I admit it - I cheated!

...but I did it for purely economic reasons.

Pokemon Diamond and Pearl have become fabulous bets-selling games for the Nintendo DS. These latest titles in the Pokemon series that started with the GameBoy add more Pokemon to catch and use the WiFi capabilities of the DS for battling and trading. I have to say I have been underwhelmed with the trading possibilities, as anyone I've come across with something to trade wants something ridiculously more valuable in exchange for what they're offering. A parallel in football would be offering to trade your injured third-string quarterback for Reggie Bush. Another feature of the DS games which is designed to reward long-time devotees is the ability to transfer pokemon captured in GameBoy Advance cartridges to the DS game card.

By now you may be wondering Why am I writing about this on a game economics blog. Here's what I'm getting at. With the WiFi trading capability, people are now selling rare Pokemon that could only have been caught in the old GameBoy Advance (GBA)titles. They will send it to you via WiFi once they receive your payment and your friend code that identifies your particular Nintendo DS. I considered taking advantage of this to complete my own virtual Pokemon collection. I have logged over 900 hours of playing time over the course of four GBA cartridges, yet there ewre still some Pokemon unattainable to me because you need to get a special ticket which had to be scanned into your GBA at special Nintendo events. (The tickets have also bee for sale on the internet). So either I by the tickets or the Pokemon invidually and I spend $15 for the ones I need. Also, some Pokemon are only available if you have a GameCube and Pokemon Colliseum - that comes to about $90 if you buy both used.

SO, as an alternative to $100+ to get what I "need" to complete my Pokedex (the thing in the game that keeps track of your collection), I went and cheated by getting a $20 GameShark for my GBA. This miraculous device plugs into the GBA and your cartridge plugs into the GameShark. You select which Pokemon you want to catch from a menu, start the game and then go catch it. Unlike the tickets or the WiFi transfers, the GameShark is the gift that keeps on giving. You can capture the very Pokemon that are being sold for $5 a pop as many times as you want - so instead of being a consumer I can be the seller if want to - and that would more than pay for the GameShark.

Now that I've bored you with my own personal story, what I really wanted to get you to think about is whether there are unintended negative consequences of the WiFi transfer feature that Nintendo put into the game. Will the real-world sales of Pokemon drive more and more people to resort to the GameShark or it's cousin the Action Replay to get their rare pokemon. And then, the rare Pokemon will lose their prestige when everyone has one. Does this eventually cause a decline in interest for the series? Perhaps Nintendo can respond to this by devising methods to prevent this in future titles, but they would bear some cost of development and QA to make sure backwards compatibility is retained.

Using the Pokemon example as a template, are there similar situations that are prone to suffer the same shifts as those I have conceived above? That is, upon shifting to WiFi or other wireless forms of access, what new goods and services will be offered to the detriment of their overall value - by becoming accessible to more consumers, by driving consumers to create or employ less expensive means to obtain the good or service, or by driving consumers to a different good or service that fulfills the consumer's underlying need in a different way?