Pokémon YouTuber Sells His Cards to GameStop and It’s a Disaster

In a surprise twist, GameStop recently announced internally, some of its stores would begin buying and selling collectibles classified like Pokémon cards. There were immediately a bunch of questions like “how?” and why?” A YouTuber recently tested exactly how the process works.

Pokémon trading card collector and Controversial YouTuber Lee “Leonhart” Steinfeld visited a GameStop at a mall near Dallas, Texas, one of the few testing sites for the new initiative. Greeting the poor employee the very morning the store opened, Steinfeld handed him a bunch of cards, including a Miriam Trainer and a completely artistic Squirtle from the base. Scarlet And Purple together, to see how they were evaluated and what he could get out of them.

“It’s cool,” the employee, which Steinfeld recorded, said as he flipped through the PSA graded cards in their acrylic cases. “So how does this whole rating thing work? » (The GameStop employee later said Kotaku he didn’t feel ambushed and was happy to learn on the spot but also didn’t know that Steinfeld was filming him.)

GameStop announced the trade-in program earlier this month and began rolling it out immediately without taking the time to do much training. While scanning codes on graded cases helps determine what the card should look like and what amounts the store can offer, it’s up to employees to go through an eleven-point checklist to ensure the cards don’t. are not fraudulent.

The GameStop employee in the video naturally ends up having to call a supervisor to walk him through the training in real time while dealing with other customers who come into the store to buy real games. He looks at the cards, holds them up to the light and tries to check for any signs of tampering, but as would you, me or anyone else who is not trained in detecting fake, counterfeit or collectibles classified PSA. , the process seems purely vibration-based.

Steinfeld estimated the value of the cards he was trading in advance based on recent eBay listings, and the actual amounts GameStop paid him varied, from pretty good to pretty terrible. In total, he received $157 for cards worth an estimated $328, or nearly 50 percent of the estimated value.

That might not seem like much considering how easy it is to sell a handful of cards online, but consider this: That’s way more than you’d get trading your actual decks. GameStop will currently only give you $20 in cash for Starblade, which costs $70 new on PlayStation 5 and was released less than a month ago. Then again, games are commodities and PSA cards are, by definition, collectibles. It’s hard to imagine who is selling their rare Lugia to GameStop rather than another collector on Facebook or eBay.

Then again, Steinfeld apparently fared better than some of his own fans in purchasing his own Pokémon mystery boxes. Some buyers of his gifts reported receiving less than a third of the value of what they paid for them.