On January 22, CGC Video Games announced it now grades Famicom, Japanese Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Atari cartridges, Sega Genesis, PS1, and Dreamcast games. That's a massive expansion into international and retro territory that the company barely touched a year ago.
This isn't just a product update. It's a land grab.
The WATA Vacuum
To understand why CGC is pushing this hard, you need to understand what happened to the competition.
WATA Games was the dominant name in video game grading from 2018 through the pandemic boom. Then the floor fell out. In May 2022, a class-action lawsuit accused WATA and Heritage Auctions of colluding to inflate retro game prices. The allegations were ugly. WATA employees selling their own graded games at inflated prices. CEO Deniz Kahn allegedly working with Heritage co-founder Jim Halperin to hype the market through coordinated press while hiding their financial ties. A game that sold for $100,000 in 2019 got valued at over $300,000 on Pawn Stars nine months later by Kahn himself, who pretended not to know the co-buyer.
WATA denied everything. Collector trust never recovered.
By October 2025, WATA wasn't even WATA anymore. Collectors Holdings folded the brand into PSA. Same parent company that owns PSA, SGC, and Beckett for trading cards. One corporate umbrella controlling nearly everything in third-party authentication.
The video game grading market is now PSA (formerly WATA) on one side and CGC on the other. VGA still exists for vintage purists, but at scale, this is a two-horse race. CGC clearly wants to win it.
What the Expansion Actually Covers
The January 22 announcement adds grading for most international releases. Famicom and Japanese handheld games are the headline, but the full list includes Atari Jaguar, TurboGrafx-16, Sega Genesis cartridges, PS1 long boxes and jewel cases, and Dreamcast. CGC also simplified its grading tiers. Standard tier runs $40 per game for titles with a fair market value under $2,500. Modern Bulk is $27 per game. Standard Bulk is $45. All bulk tiers require a 25-game minimum.
For comparison, the old tier structure was a mess. Multiple overlapping options with confusing thresholds. Now it's clean. Two main tiers. Bulk discounts for volume. That kind of simplification matters when you're trying to pull collectors away from an established competitor.
The Price Hikes Though
CGC did raise prices across the board effective January 6. For trading cards, Bulk went from $14 to $15. Economy jumped from $17 to $18. Standard climbed from $45 to $55.
We wrote about the broader grading price squeeze earlier this week. CGC is not immune to the same pattern hitting PSA. Demand goes up, prices follow. Both companies are doing it.
But here's the difference. CGC's video game grading is still cheaper than PSA's for most submissions. And CGC doesn't carry the WATA baggage. No class-action lawsuit. No allegations of market manipulation. No employees caught flipping their own graded inventory.
That's a real competitive advantage right now. Trust.
Will It Work?
Probably. The retro gaming market is smaller than trading cards but growing fast. Sealed game collecting survived the 2022 crash that followed the WATA scandal. Prices corrected hard from the pandemic highs, but the underlying collector base stuck around. A sealed copy of Sonic the Hedgehog graded 9.4 sold for $420,000 in 2025. People are still spending real money on slabbed games.
CGC's play is smart for three reasons. They're expanding into formats PSA hasn't fully absorbed yet. Japanese game collecting is massive and was underserved by WATA. The simplified pricing removes friction. And the convention circuit matters in this hobby. CGC accepted submissions at Collect-A-Con Miami in February. MegaCon Orlando is March 19-22. WonderCon Anaheim is March 27-29. You build trust face-to-face with the people who ship sealed games across the country in bubble wrap and prayers.
The question isn't whether CGC can compete. They already are. The question is whether PSA's inherited WATA customer base stays loyal to a brand that just had its name changed for them, or starts looking at the other slab on the shelf.
CGC's Standard tier for video games is $40 per game with no membership required. That's the number they're betting on.
