The only bubble more resilient than the pinball price bubble is the pinball price bubble thread bubble.

A guy from Facebook came by today to buy my Cactus Canyon. He said he's bought 40 Bally/Williams games since entering the hobby last October.

This bubble just doesn't seem to be on the burstin' path when there's new people like that coming in every day.

This guy was well into his 50s!

Pinball fever is just infectious!!!

And you aren't worried about the impending immediate pinball bubble bursting that everybody has been predicting for 20 years?!

People were saying that in 2002 when MM was going for $4500.

I guess what I'm saying is, one day it may please us to remember even this.

Great album

Yes you and 100,000 other people.

That’s why it won’t happen.

Everybody seems to have this erotic fantasy that the bubble will implode violently and they will be the only person on the planet left who wants pinball machines, and they’ll swoop in and build an A list collection for $3000.

It just doesn’t work that way.

Immune to what?

Not so long ago that game was $2500 or less.

Anyway, don't worry, it's just a bubble. And if you think it can't bust...THINK AGAIN!!!!

Top. Men.

It’ll never, ever end.

We’ve discussed this many times. Fantasy is more attractive than reality, and the fantasy that suddenly everybody but the Royal You will lose interest in the hobby and pinball machines will be incredibly cheap is just too attractive to surrender.

Surely I’ve already posted the “pinball price bubble thread graveyard” list here, no?

Are you suggesting only the richest 1 percent of pinsiders own 90 percent of the games?

OCCUPY PINSIDE!!

This literally made me bust out laughing.

We've heard this exact statement or a variation thereof a million times.

The only new twist on all this is the "hyperinflation" rap, which is more of a political statement than a pinball economics one, and is really en vogue right now.

By the way, the top 10 finalists at last weekend's Pinball Expo tournament, where most of the top US players were competing, were all under the age of 30. I believe 9 out of 10 of them were under the age of 21. The winner and runner up are both 18.

I know competition pinball and collector pinball are different things, but that's got to tell you something about the veracity of the supposed aging / impending nursing-home related bubble burst theory.

I'm "like you" in that I started collecting cheap back in the day and have always had a large collection, which I've used to "trade up" many times.

I'm unlike you in that I've managed to breach the mental barrier of $5000, $6000, even $9000 when I thought a game was a good deal. I've accepted reality and increased my budget on games when appropriate...a good deal is a still a good deal and it's pretty clear that it's still pretty low risk to buy a $7,000 game when I'll be able to sell it for more, or worst case, get my money back, or trade up or down.

I guess I'm really not married to any game, beyond the AFM that I have no intention of selling. It's just kind of boring to keep the same games year after year.

It's either wheel and deal, or just pray for the imaginary "bubble burst" that will never come, when everybody ELSE in the hobby suddenly either goes broke and/or loses complete interest in pinball. Doing the math in my head, it just seems unlikely that's going to happen before I'm in an assisted living home, so may as well adapt and participate.

The “THINK AGAIN” Tagline on this thread title cracks me up every time.

If your friends can’t afford to buy pinball machines now, then why did they just sell all their pinball machines that they got cheap and get out of the hobby? Sounds like they were sitting pretty.

I knew you’d get all pissy when I asked for a simple clarification but I still don’t understand.

You have friends that aren’t rich. They had a bunch of games that they had fun with and bought cheap.

So far so good right?

But then They sold them and are no longer in the hobby.

I still don’t get it. If they just kept their games they’d still have pinball machines. They didn’t need to leave the hobby or sell their games.

As I feel there’s no way I could answer this without you getting mad at me I’ll just say I’m sorry you have friends that left the hobby and I’m sorry if I had anything to do with it by accepting current market conditions and continuing to buy and sell pinball machines.

What's it like seeing thread after thread where people make it clear they despise you and others like you, blame you and others like you for rising prices and "ruining the hobby", and continue to insist that you and others like you will lose interest when the next shiny thing comes along?

Must be gettin' fuckin old!

I don't know why so many people - many of whom were noobs just a few short years ago - keep insisting this gigantic new wave of noobs is just gonna get sick of pinball in two weeks causing all the prices to settle back down to "normal" levels. Just doesn't jibe with reality; the reality being that pinball fuckin' rules!

Guys see a Harlem globetrotters sit for a day on Facebook and they get cocky.

