Gamestop Germany today together with Gold Standard Grading announced in an Instagram post that from now on cards can be graded with GSG in select (and soon all) Gamestop locations in Germany. In the post they make the rather bold claims of GSG being Europe’s largest grading company and raising the value of cards comparable to PSA. Now if you were to be mean you could say that two struggling companies join forces as I personally have the impression that GSG lost their lead as the most popular German grading company (at least TCG wise) in the last 1-2 years. However I’m curious if this will affect the German grading market, especially regarding younger or more casual collectors who may not have been exposed to grading as directly before. And of course if Gamestop in Germany takes further steps in the future like buying and selling graded cards in their stores as they now do in the US (and if they do I wonder whether they’ll be PSA, GSG or maybe even both).
Has CGC managed to build a good presence in Germany due to the submission office in Munich? Or are people still preferring PSA? Also I was not aware that GameStop was this big name in gaming shops in Germany.
Thanks for sharing the news.
Cheers!
I personally have not seen much CGC. Mainly PSA and sometimes Beckett or AOG. However looking back at the Gala TCG Germany, Lama Cards (the vendor with the largest selection of graded cards) did have like I would guess 25% CGC slabs, especially for the less expensive cards. But since before CGC opened their office in Germany there wasn’t even really a third party middleman service for them iirc (just for PSA & Beckett) or at least they got one last of the major American companies, I think they’re the least used option of the three American companies here from my impression.
To be honest, GameStop is no longer such a big name in Germany either. The first smaller stores were closed a while ago, and the massive drop in revenue is noticeable.
CGC, in my opinion, isn’t really established among individual collectors. However, the service is mainly used by established dealers, especially to have cards graded cheaply for Whatnot and then sell them off there.