Agreed. Stern is the dominate leader in the pinball space, pumping out games in numbers not hitherto seen this century. Stern’s innovation in code specially has been great and I’m glad to see they recognize the value in acquiring all the assets of Stranger Things they acquired.

I know I’ll be ordering a Stranger Things for sure.

All that said, I’m glad to see there are other companies out there I can also send my business to. Variety is the spice of life.

Gosh, this is all so true.

My game room is simply full at the moment, in fact, I have a total of eight games at my office since I have zero space in my house. I’m at the point where I can’t buy anything without selling something, and I don’t want to sell anything because I: (a) really like my collection and still play everything in it, and (b) don’t like losing my butt on machines. If I take too big of a loss, I get criticism from the Mrs, who is also into pinball but like everyone doesn’t like losing money.

For the current home use market to continue to thrive, there has to be a healthy used machine market. For there to be a healthy used machine market there has to be a constant influx of new players and collectors.

Competitive pinball has brought in new players and turned some of those new players into collectors. Stern brings in some new players with the release of each major theme, so far we’ve never seen mass pin acquisition from non-pinhead fans of specific themes, but each major release of new IP must drive a few new collectors here and there. We heard that masses of KISS and Star Wars fans would buy masses of machines and I don’t think that ever materialized, but surely a few new collectors sprung from each release.

Stern (and everyone else for that matter) pushing up prices on new machines has in some ways set expectations on the value of older machines. WOZ machines have appreciated (or at least appear to have appreciated) since the yellow one came around. Regardless, there needs to be new buyers.