Buying video games on eBay: fake cartridges and who grades games now

Is WATA still grading video games?

No. Collectors Holdings retired the WATA Games label in 2025 and folded the operation into PSA Video Games, part of PSA (Professional Sports Authenticator). From October 15, 2025, every game sent in has come back in a PSA slab (the sealed plastic case a graded game is returned in) with a PSA label, and there's no independent WATA left to send a game to.

That date is also a quick test for any buying guide you find. If it talks about WATA as one of the graders you can choose between, it was written before October 2025 and hasn't been touched since.

The grading scale and the standards didn't change with the name. Only the label and the plastic case did.

You may also come across a 2022 class action against WATA that alleged market manipulation and conflicts of interest in the retro game market. A federal court in Colorado dismissed it without prejudice on March 31, 2026, after the plaintiffs didn't answer a court order.

Here's who grades games now:

Checked October 2026.

Turnaround depends on which service tier you pay for and moves with whatever backlog a grader is carrying, so take the current number from the grader's own service page. An article that says "PSA takes X days" is quoting one tier on one day.

If the listing has a WATA slab

A WATA slab is still a perfectly good slab. Existing WATA grades stay valid and recognized, and PSA will recase one into a current PSA holder with the grade carried over one to one. The fee reported at the changeover was about $20 per game. Grading fees move, so look at PSA's own service page before you plan around that number.

For a buyer, that works out to a few things:

• A WATA label on a 2026 listing is normal. It's a game that was graded before the switch, sitting in the holder it was graded in.
• A listing that says a game is "currently at WATA" is out of date or wrong, because nothing has gone in under that name since October 2025.
• A recased game hasn't been regraded. If a seller says a copy was recently "upgraded to PSA," ask whether the grade changed. Under a recase it doesn't.

The slab matters more for games than for a lot of what's on eBay, because eBay's Authenticity Guarantee doesn't cover video games. That's the program where eBay's authenticators examine an item before it's sent on to you. Its own page lists sneakers, handbags, watches, jewelry, streetwear, trading cards and coins, and games aren't on that list. Which categories eBay's Authenticity Guarantee covers goes through each one.

So on a graded game, the slab is the only outside check you get. You can verify it without leaving the couch. Ask for a photo sharp enough to read the certification number, look that number up on the grader's website, and make sure the game, the grade and the label all match the listing. Old WATA cert numbers still look up in PSA's database.

How do you spot a reproduction cartridge?

A reproduction cartridge, or repro, is a copy made to look like the original. It has essentially no collector value, even when it plays perfectly. Two carts can run the same game identically in a console and be worth wildly different amounts, because only one of them is the thing people collect.

You don't need the cart in your hands to check it. A seller who has it can photograph the three places where repros give themselves away. Ask in this order, because each one takes the seller a bit more effort than the last:

• Start with the label. Zoom in on the photos. Blurry printing or colors that look off are the usual sign of a repro label.
• Then look at the screws. Most licensed Nintendo cartridges were closed with security screws that a household screwdriver won't turn. On a standard licensed NES game, a plain Phillips screw in the back means someone opened the shell and swapped the screw, or the shell was never original. Older and imported carts don't follow one pattern: the earliest NES carts used flathead screws, and Famicom carts usually have no screws at all. For those, compare the back against a photo of a known-genuine copy of the same title. Either way, ask for a photo of the back.
• On anything expensive, ask to see the circuit board. A generic board, or one built around a flash chip (a rewritable memory chip holding a copy of the game), means a repro. A seller who'd rather not open a $400 cartridge isn't being unreasonable. Without that photo, though, you're judging the copy on its label and screws alone, so weigh the price with that in mind.

Repro listings tend to lean on stock photos, and listings that use AI-generated images are documented and rising, so a reverse image search won't settle it anymore. Ask for one photo of the actual cartridge next to a sheet of paper with today's date written on it. Then go through the twelve checks worth running on any eBay listing. If a repro shows up after being sold as genuine, the item doesn't match its listing, and eBay's Money Back Guarantee gives you 30 days from delivery to open a return for it.

