This is actually a piece of cake to fix. Just stop buying games. New, used, projects, everything. The problem is that people keep lining up and throwing their money at Stern. People are paying crazy ass prices for used games.

Stern would be insane not to increase their prices sitting their watching people pay crazy money for games.

I'm just wondering at what point the operators will be priced out of the games? You figure a 50% split with the location and a Pro would need to be played about 14,000 times just for them to break even. That doesn't even include the labor to keep it running when something breaks and the cost to shop it out. You aren't going to get 14,000 plays out of it without shopping it that's for sure.

I realize that some of them sell before break even, but still. At what point do they just decide to put in a claw machine or some other redemption machine?

Ah, so you're one of those people making it so I can't GPUs at MSRP for clients that need high end GPUs for design work. Those people aren't insane, they are trying to make a living and do their work.

Thanks.

During the web session yesterday Gary was asked about if Connected would become a monthly subscription service. I have to say, I absolutely loved his answer. It was something along the lines of "Well, not right away, but we won't worry about that until we get everyone connected".

I had an interesting discussion last night with our local operator. I asked him at what price he gets shut out on a new Pro. He told me that although it takes a long time to recoup the investment, the pinball machine is typically complementary to the other things that are earning well. He said although they do consider potential resale value, it typically not the driving force behind the purchase decision.

He also told me that a ton of his locations are requesting pinball machines. He said they don't have near enough inventory to satisfy the requests from his locations.

Based on that statement, I'm assuming you have a lot of hobbies having a $6,000 entry point?

We aren't talking about a $10 increase in the price of a tennis racket in this thread.

This is a thread about NIB games and Stern's price increase. You can't get a NIB game for $500.

I'm no guitar expert, but I'm pretty sure there aren't new guitars that are selling for millions of dollars. So you're comparing apples to Volkswagons.

Damn, My mistake. I could have swore that the thread was started because of a price increase from Stern for their NIB machines.

What? You're the one that brought Guitar prices into a pinball thread.

And here you are arguing the opposite for 17 pages when you could have easily read the thread title and kept scrolling. But if you're not on the other side of the fence then you're not happy, so I completely understand why you're hanging out in this thread.

So essentially Stern is leaving $2.5 million on the table by selling the LEs at $10,500 as opposed to $13,000 they appear to be being sold at by the flippers.

How long before Stern says "Hey, let's just increase our price to $13,000 and pocket the $2.5 million". I hate price increases as much as the next person, but they'd be stupid not to keep raising prices.

You spelled Troll wrong.

Yup. Gotta love hypocrites.

Market (resized).JPG

Imagine when Stern says "Well hell, if these people are going to be flipping our games for $11k, we'll just sell them for $11k".

But make sure you bitch and whine like a mule before you do.