Everyone complaining about the near constant increases in new pin prices needs to realize that it is a necessary evil to sustain the current pinball market "bubble".

A major contributing factor to the recent increase in pinball popularity and availability on location (at least in some areas) arises out of the fact that you can generally sell a decent condition used game for nearly what you paid for it. And *that* is because the new games keep getting ever slightly more expensive, raising the market price for virtually all games at the same time.

This is a fortuitous circle in that more people buy games for their homes as well with the expectation that they can sell it later for basically what they paid for it.

If new games stopped increasing in price, or heaven forbid suddenly became less expensive the whole thing would collapse. Not many bars or people are going to be able to buy a new pinball machine for $5K+ if they can expect to eat 1/2 or more of that cost when they go to sell it later. The location games barely pay for themselves over years at these prices, there's no profit in operating them directly and if the resale market collapses it's game over man, game over.

So you should all cheer when your next NIB purchase is 5-10% more than the last, your whole collection just increased in value...