Grading Is Not Just Certification. It's Marketing.
by The Games Market RedazioneApril 30, 2026
Between Montechiari and Como Fun, NeoPlay doubled its revenue.
Si parla di grading as a technical act. A case, an evaluation, a score, a sealed slab. It is described as an operation of certification and therefore, by extension, as an operation that concerns the individual piece.
Grading protects, measures, certifies: everything the object was before. It is a convenient reading, and it is wrong.
The grading, when it truly enters a trade show booth, does not act on the piece. It acts on what is around the piece. It acts on the seller, on the audience, on the distance between the two. It acts on the merchant’s perception, on the time a visitor spends standing in front of a display window, on the probability that that display window will be remembered in the evening, at dinner, after the trade show.
It acts on turnover, but only as a side effect of something more interesting: it acts on attention.
È for this that grading, in trade show marketing, is not a technical service. It is a strategic lever. And like all real levers, it is not measured by the weight it moves, but by the multiplier it produces on the rest of the system.
The NeoPlay case at Como Fun, just a few days after its participation in Montechiari, is the clearest way to prove it: same stand, same company, same setup, same basic materials, same price list.
Grading does not act on the piece. It acts on what is around the piece.
Montechiari, the baseline
NeoPlay arrives in Montechiari as a new company, which is establishing itself in the market. A corner stand of five meters by three there is the counter, there is the material, there is the owner’s availability.
It competes with other similar stands, each with the same exhibition grammar, each speaking to the visitor through a single question: how much does it cost.
How Fun, the variation
A few days later, NeoPlay is featured at Como Fun.
One of the main differences is an additional investment of € 2,500: € 500 for TGMGrading grading on pieces selected from your own archive, € 2,000 for graded material purchased specifically.
In terms of the booth, little changes. A few TGMGrading slabs placed in the most visible spots.
There is no redesign, there is no new signage, there is no preparatory communication campaign. There is only the physical introduction of grading within the same environment as before.
In terms of results, everything changes.
In the first three hours of the trade fair, 200 people stop by the stand. They don’t just walk past, they don’t glance casually: they stop.
They remain. The conversion to purchase is 15%: thirty people who buy.
The average measured time spent, because this time there is something to measure, is 7 minutes per visitor.
In a trade fair where the average dwell time in front of a booth ranges between twenty seconds and one minute, seven minutes are an eternity.
![[The three hours that changed everything. Live updates from the NeoPlay booth, first session of Como Fun.]](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.thegamesmarket.com%2Fapi%2Fv1%2Ffile%2Fproxy%3Fkey%3Dstaging%252Fmagazine%252Fcontent%252Fil-grading-non--solo-una-certificazione--marketing-img-0.png&w=3840&q=75)
The total revenue for the two days is € 8,000. Exactly double Montechiari.
![[The doubling of revenue between the two fairs. Same stand, same company, same prices; only one variable.]](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.thegamesmarket.com%2Fapi%2Fv1%2Ffile%2Fproxy%3Fkey%3Dstaging%252Fmagazine%252Fcontent%252Fil-grading-non--solo-una-certificazione--marketing-img-1.png&w=3840&q=75)
The revenue multiplier, by itself, tells part of the story.
It is the data that emerges first, and it is the easiest to communicate: grading invested, turnover doubled, ROI of +160%. It is a simple, demonstrable, replicable calculation.
![[The economics of grading: €2,500 invested, €4,000 net increase, ROI +160% in two days of trade fair.]](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.thegamesmarket.com%2Fapi%2Fv1%2Ffile%2Fproxy%3Fkey%3Dstaging%252Fmagazine%252Fcontent%252Fil-grading-non--solo-una-certificazione--marketing-img-2.png&w=3840&q=75)
But the revenue multiplier is the last effect in the chain, not the first. And to understand why it works, you need to look at what happened before.
Before the revenue, there was the stay
— seven minutes in front of a shop window. Before the stay there was attention
— two hundred people who stopped in three hours. Before attention there was curiosity
— the feeling, for those who passed by, that in that booth there was something worth understanding. And before curiosity there was a shift in perception: that booth, which at Montechiari was indistinguishable from twenty others, was no longer so at Como Fun.
Il grading, in other words, first and foremost operated on the mental category in which the stand was placed by the visitor.
