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| WATA Releases First-Ever Population Report | |
| Initial release includes NES games and will be expanded. Full, dynamic Pop Report to be released early next year. |
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| The team at WATA is excited to share with you our first-ever Population Report. This initial release is centered on Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) games and we will be expanding the report to include games from other systems in the coming months. We are putting the finishing touches on a full, dynamic population report – including all games and grading categories – by early next year and we can’t wait to share that with you. | |
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| Now, we’d like to share with you our take on where we are going and how you can help get us to the next level with the WATA Population Report. We know you will all have questions related to the Pop Report and our plans to expand it so we have included this Q&A here with more details. | |
| WATA Games Population Report Q&A | |
| Q: Why does this Pop Report only include NES games?
A: NES games are our largest submitted system and we wanted to make sure to provide the greatest benefit to our customers right away. Q: Why not wait to release a full Pop Report? A: We felt compelled to share something of note with our collecting community now and while this is by no means a full picture, it does provide a solid look at grading stats for NES games. This particular report is a limited, temporary effort while we work on the more robust process of generating dynamic Pop Reports for all systems. Q: Why no seal ratings? A: The bottom line is we very much want to include seal ratings going forward, but we couldn’t achieve it in this version due to the complicated nature of gathering all the data and sharing it in a digestible, user-friendly manner. We appreciate that a pop report without seal ratings is incomplete, but we didn’t want to make perfect the enemy of the good. We will get there soon! Q: When do you think seal ratings and live Pop Reports will be available? A: We are very close. We are in the midst of perfecting the live Pop Report currently and believe that we can release the best version, the one everybody wants to see, in the first few months of 2022. Q: What’s going to change with the updated Pop Reports? A: The most significant changes will be to a dynamic (live) format, which will update automatically based on graded submissions, as well as the addition of seal ratings and more robust variant information. We have worked hard to consolidate variants so that the data is interpretable for collectors of all levels of knowledge. This initial version includes the most major variants for the NES games we have identified and graded so far. Meanwhile, we are building the resources to fully understand and interpret the complex nature of video game variants, even to the most granular level. Q: Will Pop Reports exist for CIB games and Carts? A: Our more detailed rundown of Pops will also include unopened, "Complete In Box" (CIB) games as well as loose Cartridges as part of the forthcoming Pop edition. We have provided a sample of what that will look like with some sample data from the most-submitted NES CIB’s and Nintendo World Championship cartridges. |
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| We want your feedback. We’ve created an inbox that is ready to receive your suggestions and observations. Overall, our data is accurate, but it may need the occasional refinement. Yes, we are creating the best Pop Report presentation possible, but could still use your help. Please let us know if you see anything that needs updating or correcting before we launch our upgraded version in early 2022 by emailing us at popreport@watagames.com. Your input is very much appreciated.
With that, I want to take a moment and apologize to our valued and loyal customers who have been so patient with us these last few months. As many of you know, we were recently acquired by Collectors Universe and as we have focused on building the future of WATA with new services and products that will benefit our customers, we have admittedly not been very good at telling you what we’ve been up to. For that, I want to apologize sincerely and give you my personal guarantee that we are going to do better. We are dedicating a tremendous amount of resources to both working through the existing backlog and to improving our communications, and you should begin feeling the effects of these improvements very shortly if not already. Thank you all for helping grow our hobby and making WATA what it is today. Without you, we’d be nowhere. We are infinitely appreciative of your support and will continue to serve you better. Deniz Kahn, |
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