Quoted from CaptainNeo:newbies are starting to wise up and think before they buy. We had a big rush of brand new people the past year and a half to 2 years. Think many are not being compulsive buyers and think before they buy.
Quoted from BoJo:A lot of them overpaid too and find out the hard way when they go to sale the machine and don't get anything close to what they paid.
B-I-N-G-O with these two comments...
The last two years have been weird for a few reasons. The "talk" of the place has moved mostly over to these forums from RGP, and the average collector on these forums has been into collecting for a much shorter time than the majority of the people on RGP. A considerable amount of these new collectors do not know how to repair their own machines and believe that every dollar that they put into a machine should pay back twice as much. I remember a thread a year or two ago where people were angry because they bought a new Stern and the resale market on it had dropped. The consensus seemed to be that Stern was failing as a business because after you opened and played the game for a while, only a few increased in price.
The people that jumped in drove the prices up to the point that the majority of collectors can't afford as much as people who started even five years ago, and many of those people overpaid and are now trying to sell and having to either decide to take a hit on their pricing or hold their game waiting for the right buyer. On top of that, we now have two companies regularly adding more titles to the top end.
I think that prices have probably stabilized until those people that purchased either decide they are willing to take a hit on their purchase price, or until something else happens to really drive prices up again.