The Gene comparison never made sense. Gene had a game fully designed and even had lots of parts. He essentially just had to manufacture. Absolutely a difficult task - but in the grand scheme of things - having a game already makes things a lot easier than starting from scratch.

No, the money factor plays heavily into the psychology about why people would pay $16k for a boutique game. BBB proved that limited run + cool art = collector demand rises over time. In other words, a guaranteed sure thing (financially speaking). Many Jpop buyers told me (paraphrasing) "What's $16 or $10k when it's going to be worth $35k or more!" Many buyers were absolutely looking at what happened to BBB and other market trends such as AC/DC BIBLE, Tron LE, and MM (this was before MMr). This psychology was getting us to pay more for Stern & JJP games as well - multiple thousands didn't seem like a big deal when a bigger return was surely guaranteed by the time it came to sell.

Since no one actually knew what Jpop was selling - there were never designs or fleshed out concepts up front when he started taking orders...people were absolutely buying on rarity speculation & banking on "the next BBB".