Stern needs to make a new Price Card: $13.00 1 play.

I did the math too.

These are opinions and just one at that! There are LOTS of people that will pay top dollar for tasteful well done mods of all kinds. I learned that posting up pics of customized games on here is a mistake. You get hammered with distasteful opinions constantly. Why cant we all Be Nice or Leave!

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I got a friend that likes fat chicks. Its all good as long as you like it.

NIB games drop in price once they are HUO. If a game gets a Vault or remake it drops in price. If it's a 1997 and before game without a remake or threat of a remake most have slowly increased in price.

It's very simple supply and demand. They made a bunch of Hobbits and very few people are looking to buy one while several people are looking to sell one. Hence the price is driven down. With stern games in production there has to be enough of a price difference to make someone want a HUO instead of a NIB. Why deal will driving to get a game when you can have one NIB shipped to your house. There has to be enough $ difference to make it worth someone's time.

In the current market climate, I can't see any realistic/strategic way for prices to be lowered at a NIB manufacturing level if people suddenly stopped buying. The minute any manufacturer does that as a response to flagging sales they have just killed off any aspect of intrinsic worth in their product in the buyers mind especially one which has now changed their strategy to put such a strong emphasis on style over substance.

Williams did closeout pricing when sales slumped and it simply sped up their own demise in pinball manufacturing.

As nearly all of the major manufacturers also have outside investors would it make any difference to them if they sold 300 units worldwide at 12,000 apiece or 150 units worldwide at 24,000 apiece? Either way the end result on the P+L statement is the same. This is little more than boiling frog syndrome at a pinball level.

If there was a sudden dramatic downturn in sales for whatever reason besides pricing increases, at best prices would stabilise and hold whilst they conjured up some new dubious strategy (hey look over here Super Limited Edition at 15k) to divert attention and then reengage the message with their target market in order to convince their end consumer of product value thus bringing the scheduled price hikes across the regular models back on track.

Speaking of back on track, this thread is about what is going on with used pinball prices - from where I stand prices of used machines are rising across the board because IMO they are riding the coattails of new pinball machine manufacturer pricing.

How much money did you lose at that price, and what did it cost you to turn a perfectly nice TSPP into a metal banana with flippers?

sad that we could not even make it out of January before the annual "bubble" thread...

oh well...

AS a older player,I came late to this hobby!Kirk,I lived in Pleasant Hill for 6 years working as a bus driver for the CC! The only pin around at that time was a TAF and a FH,in our break room at the bus company! 1990-1996!Pinball was in a vacuum!I laugh at you saying Concord is a little town:)I see all your comments and they all have merit!However,people have different tastes,so we like different stuff! Pin prices are crazy though!I bought a broke in box B66 last year,and passed on a SW to buy a Houdini because I think Stern needs better QC!!!I like some mods on my pins! And resale?? I know of a sale here of a B66 SLE bought for 15k,and used ON ROUTE for 6 MO.,and he sold it for nib at 15500.Buyers beware! And as a result of much better weather here than in most other states,we get to go out a lot more cause its not 5 ft. of snow,and 16 degrees outside! Our play places are heated in the winter only if needed!EVERYBODY is different! New prices suck!!

So one can inspect the game/play it before buying and avoid opening a box to reveal damage or defects and then having to hassle with the shipper/dealer/manufacturer. That's reason enough for ME.

Maybe I am alone in this, but it would be nice if we did not have to see a bunch of pinstadium photos in threads that having nothing to do with it. Want to post these in pinstadiums thread, great, in a thread about TSPP, sure, want to create a new thread to show them off, go for it. But this spamming of pinstadium photos in any thread that mentions 'mod' is becoming a nuisance.

From which group do you consider pinside avg prices to originate?

Okay, I have a legit question: if you're buying a pin second hand, and valuing mods: do you value an official pinstadium product more than the DIY equivalent sourced from eBay/Amazon?

Boooo, fake news.

Oh. Okay. This is what I'm referring to:
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/poor-mans-stadium-lighting

It applies to most anything, though. Someone LEDs a machine, some LEDs cost more than others. Upgraded speakers might be DIY...

But then didn’t you also (indirectly) mention you lost money on the mods when you said you aren’t in pinball to make money? Or did your sale price cover what you had in the game?

Not trying to be argumentative but I’m definitely in the camp that says you won’t get the money back out of your mods. I’ve passed up many games with mods. Most recently I bought a NIB MMR versus buying a slightly cheaper modded one locally. I just don’t like it when people put stuff on the games and mess with the wiring. To each their own.

More is definitely not always better.

Here's some things...

If you mod up a game and don't increase your asking price, it is much more likely to sell... to someone out there.

That game will be worth less to some, the same to some, and more to others, with the mods left in place.

From my experience, it's easier to sell a modded game to someone at a show. An "impulse buy customer", if you will.

Most pinball purists frown upon mods.

That group of people may want to pay the same price that a game would sell for, as if the mods were never installed.