If that’s a sign of the bubble bursting, it’s been bursting for 20 years!

This is what happened.

Pinball people hate “losing” money more than they fear poverty or death.

This will never change.

Fair question:

For me a true bubble burst would be regression of prices across the board to 7 or 8 years ago:

A list games like Addams or TZ going for around $5k or less.

B list WPC games for $2000-2500, same price for almost all DE or Sega games.

$10K plus old games becoming an extreme rarity

All the remakes, LEs etc selling for their original price or less.

Most used recent games going for $1000 under their NIB price.

Let me know when we see stuff like this.

I don’t think stern is gonna rock the boat with pice increase (the kind of $1k at once nonsense we are seeing with other companies).

They never have before. I’d guess a $500 or less increase.

Stern has always been the most affordable machines. I don’t think they have any incentive to “go JJP.”

They dominate the market partly because they are the only NIB buy that makes sense for operators.

Yes. It happens in every bubble burst thread.

The “…THINK AGAIN!!” gets me every time!!

I recall seeing these exact posts word for word from Ice predicting that Foo Fighters was going to be a huge flop.

He was wrong.

But this time - Venom? - He'll be right!

You guys really never do get tired of this do ya.

Jake Fattie even managed to sell his Time Warp (the world's least desirable game), proving that the 20+ year bubble remains inflated in an unencumbered fashion.

Welcome back!
That stupid Russia thread was your ticket out
Welcome back!
To that same old price bubble thread we laughed about

While the prices haven't changed since you've been around
Just more endless wishful thinking From newbie clowns

Who'd have thought we'd be here
After 11 long bubble years

Oh we say it'll pop, but the bubble is nonstop
Think again, think again think again!
THINK AGAIN, THINK AGAIN, THINK AGAIN!

Hey Stern! You easily sell out every one of the 1,000 LEs you make for each cornerstone, bringing in your highest profit-per game and enabling Gary to bathe in truffle accented water with gold flakes every night.

STOP IT!!!!

We've now moved the price bubble goal posts to FOMO. The new argument seems to be that if FOMO isn't sizzling hot, somehow the industry is in huge trouble and about to implode.

We'll see if that's so. So far it seems like a bit of a red herring for price bubble doomsayers.

I hear ya dude. We always wonder what in God's name is happening with $15K batman SLEs, and 20K bonds and Elivras and Beatles.

For YEARS we've been hearing about "games gathering dust at distros."

But without any actual evidence it's all idle chatter and wishful thinking. If these games weren't making people money, why does this stuff continue?

I need more than speculation. "I'm hearing nobody is selling anything" just ain't doing it for me.

Let's see some RESULTS already! It's 20+ years of pinball bubble talk! Let's see someone go out of business, or companies stop making these expensive super dooper games. Until then, I refuse to THINK AGAIN!

Yeah I've been praying for an "Industry contraction" but every time I wake up there's another shitty pinball company trying to sell us something. Punny fucking factory?! Space friggin' Hunt?! What the Hell?!

I don't see how this can go on. Maybe it'll be like the early 90s when we finally saw some casualties in the great Talk Show War. Chevy, Aresenio, Sajak....

Sounds mysterious! I hope it’s got something to do with an evil cabal of elitist bankers.

30 percent huh? Addams families for $7000 again?

I’m hoping this in unmoderatable since you invited me to have at it;

But you are out of your fuckin mind!!!

Price talk is so boring anyway. I’m more interested in the secrets of Cubesnake and the roots of the upcoming worldwide economic meltdown!

Yes, this means that's what the market actually is on Addams Family games.

I just got an HUO Star Trek pro for $4k. But I wouldn't bother mentioning that in a price bubble thread because we all know it has no bearing on the actual market. Just like the fact that someone offered you some beat to shit Addams for north of $7K isn't really relevant to this conversation either.

But why are we talking about this when there's an impending worldwide economic collapse that is coming in less than a year?! Cubesnake, tell us your secrets!!

It's also July.

The old-timers always used to say the summer was slow!

Of course they always used to say a lot of other shit that you can't really repeat in polite company these days so maybe they were just old gasbags!

It's a catch-22!!!

I think Pinside is a great place to find "real world asking prices." If you really want to know what games are going for, you are going to have to buy and sell some.

