Quoted from WizardsCastle:I'd respectfully disagree with you.
I was enjoying bringing in a new game every few months, and would finance these new titles by selling something in my current collection.
But with the price hike, I've lost my appetite for it. I say "barely", because I've gone from wanting to try out multiple titles each year, to saying I'm just going to wait for the next Elwin game.
So, if they're getting 1/3 of the money from me than they got from me in the past, it's still a huge difference. At current LE prices, it's $15K+ versus $45K+ (CAD).
Die heard collector's and newbies with lots of cash to spend will definitely help keep sales moving, but from what I'm hearing, there are a lot of people like me that are changing their spending habits, or are completely putting the kibosh on this hobby.
I personally think Stern got greedy. They can say all day that the cost of parts went up, but their margins were stupid prior to this, and are even more absurd now.
But we're to blame to. We were chomping at the bit for anything and everything these companies put out (I mean, if you put your money in Deeproot, you clearly have a problem with pinball) and they say that they had left money on the table. Any of us here, running a business like this, would have done the same. Gary Stern and crew are now evil, they're opportunistic.
But for me, and only me, they've lost a lot of my money and my interest.
You're not "wrong", but I have heard this refrain from collectors when they started raising the prices of what would now be considered a premium from what ~$3500 a decade or so ago? And it really hasn't seemed to stunt their bottom line. One person says Stern has gone too far, another 2 new buyers happily take their place. And in 2-3 years when those buyers run out of room, funds, or are tired of each game getting more expensive, the cycle repeats...
