Grading and Market Value, When a Score Changes Everything

During the procedure, the title is visually examined to identify any defects, alterations, or signs of age; secondly, its original elements are verified (seals, manuals, discs, or cartridges) and it is classified according to a numerical scale from 1 to 10, which defines its quality.

Infine, the product is placed in a transparent plexiglass case, non-openable and tamper-proof, with an official label that shows its grading and details, including the game title, release year, and the parameters with the scores shown.

The evaluation is carried out by a carefully selected committee of qualified experts, made up of figures from multiple specific sectors, such as entrepreneurs, lawyers, notaries, video game producers, professional collectors, and trade specialists.

Tali valuations are carried out objectively by analyzing hundreds of measurable parameters, including the quality of the materials, the state of preservation, the integrity of the seal, and much more. In addition, each assessment is contextualized historically, meaning that the production standard of the era in which the game was published and the average preservation conditions typical of that period are taken into account.

Questo approach allows the most accurate, impartial, and consistent evaluation possible. The team of experts who evaluate the titles to be graded is led by two highly specialized professionals: Federico Salerno, a lawyer and professional collector with years of legal and technical experience in the protection and enhancement of collectible assets, and Carlo Santagostino, a historian of computing and video games, a developer with decades of experience in the e-commerce, multimedia, and digital applications sectors, capable of bringing a scientific and philological approach to the historical evaluation of titles. In addition, The Games Market has developed an additional support tool for the grading procedure: thanks to a proprietary system that uses artificial intelligence, TGM has access to a database of hundreds of thousands of original specimens, constantly updated and allowing each individual video game to be compared.

Thanks to leading professionals in the field, such as the aforementioned Carlo Santagostino, it assigns historical and collectible value and offers an official and impartial guarantee of the authenticity of the graded title. Today, it is the global standard for those who wish to transform a simple video game into a museum-grade collectible.

Bly graded preserves its value over time, and preservation itself determines its value: a graded note can be worth even 10 times more than the same note sealed but not graded, which instead loses value (wear, moving, yellowing, etc).

With the grading process, the video game gains much more value not only economically, but also in the context of preservation, ideally connecting the nostalgia effect and its real value as a collector’s item as well as the cultural value of a collectible title.