A Montechiari: price as the only driver.
A Como Fun: a shop that works with grading, so a shop that knows the market, a shop that deserves at least a close look from passersby.
A closer look becomes a stop. A stop becomes a conversation. A conversation becomes a purchase. And sometimes — and this is the detail that numbers do not tell — it becomes a customer who comes back the second day, who sends a friend, who asks about a piece that wasn’t even for sale. Revenue doubles.
What really doubled was not the product. It was the context in which the product was being sold.
The five multipliers
![[The five multipliers of grading. Revenue is only the first effect; below is the chain that produces it.]](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.thegamesmarket.com%2Fapi%2Fv1%2Ffile%2Fproxy%3Fkey%3Dstaging%252Fmagazine%252Fcontent%252Fil-grading-non--solo-una-certificazione--marketing-img-3.png&w=3840&q=75)
The NeoPlay case clearly shows that grading at trade fairs does not work along a single axis.
Work simultaneously on five. And only one of the five is normally tracked by the merchant, namely... revenue.
The other four are the invisible multipliers, the ones that explain why the first one moves.
1) The first is the revenue multiplier. The measurable effect, the figure that ends up in the till. In the case of NeoPlay it is a factor of 2. It is the most obvious and also the least interesting, because it is only the final output.
2) The second is the attention multiplier. The same stand, at the same trade fair, with the same material, goes from little-known to attractive. The number of people passing by does not change: what changes is the number of people who stop. Grading acts as a recognition signal — it tells the visitor that inside there is a level of expertise and selection that is not found elsewhere.
3) The third is the trust multiplier. The same dealer, with graded TGMG titles in the showcase, attracts. Not because grading guarantees the seller — but because it communicates that the seller has invested in a validation process, and those who invest in validation are hardly poorly structured.
4) The fourth is the time multiplier. 7 minutes of average dwell time is a figure that, in the language of conversion at a trade fair, amounts to a radical restructuring of the relationship between visitor and seller. More time means more conversation, more conversation means more information shared, more information means more chances of purchase. Time, at a trade fair, is currency: the more of the visitor’s time you have, the higher the average spend will be.
5) The fifth is the conversion multiplier. A curious audience is not necessarily a buying audience. But a curious audience that spends seven minutes at the stand, that talks with the owner, that gets to handle a slab, that understands why that piece has that value — that audience gets significantly closer to the purchase threshold.
The 15% conversion rate on 200 people stopped is not an abstract number: it is the direct result of the four previous multipliers that lined up in sequence. Taken together, the five multipliers tell the same story: grading, inside a booth, is not a product update. It is a realignment of context. And context, at a trade show, is the real product.
People do not stop to buy
There is one sentence that NeoPlay could take away from Como Fun, and that is the most useful to deliver to any other retailer reading this article: people do not stop to buy. They stop to understand.
Grading creates curiosity. Curiosity creates traffic. Traffic creates sales. But the crucial point is the direction of the link: you don’t sell first, you spark curiosity first.
Chi prova a partire dalla vendita skips the initial step and gets — literally — half of the possible revenue. Here, however, comes the final tightening of the screws. The NeoPlay case works because NeoPlay was not alone: inside the booth it had an asset, TGMGrading grading, which is the result of a process, an infrastructure, a network.
Un retailer who attempts to replicate the effect with improvised grading, without a safety net, without standards, without brand recognizability, gets the shell without the content.
Grading is the lever. But the lever works only if it has a fulcrum. The fulcrum, for the retailer, is the network. Whoever stays outside the network holds the lever in hand, but does not know where to place it.
Cover photo credits opening article Comofun
Publication authorized by NeoPlay S.r.l.
Publication authorized by NeoPlay S.r.l.
The Games Market Redazione
The Games Market è una piattaforma internazionale dedicata a videogiochi contemporanei e retrogame. Offre dati di mercato, strumenti tecnologici e servizi come il grading TGM per valorizzare e acquistare videogiochi con consapevolezza.
The Games Market Redazione
The Games Market è una piattaforma internazionale dedicata a videogiochi contemporanei e retrogame. Offre dati di mercato, strumenti tecnologici e servizi come il grading TGM per valorizzare e acquistare videogiochi con consapevolezza.