Shows - like Allentown - can be a great place to get real time, real world pricing info. Just get there early!

It's none of your fuckin business what I pay for a pinball machine, unless you are the one who sold it to me.

I never understand the people who freak out about this. You are weird.

That's an excellent question that I'd love to answer!

It's incredibly frustrating when you repeatedly read the same absolutely moronic suggestions here - often repeated with striking conviction when it’s clear the person suggesting it hasn’t actually thought about it for more than 5 seconds. And this frustration can cause me to lash out in anger and confusion.

Sometimes it's stuff like "Stern should put more money into all of their games and slash their prices!"

Sometimes it's "Pinside should institute a policy where sellers are FORCED to report the final sales price of their games. It needs to be done for the community! It needs to be done for society! Won't somebody think of the children?!?!"

It's an idea so dumb and half-baked that it's baffling in its nature.

Tell me, how exactly is Pinside supposed to do this? How is Pinside supposed to enforce this proposed policy? They can't even get people to pay their listing fees when they sell a game; you are telling me they can institute some system where they get 100 percent accurate information on the price of every game sold here? How much is this "final sales price patrol" going to cost to institute? Are they going to force sellers to only accept Paypal, and submit their tax info? Are they going to hire a squad of polygraph operators to go door to door every time someone sells a game?

Not only is it offensive to suggest that private sellers are somehow obligated to reveal what they sell games for “for the good of the community,” it's completely unrealistic to suggest there is any way of actually ensuring that this happens with any kind of accuracy, and without pissing off the majority of sellers here, and without costing a ton of time and money to attempt to institute.

any effort to create this policy would provide zero value to Pinside or the people who run Pinside, who do not need the hassles and expense of any of this.

If Pinsiders ran Pinside, it would be out of business in a week.

No, you are not correct. This isn’t an auction house. You don’t pay a percentage of a sale, you pay a set flat fee based on “game tier.” On the games I sell it’s usually between 10-40 bucks.

Pinside doesn’t know what you sold the game for. They just know you sold it, and you pay the “tier fee.” Unless you lie and say you didn’t and don’t bother paying the fee. Which is what countless people do here.

So uh….remind me again…how is this forced sale price admission policy supposed to work?

So, isn't the system already set up to create the kind of utopia of invested hobbyists you envision?

When you sell a game, you are offered a chance to list your sale price. If you WANT to do it, you do; people who are "invested in the hobby/community to the extent" where they want to "help all of us," they are free to do so. People can view that data and decide if it informs their opinion on the market.

So what's the problem? Why try to force everybody else to do it, which would surely result in inaccurate data being inserted into the system (I know the prices I'd list would always be bullshit, just because I was so annoyed by the requirement)?

It seems to work pretty well as-is. If people want to volunteer data, they volunteer it, and there's a framework already in place for processing and displaying that data.

When I sell a game retail through my website, it's a retail sale.

When I sell a game here to another hobbyist, it's a hobby sale.

Regardless of where I sell a game, it's none of your business what I sell it for (unless I sold it to you).

But hey, you do you. Feel free to create the hobbyist utopia you envision here however you'd like.

It’s funny when someone gets a quote like that completely wrong and makes themselves look like a moron.

Like…take 8 seconds to google it first! You’ll get it right and come off all smooth!

You probably haven't seen so many grown men discussing pinball before either.

It's a crazy world here at Pinside! There's always stuff you haven't seen before.

I think he was being sarcastic about all the energy you spent.

Are you suggesting that if we think the bubble can't burst, we need to THINK AGAIN?

They'd probably be thrilled with a "market softening" if it would kill off some of their competition. Do you think these smaller companies will survive this market meltdown we are currently in? What's the "belly laugh" situation over at Spooky, AP, JJP etc?

Hey it only took 12 years.

Nice run? THINK AGAIN!!!

Counterpoint!

I've also been in the hobby for 20+ years, and I really don't want to be the guy who owns a Spooky or JJP game when it goes tits up. Always avoided Pin2K games for the same reason.

It's a fair consideration for anybody in the hobby, not just noobs.

Yeah some guy got a trashed to shit Addams for $8K, so yes, the bubble is now completely burst. Once again. As always.

Really no way to quantify it but I would think these issues do affect pinball pricing/bubble/whatever we are calling it this week.

