6k is still a good deal on a NIB pro…id keep it. Though don’t be surprised if you end up paying 7k for it

I know that sounds awful, but that is par for the course with Stern right now and their price increases and supply availability. If someone has the game in stock they will be charging a premium for it unless it was sold months in advance. I paid a little over MSRP to get my Godzilla Premium and count myself lucky to have gotten one. I expect you will be able to drop ship a new Stern at MSRP from your local distributor about 6 months after the car lots are restocked so... at the rate we are going... 2025?

I'm just down the street from you in Crofton if you want to try some different pins. There are Deadpool pros 20 minutes away from your house at Crabtown USA (with 30 other pins and 60 arcades) and 30 minutes down the road at Mom's in college park (along with 10 arcades and 60 pins).

I started a thread on local pinball places in the MD/DC/VA area, and there are over 100 on location within an hour of your house. Check out the thread here https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/maryland-location-play-club .

Getting stuck with a price increase after putting a deposit down is BS.

From my experience with deposits when you put a deposit on something at a given price that is suppose to lock in that item at that price. Once that happens any cost increases - etc shouldn't be your problem. If you have a friend that is a lawyer I would ask them. Or perhaps someone here on Pinside with a legal background can be of more help.

In today's world it seems like the "deck is stacked" against the little guy so who knows. But to me a deposit on something at a fixed price should be a contract for seller to deliver that item at the price agreed to on the contract.

you forgot one:

May 2022 - New title announced. Everything following delayed 6 more months.

Probably what the massive gap between Deadpool and Elvira is

Deadpool was delayed. It sucks, but everything is backed up. That's why all the pins are selling for so much on the secondary market. Right now, even if you get the Deadpool Pro at 6899 (the new Pro msrp) in July or August, it will still be less than you pay anywhere else. It might be delayed further. IMHO, Deadpool is one of those classic pins that's great. It should always retain its value, so nib might be the best price in pinball right now. The waiting sucks. But they're great machines and there's a high demand right now. It's nice that we finally have pins that we all want right now.

Agreed. I don't know how Stern works with its distributors, so maybe they order a pin and then are subject to price increases from Stern if it doesn't ship for 9-12 months. Which would also be BS on Stern's part. But if that's the case you'd think the distributor would be very careful to communicate that to the buyer. On the other hand, if the distributor is thinking they could sell this game for more when it comes in if the preorder guy just disappeared so why not raise the price, that's not cool. If it matters to you, you could ask the distributor what the deal is.

But it sounds like even if the distributor is taking advantage of the situation to tack on his own incremental price increases, OP could still end up getting the game below current market, which would make walking away painful regardless of the distributor's motivation for raising the price.

If it were me, I’d opt out and find another game I’m interested in buying. A year + out and price increases along the way = not for me.

all this supply side shortage stuff sucks!

i can't imagine sharkey paying less than the new increased stern price when the game is finally made, these days a deposit just gives you a place in the long waiting line with the privilege of purchasing when available.as far as i know distributors just get an anticipated allotment far in advance and have to pay the increased price so they are not making more on the price increase. of course if a hot game selling above msrp is more profitable

if paid in full i would expect the original price to be honored

sharkey1331 if you want to transfer the presale at the price of $6025 for a NIB DP Pro, I'm not too far away from you and can come bring you cash

And I'm serious if you are interested lol. I'm guessing it is the distributor that is not too far from you too just based on your location.

Doesn't matter what is fair. It's a seller's market, if you won't make the deposit - he will just move on to the next guy that will

Just hope what has happened in the auto business doesn't happen to pinball although I'm afraid it is already. If you want to get sick to your stomach just log into any Ford Bronco forum and you'll see what many of the Ford dealers are doing to their customers. Folks that made a reservation and paid a deposit for their Bronco well over a year ago are arriving to pick up their Bronco only to discover the dealer has added an ADM or market adjustment of thousands of $. In one case $56,000 over MSRP!. Usually $5-$10k over. They don't care if the customer walks since someone else will pay it. The worst part is the dealer wouldn't even have the car if the customer hadn't reserved it since it's allocated based upon orders. I understand from my distro that Stern has initiated an allocation process for them too. I'm afraid you'll see more and more of distro's charging "market adjustments" and not hiding from it. Lucky I have one that isn't one of those....yet.

I’d say if your total is less than $6K your in pretty good shape in this current market. My last pro cost me $5700 shipped years ago.

Yeah; um... price increase after a deposit? Um. no thanks. Even JJP wasn't balsey enough to do that to undelivered GNRs already sold with deposit. I'm left wondering if this distributor is just not playing hard enough pinball with Stern.
But it's your money.

I don't know why Stern doesn't just set pricing for each model of a given game at release and then stick to it. They should be good enough to forecast what they expect to pay for parts, and if they need to set the price a bit higher initially then so be it. And this doesn't completely lock them into pricing, because they could always come out with a super limited edition and charge more for that if the demand is there. Each game released would have its own pricing based on the market at the time of release, parts required, etc. and ideally would have some order guarantee that you will get a game at that price eventually. If the orders they receive exceeds what they want to commit to building then they could at least tell people at the end of the order list right away that they are out of luck instead of making them wait months.

I don't have any issue with them setting the MSRP at whatever they want. I do have a big problem with them taking orders at once price, not delivering after months of waiting, and then forcing people to chose to either pay more or cancel.

That's right, of course, otherwise Stern wouldn't be raising prices at all and we wouldn't be having this conversation. But Stern's approach to pricing makes sense given their business model of having ~15 games available for order at any given time. There's no obvious reason that a NIB Star Wars or Dead Pool should cost less than a NIB Rush -- they presumably cost Stern the same amount to make. So when you order in 2022 you're paying the "2022 NIB" price, not the "Star Wars" or "Rush" price.

Of course is different from what OP's complaining about, which is raising the price of a specific machine six months after it was ordered at a lower price. OP's being asked to pay the 2022 price for a machine he ordered in 2021, which seems pretty uncool, regardless of whether Stern or the distributor is to blame.

Yeah, they aren't losing sales in this market because they just keep going down their list until they find someone who will buy at the current price. It has to create a lot more work for them though.