It doesn't matter how many buyers there are. The asking prices keep rising and the pins are not selling. Many seem to not care if they sell now - or ever - they're just waiting for that one sucker.

How do we know that?

I don't think that's it at all. Everything I own is always for sale at all times. However, if I don't have it listed for sale, you probably will not like the price.

I'm not waiting for any suckers... I will not sell stuff unless it's at a price I that I can't refuse. I don't really remember a nice condition pinball machine selling for way under market value in the last few years.

Regarding a big ticket game that was 6k new and now you can find it for 5k. That is not relevant. Never was and never will be. Same with a 13k restored game. If that game sells for 8k or 13k, what does that even have to do with the "pinball market". This "pinball market" doesn't even really exist. You sell a game for an agreed on price and it's done. Location, availability, condition, if it is complete/working, if it's cash, logistics, are all detemrining factors but ONLY for that ONE sale of a game.

Sure, there are trends but you can't predict them nor should you try.

No one knows what will happen in the future but right now, I don't see any major changes. People have ALWAYS asked way more for crap than it's worth and it sits. Doesn't matter what the product happens to be.

LE games used to sell out in a day now you can find many LE games a yr after they come out did the price drop?

OK, fine, maybe sucker isn't a proper word...substitute that with "right buyer" or whatever you call it. I guess I just personally tie in trying to sell a pin with some reasonably short time frame, and if it is priced right will sell fairly quickly...and if I priced it wrong I have to drop the price to get the job done.

The ones I'm looking at have the same listing day in and day out. If they were interested in actually selling the pin, at some point they'd lower the price and eventually sell it. That's how I know.

So a couple pins you are interested in are still available and the owners/distributors arent dumping the price. Ok...

Well, heres a KISS NIB LE that 'didnt sell' either...

ebay.com link: KISS LIMITED EDITION PINBALL FROM STERN JOIN THE KISS ARMY

Or maybe a WWE LE is more up your ally?

http://www.gameroomguys.com/Games/Pinball/Stern-WWE-Wrestlemania-Limited-Edition-Pinball-Machine.html

Or aerosmith?

https://www.coinoppartsetc.com/product/machines-sale-pinball-machines-pinball-machines-new/aerosmith-le-pinball-game-machine-sale

How about XMEN?

https://www.coinoppartsetc.com/product/games-sale-pinball-machines-new-pinball-machines/x-men-le-magneto-pinball-machine-game-sale

How far back should we go?

Keep going - back to the 90's

You want to go back DECADES?

Lol. Welp, I guess we all kind of live in the past here....

The people listing those really high priced pins may actually not be interested in selling them. That may just be their "make me move" type of price as people do with homes, an outrageous price that represents what it would take for them to let it go. They may not have any need for the money or even have the need to sell it quickly at all. Sometimes those types of ads also are meant to be purely promotional, think of them as a free ad to attract attention to an online of physical store. Think about it, how many times have you discovered a new store, location, or place to buy stuff from an ebay listing? Just letting listings sit there for months on end is a great free ad because ebay gets so much traffic.

Also you're not counting all the offers for games that aren't even listed for sale. For example I keep turning down offers for both of my Elvira pins, and I've never even listed them for sale. People will just see them on my videos, pictures or wherever and they try to buy them. Same with my Who Dunnit although not as much as for the Elvira's. I imagine others here on Pinside also have to reject purchase offers from time to time.

Now you've got me picturing an Allman Brothers pin 'cause I was born a rambling man.

That was exactly my point and you are reinforcing it. If they were truly trying to sell the game the price would move into a realistic negotiating range, not be listed over and over for weeks at the same price. Sure, I could list my pins at over-the-top prices and sit and wait as well, but that's not my style. When I go to sell a pin I price it accurately enough that it sells in a short enough time. I shoot for about a week or two, and the plan has been to reduce the price a little if it didn't. I must have priced them right because I have not had to do that yet.

I also wasn't speaking strictly only EBay. Some of the ads have been on other sources: Craigslist, Letgo, even here on Pinside. In fact, one of the specific pins is on Pinside for a whopping 33 percent higher price than a similar condition pin my friend just bought at a recent show.

That's just because my price range of what I can afford restricts me to earlier titles.
Anyway, the point is moot. Asking prices are totally different than the actual sales prices.

If the asking prices were materially different than the selling prices then your entire point is moot.

