And if you want a great read: ‘The Great Beanie Baby Bubble,’ by Zac Bissonnette

fun facts: Ty Warner (the beanie maker guy) HATED the collectors. HATED them.
Two Chicago suburb women pretty much responsible for the craze when they started trading them, and made a price guide. (I knew one of them looool)
Ebay pretty much got it's start trading Beanies

The book is WAY WAY WAY better then it had any reason to be, picked it up on a whim, can't say enough good about it.

Beanie babies couldn’t possibly be more different in almost every single way than pinball machines.

So sure, watch beanie babies documentaries for fun and recreation. Don’t expect to gain any insight into the pinball machine market by doing so.

Please restrict your pinball market comparisons to cars from now on. Thanks!

i doubt anyone's business plan is "purposely not meet demand".

I think the sneaker industry has leaned super hard into limited editions, and a lot of collector hobbies have followed. It's all about manufactured scarcity right now. They got tons of people using apps just for a chance to buy special limited edition shoes. There is no intention in meeting the demand when they need to keep the demand up.

I completely agree. I also picked this up on a whim and I was hooked.

Supreme

Supreme. Which interestingly is worth way more as a company than Ambercombie and Finch.

Damn it you beat me by 18 seconds

It’s a crazy time right now

Luxury and limited goods are skyrocketing kind of across the board.

Speaking of, I hope Stern (my favorite global lifestyle brand) releases a collection of NFT's soon.

It's cuz I'm like Supreme. Minimal.

I would say there is no way they can meet the demand even if they wanted to. There is a lot of assembly work that goes into a machine that can not be automated. It takes a lot of people on the factory floor to make it happen and all those people have to be paid, not to mention the people designing the playfield ,the backglass art , the dmd interface the rule sets and the code. Due to all this expense there is probably not a lot of profit margin per machine. I would say that most manufacturers put out as much product as they can and if you add inflation and supply chain problems it makes the problem worse. Don't worry, more inflation and reccession is coming so there will be less people buying pinball machines and more people just trying to survive and put food on the table

Let me introduce you to the diamond market.

Yes, exactly. Sneakers are exactly the same as pinball machines. From marketing, manufacture, production, uses, shipping costs, labor, design, research, economics...exactly the same thing. You can compare them exactly.

Just like beanie babies also.

What I really don't understand is the seemingly irresistible need to compare pinball machines - one of the most unique commercial products on the planet - to everything else.

Is it the same reason people embrace conspiracy theories? To try to introduce some semblance of control or order into a chaotic world?

Pinball machines are like almost nothing else besides pinball machines. You can't even really compare them to other commercial devices like Coke machines or claw machines, which have not developed a fanatical home use following.

But people keep trying. It's like...maybe if we can finally crack the code, the sheep will all wake up and suddenly prices will fall? I think that's maybe the point, but it's all so weird I'm having a hard time figuring it out.

Why do you want pinball machines to be Beanie Babies? If we all watch the documentary on Beanie Babies, we'll all get some "perspective" and figure out that pinball machines are just cheap chinese made stuffed animals with no practical use and demand and prices will suddenly fall?

Looks like this is just a camouflaged "price bubble" thread, so original....

Well, if we're going to compare apples to Space Shuttles......

You were the only one who suggested anything was exactly the same. I vaguely made reference to pinball and other collectable hobbies to which he appropriately replied, "exactly" in agreement.

I maintain that the modern use of stuff like LE numbered goods, variations, the whole pro/premium/LE tiered system, 3rd party waiting lists, surprise announcements/drops, pre-release hype building and creating a keeping-up-with-the-joneses atmosphere on social media, needing to be online at a certain time, collaborating with other popular brands and influencers, and a whole bunch of other stuff has its origins in the sneaker business and can even be seen in other hobbies like barrel-aged beer collecting.

Not meeting demand is very much a staple of some business models. Take any good BBQ joint for example.

Mikey like pinball. Mikey want more!

Well, you see, pinball machines are like the environment.

That’s all I got.

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They’re just trying to poke your hornets nest amigo.

You have a relevant perspective that I tend to agree with.

Why sell lots of stuff at $600 over when you can sell one at $15k over.

