Pinball is fundamentally an entertainment product. It should be compared to other forms of entertainment, not a pure collectible market. It is ludicrous to compare pinball to beanie babies.
As long as people gather to drink alcohol in public places, there will be a market for pinball. Pinball is a unique entertainment form, since nearly all of them work the same way: two buttons and a plunger. You can be drunk AF and still have fun. You can play alone and nobody will shame you for it, or you can have a blast with friends or strangers.
There are also millions more Americans alive now than in the 1990s when pinball was in its golden age. Until we stop producing humans at a rate less than we are dying, on pure numbers alone the hobby will grow.
Sure, demand for new machines is very likely to drop when the next economic downturn comes. Some pinball companies will likely go under. But entertainment use, particularly cheap entertainment, always goes up during economic downturns.
Old pinball machines /may/ become less valuable. Maybe. EM's are very cheap compared to SS and DMD, maybe the floor will fall on SS prices, then DMD prices as LCD games become the norm. But this has nothing to do with the popularity of pinball.
I also totally agree that parts will /always/ be available as long as we have an Internet. The cost to create replacement parts keeps getting cheaper.
By the way, most people who play my pins on location are under 30.
