Buddy of mine has several ongoing auctions on that site.
The owner of Heritage Auctions personally drove to his house and bought $70k worth of sealed games, no joke. Basically, the guy is trying to get people to invest in sealed games as an alternative to art, comic books, baseball cards, etc. He sees it as the next big thing.
Once celebrities get involved in speculation, that may be it for game collecting, as a whole.
Jon
I was into sports cards back in the day, but the scene around them is gone. Comics are still a thing, but the monitary value attached to them has plummeted as well. These genres had their day in the sun.
Now enter video games. A generation of kids finally have jobs and can afford to buy up all the games they wanted in their youth. Tack on the YT retro channels, and you have two demographics willing to pay almost any price for any game. It has created a bubble, and when you can identify a bubble, it usually means its going to pop.
After this wave comes and goes, there is nothing available to replace it. The interest level will drop off a cliff in 5-8 years causing that "gem mint" copy of Robot Alchemic Drive (PS2) to be worthless. Advances in technology are also obsoleting the console hardware. It gets harder to play older systems with each HDTV resolution shift.
For todays youth, digital services are the norm. Try telling a millenial they have to wait a week to play a game, "Prime" isn't available, and they have to fight someone else in a bidwar to get it. Also they need special hardware that isn't their laptop or phone to play it.
People are paying for fucking emotes in games for christ sake. They are spending gobs of money on trivial shit that anyone who played Starcraft/Quake would get for free from the community. The CS:GO knife skin shit is absolutely out of this world. People crying and sobbing when someone with mad youtube subs gifts them a texture asset? What in the fuck.
Eventually, there will be a generation of people who will look at you as if you are insane, when you say "But, you get to build a computer! And connect all these wires, and run spinning fans. Its just $2000!" As they unroll their 1mm thin tablet and begin streaming Assassins Creed Galaxies from a Cloud Server with Quad SLI Raytracing GPUs.