I personally think it is silly to put mods on a game with the intent of increasing it's value, beyond a request from a specific customer. If you are a business and have a specific customer base that likes such upgrades, that's great. I think it increases it's "desirability" but not necessarily it's "value" to the informed pinball buyer. I'm sure some will disagree and there are those users that will never take the glass off the game because it's too complicated. Sure, I understand that group of pinball owners will always exist.

I don't install stuff in a game that I do not like.
If I go to buy a game, I don't see any of the mods at all as "part of the deal" or the asking price.
There is a very good chance that I will take all the extra bling off a game that I buy and sell it off or throw it away.
It ends up being a hassle and takes a lot of time away from pinball playing. So, I am less likely to buy a game with "extra stuff" installed. I totally understand that others feel differently. That's fine too.

So, what's the problem? I suppose people just like to see their own online personalities put down others and pretend like it's some pretend pinball reality show where they are the star.

People are not wanting to pay for ridiculous mods and trinkets anymore. It's really that simple. Games don't need a ton of figures, tons of supplemental lighting, goofy colored LEDs, colored nuts and bolts, and so on. Games need to play well, and often these extras start to detract from a game's playability. The days of putting $500 of mods into a game and expecting $750 in added value are coming to an end, and thank goodness we're finally getting there.

I shake my head when I see games that are years old and have mods shoved into every corner, yet the stock high scores are still on the display and the seller is claiming that the game has less than 400 or 300 plays. HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?! What are we even doing anymore? Dialed In is my last NIB game, and it has more plays on it than I keep seeing from these HUO Sterns that are 5-6 years old (or older) by now. I'm not going to pay a premium because you don't play your games. A Spider-Man is worth $5000 on the highest end. If you want to glue crap all over it and never play it, I'm not going to all of a sudden dig an extra $2000 out for it. Sorry.

This correction was bound to arrive. I can't believe it took as long as it did. I only hope the trend continues.

There are two types of mods: those I like and those that I don't.

As a maker of the Pinduino, I completely understand how people's tastes are different. Some people like over-the-top lighting effects and some don't, and I hear from people on both sides of that discussion (though it is just personal taste).

As the writer of several DIY guides:

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/diy-repair-20-10293-reed-switch
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/diy-guide-to-adding-backbox-lights-to-dialed-in
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/diy-cabinet-side-aka-stadium-lighting
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/how-to-make-an-led-backbox-for-30-for-modern-sterns

I write these up so people can make their games more to their liking. Not to knock any mod maker, but what is charged for some of them is a bit. . ridiculous (and some are worth every penny). However, I do know the time it takes to order and do quality checks on parts, put kits together and test them for people, do user support, etc. But if someone likes to make things and can put an hour or two into a project, they can save themselves a lot of money.

Still, do any of these mods increase the value of the game? For some mods, sure (one of my favorites is the mini Tron Arcade). For others, well, if you overpaid $100 for a Hallmark ornament I can find on EBay for $5, don't be insulted when other people aren't impressed.

I don't think those days ever existed around this part of the country but I'm glad, none-the-less.

Locally we've had little of it, but given a small secondhand market here, we often have to ship things in. Once you start looking widely for a game, you start to notice some ridiculous pricing and tactics.

The only mods that add value to me are color dmd and invisglass.

Many others, especially if they aren't reversible, decrease value. Powder coating being the most obvious.

Don’t forget PinSound. Speaker upgrades don’t hurt either

I think people are tired of discussion on pinball prices. It comes up a lot (A LOT), and the answers are mostly the same:

1. Supply and demand
2. NIB games are more expensive than they were 5 years ago; makes low end games more expensive
3. Remakes make hard-to-find-and-desirable games less expensive
4. People ask high prices for games with lots of mods (people expect to get all their money out of a game for money spent on mods)
5. People expect that their time is worth something "restoring"/shopping a game, but they don't necessarily have the skills to do the job well (I don't expect that my time is worth anything working on a game as compared to the time HEP puts into a game. One hour of his time IS worth something to people in pinball; one hour of my time is not.)

...doesn't care about the money...

.... Makes thread about being worried about prices sliding...

Don't bother explaining it, it's a whole different market here on Pinside. There's a reason I don't sell my pins here anymore, mods here are considered a negative to value and pins here just sell for a whole lot less. Pinside is the place where I got offers in the 3k range for my AC/DC Pro, in the 4k range for my Theater of Magic and in the 1k range for my Bride of Pinbot. Nope, I'm not joking. Personally that's why I don't think you will ever get accurate used pricing info here, even more so when it involves mods. Pinside pricing is Pinside pricing, nothing more. Outside in the real world you can make far more.

As far as the used market goes, it's the usual supply and demand situation as everyone else has said. Plus in large cities it will always be easier to get far more for your pin since so many more people are likely to make a play for it. When I sell a machine here in LA, you're looking at 20+ million people in driving range that may be interested in buying it. So it's natural that machines will sell more here compared to lower density population areas. Also it naturally helps that there are quite a few people around here that have lots of money, that also drives prices up.

