Quoted from LordHumungus:By the way is that a boy or a girl in ur avatar?
I'm guessing that you don't own a Hook.
(Topic ID: 291861)
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Quoted from LordHumungus:Can u explain cause I doubt the hook I own is the same thing.
Rufio is the leader of the lost boys in the Robin Williams movie Hook. The character was played by a male actor. I was referring to the DE Hook that portrays the character in the artwork.
Screenshot_20210418-211352~2.png 1 month later
I see the problem lying along the fold. On one side, this hobby is only meant to be a source of fun for the majority of us. There was a time where buying and selling games might have resulted in the difference of a few hundred dollars. There were an abundance of old stock in basements and warehouses that came at a relatively frequent basis for those that were patient and wanting to restore old games.
It became more popular. More people are involved. More people meant that there was more competition that led to more money to fight over. There are less and less finds because they just aren't as abundant. That combined with the increased cost of new games (for a number of legitimate and maybe greedy reasons) means that more games are being bought from within the community. Everyone that takes a game does something to it that increases their perceived value of the game and that then reflects in the future sale price. It compounds from sale to sale to some extent. Those sales in turn are needed to fund new purchases.
On one level, it hurts because it's not about the money. It was just supposed to be fun. But the money is also what is driving Stern and all the other manufacturers to keep going. Once a certain price point is hit, it becomes attractive to people that are more into it for the profit than the fun. That's where I think the community is upset. Because it takes the fun out of it. It's not about the pinball as much as it is the game of buying and selling.
I don't know if it's a cancer as much as it is the natural evolution of a popular hobby.
The problem is that a number of us will eventually be priced out of the game that is buying and selling.
On the opposite side, if it wasn't as popular, a number of us would fall out because we wouldn't have the technical capabilities to produce our own parts and we would never see anything new. New old stock would eventually run out and some parts are hard to make in the garage.
On one hand we are lucky that we have the ability to order things from Marco and Pinball Life. On the other, the price of machines continues to maintain that collective value. The rest is collateral damage.
Then there's COVID
Quoted from flynnibus:It's not even just more people.. it's a different approach.
Before it was "who got there first".... and maybe someone trying to snake it from you before pickup. Now you have people bidding up sellers before they've even seen the game trying to make an auction out of every freaking sale.
That mindset has bled over into buying new games too.. where the solution to everything is just throw more money at it. It's how we get freaking games STILL IN PRODUCTION selling for 50% over msrp... insanity.
Pinball used to be full of cheap skates who loved finding deals and making something good out of something lesser. People for the most part wouldn't even buy NIB even though we could have because people wouldn't value the premium.
Now... people are fueled by the idea of making a buck or believing money isn't a problem because they can just sell and make most of it back. The willingness to throw money around blindly has caused inflation in all segments of the hobby. Artificial scarcity and FOMO are built into the product plans and marketing now.
This isn't a 'competition' problem - this is about the population and their willingness to spend.
Yeah. So to focus that more on the OPs question. Are you saying it's a generational gap based on availability at the time? Or a prosperity gap based on where the community is now?
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