I was going to comment, then realized it’s not worth it. Do not read any further. Don’t do it… Really…

But since your reading, I will tell you a secret. Stern doesn’t actually make pinballs… Nope. They make CAKE that LOOKS LIKE PINBALL!!! Yep… It’s cake… Sooner or later, the bubble will burst, and the people will have cheap cake again!!!

It could be that Stern is conspiring to raise prices. It could also be supply disruptions coupled with everyone is spending way more time at home combined with people have a lot of extra cash because they have been spending way more time with home combined with pinball machines are cool as hell.

As I remember, Stern, Spookey, JJP all moved to new bigger factories in the last 3 years, and have maxed out production in these larger factories.

There are over a hundred Cargo ships anchored off Port of Los Angeles......waiting...

It's a miracle that these companys are building as many as they are today, with the complexity of parts needed to build one machine, let alone 6 to 8 designs that Stern has listed as "in production " .

The main difference is beanie babies and those who collected them are moronic.

How about Hummel's

Not to belabor this point, but another real example of this is Harley-Davidson throughout the 90s and early 2000s. They used the same model that Stern is using - break up your two basic models into multiple "limited edition customs", get your product on TV in every movie and commercial, allow people to pre-order, put down large deposits, and wait months or even years for their bikes, whip up the FOMO on commercials, live events, and the web, etc.
Most importantly, they DEFINITELY limited production in a careful and calculated manner to keep demand higher than supply. This helped them keep their prices high, and they sold as many bikes as they wanted for a while. I remember reading quite a few articles in which the Harley executives openly admitted doing this. It's not illegal - it just doesn't create great customer relations.
It tends to annoy your customers and even drive them to other brands. There still aren't that many alternate choices in pinball, so that isn't as much of a danger in that industry. But in the long run, constantly annoying your customers erodes your relationship with them over time. It's not really a good long-term strategy, unless you're pretty sure there isn't going to be too much competition (like Stern seems to be acting).
No one liked Harley for doing that, and no one likes Stern for apparently doing the same thing. It's their right to market their products any way they choose, but ultimately it's our cash that they are looking for, not our love.

As far as the parts go, I don't agree with the complaint. You are very new to this hobby, I have been in since the late 90's and that was late to the party. There are more parts, parts vendors, and hobbyists manufacturing parts than there ever was. I was able to find a piece of linkage that was unobtainium for an 80's game and another hobbyist 3D printed it. There's more mods and upgrades than I could possibly want to put on a game. Restoration companies like BGresto to make replacement real backglasses - you can have it like new instead of pasting colored film on the back of your glass and coating it with triple thick acrylic. The list goes on and on.

The rising prices as a "conspiracy theory"- I don't buy it, but I can give you wanting scarcity. If my competitors have less, they'll get what they can from me if I have it. Right now it's just a perfect storm of people with more available cash, people staying at home during the pandemic, natural inflation, supply and demand that are causing the high prices. If people were not willing to pay up then the prices would have to come down, but as long as somebody is willing to plop down big money games will sell and prices on all of it follow suit. You can't blame the manufacturers for wanting to sell out, short runs making games. Nobody wants to carry inventory. This is true in my business as well. Everyone wants to clear out the shelves.

The global diamond industry.

Exactly. And its not likely to ever change. These machines cannot be mass produced, cannot be offshored to another country, and cannot be custom ordered at any time. There are quite a few pinball companies now but I don't see any of them offering lower prices than Stern. 10 years from now we will be reminiscing when you could get a NIB pro for only $7k.

Can't compare to any hobby that can be stored in a hall closet or shoe box - baseball cards, pez dispensers, comic and can be cranked out cheaply or even counterfeited.

Pinball machines are inherently produced in low quantities, are costly to store/move, require maintenance/repair and were not originally produced for the collector market.

Pinball machines will always hold some of their value as the product provides entertainment, ability to earn money, and is truly in short supply while the value of many mass produced "collectibles" can see their value drop to zero. A baseball card is a piece of printed cardboard.

"I am saying if you don’t think this is sterns strategy then I don’t know what to tell you."

"Not here to argue or say I am right."

I mean...it sounds a LITTLE like you're here to tell us you're right...

Joke's on you, buddy. I collect pinball machines and am also a moron.

*Edit* Looks like they did change a while back, so deleted this.