The cost factor is going to cause pinball to erode over the next several years I think. The price of entry is too steep relative to what you get now. Used to be the new games (5 or 6 years ago) cost $3k to $4k, old games were mainly at that same point for the best ones (except MM, CC, MB). It's now almost double for all games. Spending $3.5k on a new game is a lot different than spending $8k, you can literally buy a classic car for $8k. Also, relatively, an Xbox One or PS4 is $400, the amount of hours of entertainment you can get for those vs a basic $2k pinball machine isn't close. It's only a matter of time before we see a drop in buying, and when that happens resale values will start eroding and the market will start to collapse...you can't keep increasing prices every year at a high rate without eventually going over the edge.

Yes and no, prices will fall but there may not be anyone to buy the games (nobody wants to catch a falling knife). I just think that the current business model for pinball is unsustainable and that it's going to hit a rough spot sooner rather than later here, and that many collectors will exit the market as the games depreciate.

You can kind of see it happening this way...at some point, either Stern or JJP is going to raise prices to a point where nobody can afford them or the market is out of money. Either they're going to have to lower prices, cut down on their operations considerably, or go out of business. Lower NIB prices drives used market prices lower, hence you get into this situation where everything is falling.

I'm really surprised it hasn't happened already with all the missed deadlines, poor code, vaporware, etc with a lot of the NIB games. I feel like it's close though, MM remake was the first domino, just a matter of time before they all start falling.

I'm not saying that they'll go to zero or even close to that, but I would expect that if you drew a trend line of NIB pricing over the past 30 years, the NIB pricing is going to have to get back closer to that (and will take used games down with it) to be sustainable.

You bring up muscle cars, that's where I see the issue with pricing and sustainability. 5 years ago, a NIB game was 1/2 the cost of 70's corvette (although technically not a muscle car). Now you can get a 70's/80/90's vette for less than a new pin. Which is why I now own a 72 vette instead of a NIB game.

Things happen. Look what happened to gas, who would have thought that it would have halved in 6 months? Things can turn quickly when supply/demand curve get out of whack and when speculators exit quickly like they did in the oil market.