What does CIB mean on a game listing?

CIB stands for complete in box. At the least it means the game, the box and the manual, which is how PriceCharting defines it for its prices. Plenty of collectors also expect every insert that shipped inside. eBay doesn't define the term anywhere, so two listings that both say CIB can describe very different piles of cardboard.

Ask what's included, item by item, before you bid. The pieces that go missing are the ones that look like packaging:

Then ask for one photo of everything laid out together. Someone who really has it all can take that photo in five minutes.

"Sealed" and "untested" promise less than they sound like

Sealed is a claim that the factory wrap has never been opened, and a photo can't prove that. A used game can be rewrapped in new plastic. Ask for close-ups of the wrap seams and corners, and put any doubt to the seller before you bid. That's a big part of why sealed games trade on a grader's label: PSA grades a sealed game's seal separately from its box.

Untested isn't an eBay condition. It doesn't appear anywhere in eBay's list of item conditions, so a seller who writes it has still had to pick a real condition from that list. Usually that's Used, which eBay says means the item is fully operational, or For parts or not working, which promises nothing. Read the condition field first and the description second. If the two disagree, that disagreement is your first question for the seller.

Save batteries, disc rot and buffed discs

Many cartridge games from the 1990s keep your saved progress in memory powered by a small battery on the board. When that battery runs flat, the save goes with it. Ask whether the game still saves and whether the battery has been replaced. A replaced battery is a repair, and if you want to play the game, that's good news. If you're buying the cart as a collectible, though, any sign the shell has been opened can count against it.

Disc rot is the reflective layer inside a disc breaking down until the disc won't read. On a CD it shows up as pin-prick holes of light when you hold the disc up to a strong lamp, so ask for a photo taken that way instead of one lying flat on a table.

Resurfacing, sometimes called buffing, takes scratches out by grinding away a thin layer of the disc's plastic. That can bring a scratched disc back to playable, and it lowers what a collectible copy is worth, because the surface isn't original anymore. If you're paying collector money for a disc, ask the seller whether it has ever been resurfaced before you bid.

Read the region off the box

Get the region from a photo of the actual item and not from the listing title. Anything recent enough to carry an age rating tells you its market: ESRB means North America, PEGI or USK means Europe, and CERO means Japan. Older games came out before those rating boards existed, so look at the language on the packaging and the product code on the label. On an NES cartridge, for example, the code on the front label ends in a region code such as USA.

Region matters in two ways. The first is whether the copy will run on your console. Region locking works differently from one system to the next. Japanese Famicom cartridges, for instance, are a different size and won't even fit an NES without an adapter. Check your own machine before you bid, because a copy that boots on your console and one that doesn't are two different purchases.

The second is price. A Japanese copy and a North American copy of the same game often sell in different price ranges, and eBay's search results mix them together. Hold a Japanese copy up against US prices and a perfectly ordinary listing can look like a bargain.

Pricing a game against the right copies

For what a game actually sells for, look at PriceCharting. Its prices come from completed sales, and each title is split into loose (the cartridge or disc on its own), complete in box, new and graded, so you can price the kind of copy in front of you. Its complete-in-box price covers game, box and manual only, and leaves the inserts out. Looking a game up is free and doesn't need an account. Paid plans start at $6 a month, and price downloads and API access sit on the $49-a-month plan. Our roundup of free deal-hunting tools covers where each of the others is useful.

If you use FindersKeepers, know what its deal badge is measured against: the average asking price of every active listing your search returned. We don't hold sold prices, so the badge tells you a listing is cheap next to the other asking prices right now. That isn't the same as cheap next to what copies of the game actually sell for. The gap between asking prices and sold prices is worth understanding before you trust any price check, ours included.

Games are where that average goes wrong most easily, because the average takes in bundles too. Search a console's whole library and you'll get loose carts, complete copies, graded slabs and "lot of 12 games" bundles in the same set of results. Those are four different products at four different price levels. The bundles pull the average up, and an ordinary loose cart suddenly looks like a find. Add the words that separate the copy you want from the rest until every result is the same kind of thing, and only then look at what's cheap.