Like...I've been buying and selling games for over 20 years, been through hundreds of games, and I'm literally telling you I ain't buying a spooky game unless it's dirt, dirt cheap. Like "My husband just died and we need to clear out the house by tomorrow" cheap. And it's because I'm afraid it'll break and I won't be able to fix it.

But you are right we all have our own perspectives. I don't operate; I sell games for people for home use. And Spookys (and to some extent some of the other non Stern manufacturers) seem like ticking time bombs to me on a sale I'll have to take care of after the fact.

Pinball has hit the wall.

People sure love saying my name in this thread.

It’s flattering, really!

I expect you to kiss me full on the lips if we ever meet!

Sweet, sweet dougeeeeee!

Why bring up that example
Of fish tales though? Great, you scammed an old lady out of a fish tales, or got a steal on Craigslist.

You know as well as all of us that a $2000 fish tales would last 2 seconds here, with 50 PMs to the guys inbox within 20 minutes.

Not representative of the market!

You heard it folks.

Fish tales is a $2,000 game now.

Wall = hit
Bubble = burst

Let’s rock!! Time party like it’s 2002 again.

Ok I think we’ve piled on enough.

It’s just dumb to list these kind of qualified deals as an example of a market trend. We all know that’s silly.

These things belong in the “what’s your best deals!!” Threads, not
Pricing trend threads.

Punishment will be Levied.

6 months ago I bought a lightly used bond for 6500.

Today I got one for 5900

I want a foo for a little while, but I’m gonna wait till it’s down to $6k as well.

All seems reasonable to me. In the old days you lost $1000 driving any new stern off the lot (of course that was a larger percentage of the game NIB price back then, but that’s nit picking innit)

Zep, AIQ, Rush, Bond, Turtles, Mando...these recent Stern games are ALL at $6K or less for a used pro if you actually want to sell it. I'd say that qualifies as a trend.

I think I speak from experience. I had both a Rush and AIQ pro, and got ZERO bites at $6k asking. Ended up trading the AIQ for Rush (which I disliked even more than AIQ) and traded Rush for a nice Spider-Man, which turned out to be a great deal.

Deadpool is heading that way too now that the pandemic is over. I fully expect Foo and Venom to follow the same path - these are not "grail" themes and the excitement of release won't last.

It's not a collapse. But it's a clear trend, away from the craziness and back to the sanity. Or as people love to say, "where it should be" on used, in-production machines.

If it isn't a Godzilla or JP, or some other white hot theme with or without Keith, I think that's the trend we are seeing and going to be seeing from here on out. Rarity will continue to buoy games like Stranger Things.

Everybody happy now? I'd guess not, because what people REALLY want are $5,000 Addams Families.

Every game is hinted to indeed be getting another production run! Just check every "they should vault this!" thread!

I’m sure Brian would love it. Who don’t want more royalties ?

Yes, this is brought up every time the "GB Vault Brigade" gets going.

Not sure if there's a "you don't get them any more if convicted of kiddie porn and child sex abuse" clause, but if not, don't see why Stern would want to send any more checks JT's way.

Yeah so far the only "bubble" bursting is the "sell my used pro for more than I paid for it after 6 months" bubble, which is disappointing and probably not what the OP had in mind when he started this thread 12 years ago.

But I have a hunch THIS could be the year!

Or maybe the next one.

They get royalties. I'm not guessing. It's a fact.

Be amazed!

It's not a big secret.

Wait….you are telling me pinball companies sell us stuff for MORE than it costs them to make?

That is seriously fucked up. How can this be allowed to happen?! It’s effing things up for everybody !

Nobody’s ever lost money in the stock market!

And it only took 12 years!

For those of you who thought it wouldn’t happen…THINK AGAIN!

Do you think the recession + Bubble Burst isn't looming?

Well...

Welll...

Wait for it.....

THINK AGAIN!!!!

It really isn’t. It’s the same shit with a little window dressing.

If venom is a sign of pinball “evolving” I guess I’m a creationist. Forcing innovation in pinball is stupid and makes for bad games.

It is not.

That may have been true when it was 900 bucks but nobody really wants a Sharkey's.

File it under: Games Like Time Warp

Jokerz sucks but it's probably a decent $1500 starterz game for somebody.

I had one and it drove me fucking insane, I could never get rid of an awful static on the sound. Sent the board out and everything.