I take it you never collected old EM wood rail games. Also many of the top EM games and some early SS games. They all went down or were flat lined from their hayday years. Although most of them have now gone up in the past 2 years with everything else. But for a while they were worth more in 2000 then in the 20teens.

Let me ruffle some feathers here.
Are we finally in a real pinball price bubble? Caused by surge of new people in the hobby and lack of supply to keep up with the new trend. Has pinball become the new hip thing? Are rising prices giving people a false seance of security that they won’t lose money and spending every penny they have to keep up with the Jones’s? I keep meeting more and more people that just got into the hobby within the last 2 or 3 years that already have 40 to 60 k in pins in just those few short years. Took me 22 long years to get to get to that point. Of course I only paid about half of what they are worth now. Will these crazy prices keep going up, will we see the crazy prices come down like they did in 2008/2009? Funny you can easily tell who the resellers are on here and who is just in it for fun just by they way they reply to these threads.

That would be true if it wasn't for the world wide product shortage we are going through caused by the pandemic. This isn't just another simple increase in demand. Demand has been picking up for years and there has never been a price increase in the secondary market to this scale before. Yes people have always flipped LE's for a marked up price on some games. However there has never been a time when people were flipping/reselling premiums and pro's while still in production over MSRP in this quantity before in the secondary market.

Many things are crazy right now. We bought a leftover 2020 SUV at the beginning of the year for a good price. 6 months later the same dealership was offering us 8K more for it cash sale. At one point they only had 2 vehicles on their lot that weren't already sold. And this isn't a small dealership..

I bought more pins and complete collections at discounted prices in 2008 and 2009 then I did buying games from 1999 to 2007. So yes as far as I'm concerned they did go down in price during that time. It Got to the point by the middle of 2009 I discontinued all my wanted adds. I simply just had way too many games. And my sales dropped by more half for those years. So to move games I had to lower my own prices.

For some people only a full exodus of pinball machines to a point of people giving them away would qualify as a bubble burst. For me the bubble burs when pins hit an all time high and then prices start coming down again. Which is where we are right now. Just like playing Dig Dug. The bubble can be pumped up again, and again.