I rarely ever see good deals on pinside. It's always on facebook. But if you wanted a game like Munsters or Stranger Things, you can get HUO games for $5,000. A friend in Memphis just sold a bunch of decent games like LW3, Sharkey's Shootout, DE Simpsons, Earthshaker for between $1,800 and $2,200.

WH2O is up, WW down! Buy! Sell! It’s a bumper market! Should we wait for a Flipper market or get out now?

4C5DEC96-D6F2-417C-9CA1-2F14CC690BFF (resized).jpeg

I’m calling Gary and cornering the market on ramps

2D9F7C56-B3C7-4488-B618-D86DDB9B7219 (resized).jpeg

What kind of ass down votes this

Try selling one of your pins if you can't have cash in hand by the end of day than you can't even compare to stocks

LOL large cap stocks trade millions of shares a day the average person trades 100's liquidity is not an issue with stocks it is with pins

Wow you don't have a clue

LOL i would not ask close to that as I did not pay close to that as for stock vs game one wires money in and out of brokerage accounts checks are never used

What Is an Investment?
An investment is an asset or item acquired with the goal of generating income or appreciation. In an economic sense, an investment is the purchase of goods that are not consumed today but are used in the future to create wealth. In finance, an investment is a monetary asset purchased with the idea that the asset will provide income in the future or will later be sold at a higher price for a profit.

What Is a Collectible?
A collectible refers to an item that is worth far more than it was originally sold for because of its rarity and/or popularity. The price for a particular collectible usually depends on how many of the same item are available as well as its overall condition. Common categories of collectibles include antiques, toys, coins, comic book, and stamps. People who amass collectibles take a lot of time to collect them, and usually store them in locations where they will not be ruined.

Both copied from Investopedia.com.

To the average Joe, it is entertainment.
To a few owners they are a collectible.
To the routers, it’s an investment.

I would answer your question by saying, no.

If pinball machines were a better investment than stocks, then why aren’t more people buying them with the hopes they go up in value?

Well, some people DO buy them expecting the value to increase. Though, I am not saying that this is the norm (or that it is wise).

And yes, pinball is more of a collectible to most than a true investment. Though there are also many people who "invest" in collectibles (with varying degrees of success).

I know people who invest in collectible autos. But it is a business, not just putting them in a garage, driving them and expecting them to appreciate.

Pinball machine collecting is more akin to automobile collecting. It depends on the current generation of collectors and buyers. In the auto world, they have shown how the market changes with each generation of buyer. There is only a small/tiny part of the market which appreciates continually.

In 10-20 years, you will see a lot of pin collections being sold off by family’s who have no interest in the collection. The same thing happens with each generation of automobile collector. The boomer generation is currently driving the pinball market. As they pass away, the market will decline. Then it might be another 10-20 years before the millennials start driving the market.

It is an easy argument to prove. Pick one pinball machine and one stock and compare the value in X months. I bet the stock will beat the pin, hands down.

That’s not accurate. What about when they were banned.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/g284/4328211-new/

Explain that to my grandfather who loved to play pinball until they got banned.

The stock market was not shut down for 30 years after the crash because it was thought to be a game of chance rather than skill.

Pinballs popularity has ebbed and flowed over time. We are nowhere near it’s height of the past.

Not trying to argue with you, but you are mistaken. There are others on this forum who know the history better than I do.

Just look at all of the manufacturers that no longer exist vs today.

List of pinball manufacturers
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to navigationJump to search
This is a partial list of pinball manufacturers of past and present organized alphabetically by name. The article only includes producers of pinball machines at least in a small series which excludes makers of single unit custom pinball machines.

Contents
1 Present
2 Past
3 See also
4 External links

Present[edit]
American Pinball
Chicago Gaming Company
Dutch Pinball
Haggis Pinball
HomePin
Jersey Jack Pinball
Multimorphic Inc
Penny K Pinball
Phenix Pinball (french company)
Quetzal Pinball
Spooky Pinball
Stern Pinball
SunCoast Pinball
Team Pinball
Escapism Pinball

