to plan...

 

[kaicer]

this is nice, also some MVS cart had gone up in price, normally I saw games like the first fatal fury, art of fighting and world heroes with prices like $10 to $15 just the cart and sometimes with box, but now I see an increment of $20 for a price of $30 to $35 and just the cart for the MVS. Funny thing is I'm seeing AES cart going down in prices on ebay too for me is a problem cause I play more the MVS than the AES and also I can use the MVS on the consolize and the cabines not like the AES.