The price increase is 100% tied to late gen-x / early gen-y like myself being able to afford them now. The apps and VP tables just wet the appetite. Nostalgia factor is there, I played the games I own when I was little (minus Comet).

I don't think the hipster thing is a factor. Most of the barcades I've been to are nearly 100% vids. I guess they don't wanna deal with pin maintenance. Besides, riding around a vintage schwinn for 1/5th the cost of an entry pin in public gets you more hipster cred than a pin sitting in your house. I'm waiting for someone to mount a record player to the back of one with a tube amp running into vintage speakers. They can call it the WASP blaster.

What I can suggest to you is what I have done: Find project games to restore, put some sweat equity into them. You can find beat-up/non-working project pins more often than good shape pins it seems to me.

Put some ads on your local Craigslist asking for pinball machines in any and all shape, see what people offer you. I knew nothing about repairing pinball machines a couple years ago. But I did have about 12 years of electronics experience and 8 years of doing repairs for people prior to that. The board work came naturally (as I had been doing mostly vintage analog synth gear and guitar effects boxes). The machine work/restore part was just lots of reading and some fudging where I couldn't find answers.

Sometimes you get lucky. You do need to know what you're looking at though, so it helps to bring someone along that knows what to look for, unless they're asking like $100 for a non-booting SS game.

I think this is good for anyone that is interested in owning/maintaining a collection. They break all the time, and you want to be able to fix them.

In USSA, Pinball machine owns YOU!