Past[edit]
Allied Leisure (Centuri)
Alvin G
Atari
Bally Manufacturing
Bill Port
Capcom
Centro Matic
Coffee-Mat
Chicago Coin
Data East
Exhibit Supply Company
Fascination Int., Inc (Allied Leisure)
Game Plan
Genco
Gottlieb
Hankin
Heighway Pinball
Inder
InterFlip/Recreativos Franco
Jennings & Company
Jeutel pinball
Nordamatic
Nuova Bell/Bell Games
Maresa
Mirco Games
Midway Games
Pinstar
Mr. Game
Peyper
Playmatic
Rally Play
Recel/Petaco
Sega Pinball
Sega, S.A. SONIC
Spinball S.A.L.
Taito of Brazil
United Manufacturing
tecnoplay
The Valley Company
Viza
Wico
Williams Electronics / WMS Industries
Zaccaria
Zidware

A big one.

Well, good luck with your pinball investment. I am doing fine with the market. Made more money on stocks and bonds than I ever could with pinball machines. There is a solid reason there are Trillions of dollars in the market vs millions in pinball.

The biggest investors in pinball are the ones investing in the companies. Not the ones buying them.

The best advice I could pass on is to read some investing literature. Learn about the Tulip mania and start buying now while the market is on sale. It will only go up over time.

Oh and don’t count on SS or the government. The best plan is to have your own money to live off of.

One more for the road...the best investment you can ever make is in yourself. Go to college. Educate yourself on your own. But I hope you are not seriously thinking you can get rich on pinball machines. If so, then start a pinball manufacturing company and sell them to everyone else.

Any one can make money during a bull market. When the virus stops and all the negative quarterly reports come in, thats when I'll be impressed by who is making money.

Lol.....not even close dude. 1978 is credited with being the peak year in the modern era with estimates of about 200K machines being produced. If you go to IPDB you can count somewhere around 90 different manufacturers world wide that year producing games. Bally alone had a production of approximately 90K +/- of various models in total that year. We’re nowhere close to that now. Of course if you want to go way back to the 30’s, some of the early games exceeded 50K on a single model.

As far as the investment piece of it goes, it’s not a lot of different than stocks. It’s highly dependent on the title/stock you choose.

If you go back to the start of this thread, you can see that I did exactly that.

And no, the stock market did not win "hands down", both Whitewater and Mousin' Around beat the DOW and S&P (but not NASDAQ). Eight Ball Deluxe (over a much longer period) fared much worse than the market.

And obviously, picking one stock and one pin would not prove anything...you could compare Street Fighter to Google or you could compare Twilight Zone against WorldCom.

In any case, I am not arguing that "pinball investment" is a good idea, just that some people ARE expecting (rightly or wrongly) the values to rise.

I see what you are saying. But you are comparing individual machines to indexes. That would be like me comparing a single stock to the pinball market overall. I could pick a stock that easily beats the pinball market.

There is not enough accurate data available on pinball sales to make any kind of fair comparison. One or two machine sales does not make a market worth investing in.

I am not investing in TP or hand sanitizer, although there are some that would disagree with me. Some of them are now stuck holding items that are not worth anything more than they were when they bought them.

Pinball investing=very very risky investing=good luck, stay healthy and you will most likely work for the rest of your life

This is wrong.

Of course you could pick a stock that would do better. You could also pick a stock that does worse. I used an index because that is a much better guide to the stock market. I could have compared it to Google or WorldCom...but all that would have said is that great stocks are great and bad stocks suck.

If there had been a "pinball index", I would have used that. Instead, I went with the 3 machines that I personally had definitive data on. Two of them appear to have been good "investments" (even though I did not purchase them with that in mind) compared to the overall stock market, and one does not.

I was not trying to claim pinball as a wise (or even valid) investment strategy. It was just something I thought would be amusing to examine. And I was a bit surprised by the results - I expected all 3 machines to have done significantly worse than the market, but that was not the case.

Someone already brought this up in another thread. It's not true. The numbers were higher back in the day. The only one putting out a lot of games now is Stern - who may very well be selling more games than they did back then, but the rest of the new companies aren't selling nearly what was sold back then (on average).

Wut? As you said in your previous post, there were other companies putting out games, Stern wasn't even the biggest of them at the time. More than you have listed.

I can't imagine the dimpling and wear that a 26,000 play MM remake will have on it. I have a MBr with under 1200 plays and wear is evident. I am installing a playfield protector shortly. I am on line for a remake in 2023 and I hope the cleancoat on it is more like my CCr than the original AFMs!