Welcome to VeVe! The Fast Fashion of Digital Collecting!
I am Doublequill, an underdog who collects underdogs on the VeVe platform, and I’m going to talk about a very unpopular opinion, because it needs to be discussed.
Most people who’ve lived in Vegas for a while don’t really go to casinos to gamble much. We go there to eat at a restaurant, go to the movies, or go bowling. You become almost blind to slot machines most of the time; after all, they’re not just in casinos here, they’re in gas stations, convenience stores, and grocery stores. Why anyone would want to hang around a grocery store and play slots, I don’t know, but they’re there.
On the rare occasion that I do wander into a casino to play machines, I look for a machine that’s pretty hard to find these days: it’s called 100 Play Poker. Typically, it costs a penny or five cents per draw (so a dollar to five dollars total), and the reason I play it isn’t to win money, but to kill time and get a lot of casino reward points.
The way it works is pretty simple: you put in a dollar, and it draws a master hand at the bottom where you can hold certain cards. If there are two Jacks or three of a kind, whatever, you hold them, and it applies to all 100 hands. Most of the time you get junk, and you decide to hold an ace, or just let caution fly and don’t hold anything. Then it fills out all the poker hands and tells you which ones win and which ones don’t.
The benefit to the game is that, unless you decide to hold all five cards of a losing hand, you’re going to get something back. It’s a matter of percentages; out of a hundred random hands of poker, you’re going to get some pairs, flushes, and so on in the mix. This means that even if you have a weak master hand at the beginning, you know that you’re going to win some of your money back. It may be ninety cents or thirty cents, or whatever, but by getting part of your money back every single time you play, it means you can play that game a very long time before you finally run out of money.
Of course, the drawback to this method is that wins tend to lose their impact. Yes, there’s a chance that you can get a good master hand, like three of a kind or something that lets you get your money back plus extra. But after sitting there plugging partial dollars into the machine for a while, those wins are pretty muted. One starts going for riskier plays to try to get all kings or royal flushes just so that you can break even and get ahead. Or, in a more likely outcome, walk away with a cashout so pitiful that you don’t even bother turning it in. It’s just a long, drawn-out cannibalization process where your money goes away in smaller increments so you can push the button more often on the same amount of cash.
So, I know the game well and its rules… at the twenty dollar an hour level. I have no hope of playing that sort of game with VeVe comics and collectibles; it’s too high of a buy-in. But I know it’s being played. Why else would so many be willing to instantly throw back their commons and uncommons at such low prices all of the time? They’re playing the percentage game. They’re content with getting those partial wins so they can get another pull. It’s the same exact game, just at a scale that’s above my head.
Why would I ever need to even go for a drop while there are people doing that? There’s no incentive for me. I collect uncommon comics.
Why gamble when all I have to do is pick up their rejects in twenty minutes? They’re so busy getting instant gratification, they don’t stick around to see what happens to the prices of some of those uncommons after the comic burns. They’re all about the next drop, regardless of what IP it is.
As for the store, it’s pretty much irrelevant to me once the market opens.
Once the cannibals are out of the way, everyone else on the platform can pick up what they like for a fraction of the price. What is the point of even having a store if they’re going to open up the market so soon after the drop is over?
Unless you want the secret rare and don’t think you can afford it on the secondary, the only people who are incentivized to buy from the store again are the cannibals. Recently, however, most of the secret rares have been reasonable as well. That means that everyone else simply waits, knowing that we’ll be able to pick up the sets for a lot less than most of those cannibals spent on their initial buy-in.
I feel like we’ve been letting this happen for far too long, really. As much as I personally benefit from getting tossed bones in the market, this sort of attitude is hurting a lot more than helping.
Would it really be so terrible if VeVe waited on releasing items on the market right away, so that people would buy from the store? So that artists could get paid for their work? So that we can take a step back and get a breather from the instant gratification?
If this is supposed to be ‘Collectors at Heart’, why feed the beast that’s keeping these collectibles from being relevant after that first half hour? It’s not sustainable.
As an experiment… perhaps with a willing artist or something else flexible… why not try longer holds on the market? 1 hour, or 24 hours, or even a week. Or, perhaps run all of them as experiments, just to see what happens.
I really feel like this current fast fashion approach is hurting rather than helping, and I think if other collectors would step back a bit and think about this from a long-term approach, they might see it too.
We need to stop flipping ourselves out of existence.