Why I built NerdyScore

I mentioned Mike Etler's rarity guide earlier, but it's worth diving a little deeper into how it actually worked. Etler put his list together in the mid-'90s based on what came through his store in Howell, New Jersey. He watched what showed up, what didn't, and rated games relative to one another rather than trying to guess exactly how many copies had been made. It obviously had some flaws (ala Tombs and Treasures being an A-) but that had more to do with regionality than anything. Some games sold better in some parts of the US, and Tombs and Treasures obviously was one that did not sell well in NJ.

That's essentially what NerdyScore does, just on a much larger scale. Instead of watching what comes through one game store, NerdyScore watches what appears across the resale market and compares it with the rest of its platform's library. But at its core, the question is still the same one I cared about when I was carrying Etler's guide around: how hard is this game actually going to be to find?

NerdyScore isn't affiliated with Mike Etler or his guide. I just believe in giving credit where credit is due.

Long before NerdyScore, I created GameValueNow, a video game pricing site that I ran for around five years. It started as a labor of love, and for a long time I genuinely loved working on it.

Unfortunately, I'm what many would call a perfectionist, and one thing I learned pretty quickly is that there's no such thing as perfect when it comes to price guides. That didn't stop me from trying, though. I was always stressing about whether the pricing was right and putting a lot of unnecessary pressure on myself in the process. Over time, something I had created because I loved doing it started to feel more like a chore.

Life was also getting a little overwhelming, and I ran into some issues with eBay around the same time. Eventually, it just felt like the right time to move on.

So why do I think NerdyScore will be any different? I'm still a perfectionist, and I'm sure there will be plenty of times when I obsess over something more than I probably should. The difference is that I've learned a lot since then. I've learned that no price guide is ever going to be perfect, I've learned where my time is actually worth spending, and most importantly, I've built NerdyScore from the beginning with the goal of making it something I can actually manage without letting it take over my life.

In the end, I sold GameValueNow. It was the right decision for me and my family at the time, but as the years went by, it became one of those decisions I found myself wishing I could take back. I missed having something I'd built from the ground up, and I missed being part of the collecting community in that way.

I can't go back and make a different decision, but I can build something new. NerdyScore is my chance to do that.

The original idea for NerdyScore was actually a little different from what the site is today. At first, the plan was just the rarity guide, but then I thought it would be cool to come up with a single score for every game that combined the three pillars of collecting: how rare it was, what it was worth, and how much fun it was to play. That combination is where the name NerdyScore came from.

It sounded good in my head. In practice, it just didn't work.

The more I worked on the overall score, the more arbitrary it felt. What does it really mean for a game to score an 87 because it's rare, expensive, and fun? Is an expensive game somehow better than an inexpensive one? I kept adjusting the formula, but eventually I realized I was trying to force three useful pieces of information into one number that wasn't particularly useful at all. The individual pieces told a much better story on their own.

When I started NerdyScore, I had already told myself I wasn't going to build another video game pricing system. I'd done that with GameValueNow, and I knew firsthand how much work went into keeping one running. My original plan was to use PriceCharting's data for the pricing side of NerdyScore and focus my time elsewhere.

Then I started building the rarity system. In order to figure out how difficult games were to find, I had to collect and analyze huge amounts of marketplace data. Eventually I realized that basically all of the data I would need to calculate prices myself was already sitting right in front of me. Despite telling myself I would never go down this rabbit hole again, I felt compelled to see what I could do with it.

I had one thing going for me this time around: the benefit of starting from scratch. During my years running GameValueNow, I'd come up with ideas for things I wanted to improve, both in how pricing worked and in how much effort it took to maintain. Making those changes to an established site would have been incredibly difficult. With NerdyScore, I could design them into the system from the ground up.

One of the biggest improvements has been finding better ways to distinguish variants from the base game. This was a big time sink for me on GameValueNow. A Greatest Hits copy and a Black Label copy may technically be the same game, but collectors don't necessarily value them the same way. The same problem comes up with alternate covers, reprints, special releases, and other variants. When those listings get mixed together, they can distort the picture of what a particular version is actually worth.

This was one of those things I always wanted to approach differently if I ever had the chance to start over. So this time around, I've spent a lot of time finding ways to separate those listings accurately without requiring all of my attention to do it.

I've also changed the way I think about the market itself. Sold listings are a big part of how NerdyScore determines value. They show what people have actually been willing to pay, and that's obviously one of the strongest signals we have. But I've come to believe that sold listings alone only tell part of the story.

The active market matters too. What's available for sale right now, how much inventory is out there, and what sellers are asking all help paint a more complete picture of the current market. Because NerdyScore was already collecting active listing data for rarity, I realized I had an opportunity to look at both sides rather than treating pricing as a history of completed sales alone. I believe this paints a better picture of the current market than what I was able to do with GameValueNow.

Then there's Fun Factor. Rarity and price are pretty objective things we can try to measure with data, but neither one tells you whether a game is actually any good. Some of the rarest and most expensive games out there aren't particularly fun to play, while some of the most common and inexpensive games are among the best games ever made. A $10 game you can't put down can be a lot more interesting than a $1,000 game you'd never actually want to play.

That's ultimately why I stopped trying to combine everything into one magic number. Rarity tells you how difficult the hunt might be. Pricing tells you what the market says a game is worth. Fun Factor tells you something neither of those can: what people think of the game itself.

They're related, but they're different questions. They became much more useful once I let them stand on their own.

The funny part is that the name NerdyScore stuck.

Now to the collection tracker. This is probably the part of NerdyScore that means the most to me, because it brings me right back to what I loved about tracking my collection on NintendoAge all those years ago.

I love being able to look at an entire library and see what I own, what I'm missing, which rare games I still need to find, and even which common games have somehow escaped me. Price, rarity, and Fun Factor are all useful when looking at an individual game, but seeing all of that information across my collection is where it really comes together for me. It's what makes NerdyScore feel complete.

There's still a lot I want to do with NerdyScore. I want it to keep becoming the kind of collecting resource I would have wanted when I was walking around game shops with Mike Etler's rarity guide in my hand. More platforms, better coverage, better data, and plenty of ideas I haven't gotten to yet.

There will always be things the data gets wrong, especially as the site grows. If you see something that doesn't look right, I'd rather hear about it than not. You can reach me at support@nerdyscore.com.