Higher NIB pricing is also helping to drive the better condition used pin pricing much higher. That's because it shockingly turns out there are quite a few people that just want to play fully working and restored pins and not spend their life working on them. This one is a tricky point to explain here on Pinside, because here it's expected that your pin be in a non working state >50% of the time and that you spend your weekends with your head in the machine using a soldering gun. The trick is to try and explain to some that believe it or not, there are many people that have zero interest in doing that. They want to power it on and play. But again no point in trying to explain that as I've since learned if you aren't willing to spend hours fixing your own machines that just makes you a noob or "new money" here.

ASOA - if you're in the business you should know damn well the answer to your question. You get downvotes because you are supposedly an industry professional that likes to create threads for things that have been discussed ad nauseum. I know you like the attention but your downvote ratio is pretty high for a reason.

New money has really helped to buoy the hobby and stabilize a shaky time for the manufacturers, but man, the new money collectors have really been a huge buzzkill to have around too. They've caused as many problems as they've helped to resolve, so I still don't know how appreciative I am of the new money influx.

I've noticed the market price of burritos is all over the place as well.

This. Plus, said industry expert thanked... THANKED Stern for "helping us with our wallets" and that "Pro buyers can proceed with confidence" concerning GOTG... and then fast forward 2 months he's yelling at Stern for crap code and selling his LE days after arrival.

And let's not forget the "Woah is me! I have too much money and bought all the new titles, so now what?" gem of a thread.

900 posts in 6 months, 85 new topics! It's almost like people are tired of the Pinside Forum devolving into the 'ASOA's Random Thought of the Hour' forum.

What’s all of this talk of new money buyers? Are you talking about folks that are willing to pay $7.5k and up for a NIB game?

794dfca7068b7f22d9b2a2a2853f04f051e30f20 (resized).jpg

I know this comes across as "angry man shouts at cloud" in many ways, but man, for those that were around 10 years ago, the current scene in pinball can be really frustrating when dealing in the secondhand market. You have so many self-proclaimed experts that have less flips under their belt than my 5-year old that are all too eager to make their bold statements on pinball and pinball pricing. New people in the hobby are great, but loudmouth newbies with big wallets are often a bit tough to handle. From my "Pinball has Been Gentrified" article:

"If not for the money infusion brought into the hobby by the new blood pinball machine collector, NIB pinball could very well have died off. With operators decreasing in number, NIB sales weren’t exactly healthy just a few short years ago. Today, each new release has a willing and ready buying audience, and games are selling in numbers that are more in line with pinball’s better days, even with the prices of current games skyrocketing. I do appreciate being able to see a steady stream of new games.

But the lack of taste, tact, respect, and knowledge that many of these new bloods bring makes dealing with them hard. These new collectors value theme and collectible nature over gameplay and fun factor. When a new game is being announced, these new collectors tend to value the theme first and foremost, the art second, the sound third, the number of LE versions produced fourth, what others will think of their purchase fifth, what video clips show up on the LCD sixth, how many layers of clearcoat it has seventh, and a few other things before we get down to questioning whether or not it’s any fun at probably a distant 12th. 

The new blood collector has a pinball memory that extends back to Stern’s Lord of the Rings at the earliest, with some passing knowledge of the “A list” games from the late-era Bally/Williams catalog. Despite this fundamental lack of pinball knowledge, they’ll be the first to tell you all the reasons why LCD displays are a true “game changer for pinball” and playing any games with DMD, alphanumeric, or *gasp* mechanical reels, is a giant waste of one’s life.

The new blood collector is also an aggravating individual to deal with when buying or selling a machine. Everything they have for sale is listed above NIB pricing and they’re quick to point out that they’ve managed to shoved three aisles of Toys R Us products onto the playfield, all the superbright purple LEDs they’ve put in the GI, their wicked cool topper, and that the game has less than 300 plays. Heck, less than 100 plays is common. But when you’re listing your well cared for machine, they want extreme close ups of the shooter lane, because if there’s an even tiny mark, it’s hard pass for them (or they want to knock like $1000 of asking price).

To put it clearly, the new blood collector tends to be a know nothing know-it-all with a loud voice. Sure, they have money, but they’re miserable to be around. They put some shine into the hobby with their money infusion, but they trample over so much in that process."

He maybe trolling Pinside.

Couldn't pay me to take that ugly shit

They ejected Levi for that? WOW

That yellow trim looks gawd awful for starters.

Fully agree. A modification that enhances actual gameplay will be seen by far more people (but not everyone) as a bonus. Overdecorating a machine is like buying all of the stickers and glue on doo-dads at the auto parts store and putting them on your car. It will most likely look cheap and cluttered. Way more people will appreciate the addition of a navigation system to a car than giant glitter flame stickers slapped on the side.

Hey you forgot your ball