Wauwatosa, WI
Quoted from nosro:It further suggests that "pinflation" is only partly as bad as everyone thinks it is, once prices are adjusted for condition.
I've LONG said the same thing.
The market shift that happened was that the hobby had a ton of people come in who wanted perfect examples of machines and didn't know how to care for them themselves. Why buy a project [insert game title here] for $2,000 when you can get a perfect one that you shouldn't need to call a tech on for a year for $3k? That attitude definitely drove a lot of the market... I had NO problem finding multiple total project machines a year for the last few years for the same great prices I would have expected before the whole inflation thing.
Try to sell a beat up B list machine, and you'll sit on it for a while unless it's cheap.
There was most definitely a group of people who got into the hobby for the wrong reason over the past few years, and that was because they expected their machines to always make money and keep going up and up in price. That isn't realistic in any way, and what I think happened is that the MMR has caused some of them to rethink their purchases and it has held game prices down. I think it would be a good thing if people started treating it like the hobby that it is again and not a money-making venture that they are going to retire on.
I think prices will become relatively stable again, and hold that way for a long time now.
