Keep in mind this 'inflation' occurred after a huge DEFLATION in prices. Used TZs for 1200? New CVs for 1850? DH, DW, DM, JB, JM, TS all 700-1000. Nobody wanted pinballs in 98-00 except us auction dorks. It took til 2010ish before things normalized.

...and in this sentence fragment you perfectly captured what is going on right now: more people want games than there are games to go around.

Your friends and neighbors likely are pretty well to do and could buy a game at today's prices no problem. Now consider there are tens of thousands or more of well-off people looking to buy pinballs, and understand why prices keep going up...

Why do you think prices will go back down?

Inflation is coming, raw material prices are up, demand is up, the virus is slowly going away, jobs are returning and the economy is improving.

Nothing I see indicates pinball prices will stop rising in the short term. The people who currently own games don't seem to be getting sick of them, unlike beanie babies and other actual bubbles. If your friends want to own a game, they're better off buying now.

Never saw a closeout under $1850, not sure where you're getting 1300. I paid 2150 for my closeout NGG but was via an op who'd ordered too many.

So basically you're saying jpop killed WMS before moving on to killing zidware, pintasia, deeproot...?

- There's ~12000 of them out there

- They are big, heavy and can be fussy to keep running

- They're not exactly cheap?

No, the GnR CEs are sold out and unavailable. That is exactly why they cost more.

GnR LEs are currently in production and may sell for a bit more than retail simply because some people are willing to pay a little extra to avoid waiting.

No, your comment was " It's how we get freaking games STILL IN PRODUCTION selling for 50% over msrp" ...which is false. CEs aren't in production and LEs aren't selling for 50% over MSRP. Ergo, you're wrong

(cue typical flynnbus 7 paragraph reply I'm not going to read...)