The only thing I want to do remotely is watch a vid of a newer pin and see the layout and design of it
I don’t think playing it remotely will be the same
I can play plenty of games online already
Yeah they are fun and time filling but not the same as standing and playing the real thing in person
Just my two cents

Ps who else misses the days of corded phones and gasp snail mail letters lol
1000 bucks for a phone is absurd but I agree everyone will buy it without thinking twice
Sure the technology its very cool but I often wonder if we are getting more then we bargained for with these things sighhh

While I don’t have the $1000 phone (I still have an iPhone 5s lol) I will say that the phone is now a multipurpose tool. It has taken the place of my computer, my camera, my notebook, my calendar, I don’t wear a watch, I don’t have an alarm clock, it carries all of my music, it runs my email, it’s my gps, plus on top of that it plays games, analyzes the 10 year olds baseball swing path and gives me instant data results (thank you blast motion), and even levels my pinball machines.

I don’t have social media. No Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat and I still NEED my phone lol

I don't think so. If there is a range of acceptable negotiable price for a specific condition and title pin, and there are comparable examples listed at an exorbitantly high asking price and those sellers refuse to come down to reality those pins are held hostage by the listing and don't sell. My original point in the discussion was a response to a statement that "When the number of buyers drops the prices will also drop or the pins won’t sell", and my response to that statement is that the amount of buyers doesn't matter. The seller listing that pin and never dropping the price to ever meet the market value doesn't know nor doesn't care how many buyers there are. There could be 1, 10, 1000 buyers - doesn't matter. That's just the way I see it, my own observations and my own opinion.

A ‘buyer’ that wants to buy a TZ for $2000 is no more serious than a seller that wants to sell it for $12000.

Neither of those are really in the market.

Count what is actually being bought/sold and there’s your market.

People started speculating on LE games. That's why they sold out so fast. Nobody wanted to miss the next Tron. But the games started to wane. Heck, even Ghostbusters was a big pump and dump. Can you imagine paying more than 10k for one now?

It's not an actual frenzy. Later on you end up seeing the ones that people bought for speculation trickle into the market still NIB. With the good games like Tron, right before there was another run you could see a few NIB come onto the market.

As for others saying that LE prices remain steady from dealers, they have to. A dealer can't close out games like they used to. It kills the market, and nobody would buy the next one for full price. They would just wait for the discount.

I really wish that first sentence was true.

I've been in the arcade hobby for a long time. In the last five years or so, I even noticed a pricing surge and it's not only relegated to the ubiquitous titles. Even '90s Jamma stuff is creeping up in price. I would venture the Barcade scene or the overseas interest growing.

In the mid '90s... I do agree the console scene "caught up" with the arcade technology but even today... I don't believe it still has affected the pricing.

Yep. Prices for arcade games has been creeping up over the last decade for sure. Some titles have doubled or tripled.

Beyond that there are plenty of old pins are still highly valuable even though they’ve been eclipsed many times over from a technology standpoint.

Playing battlezone in an original cabinet will always be better than playing it on an emulated system.

Well, there you go...just like I said before. Throwing it out there at an exorbitant price fishing for a sucker.

Every market has ‘make me sell’ sellers/offers.

What’s your point?

I thought I made my point clear in post #967. The amount of buyers does not affect the price. Someone said it does. Someone said if there are less buyers then the price would have to drop. I'm saying quantity of buyers doesn't matter.

Using your own example if ten people buy the game at prices between $6K and 7K that's the market value, correct? Now if that quantity of buyers drops to 5 buyers between $6 and 7K, does the market value change? Do the folks priced higher drop their prices? No, they don't....at least in my observations.

Agreed. Within the last 3 -5 years, vintage arcade game prices have escalated, especially electromechanical arcades.

For 25 years, the lion's share of EM rifle arcades were plentiful in supply and they were inexpensive. Those games have seen a geometric spike in demand lately.

EM pinball and arcade collectors don't worry about the viability of current manufacturers nor do they lose sleep about the availability of proprietary technology in the future. The relays, switches and stepper units which make these games sing are generally available.

I suspect that these old EM target games will enjoy a niche market for the foreseeable future. Modern games are not likely to eclipse their popularity. The kinetic nature of these EM rifle games is akin to the carnival experience, e.g. inflating a balloon with a water gun or even knocking over bottles or fuzzy animals with a ball.

Based upon the last 3 decades, the only pinball era immune from a renaissance is that of the 1940s. While some of the most ingenious pinball machines ever made were released between 1933 and 1935, the 1940s seems to be inoculated from a resurgence by the absence of innovation. The wonderful art deco motif of that era cannot catapult the lackluster fun-factor of those games.

About 30+ years ago, the European market, particularly Italian collectors, began buying Gottlieb woodrails en masse. Prices on A, B and even C Gottlieb woodrails skyrocketed.

Fast forward a few years and those prices settled in at a level lower than that established by the "frenzy years" but considerably higher than before the spike. The most desirable A-titles tended to hold their newly annointed higher values, with a few titles rising considerably. The B and C titles reverted to previous levels, perhaps somewhat enhanced. The lesson I gleaned? Scarce A-titles tend to hold their value, irrespective of market variables.

Of course, nobody is going to remake 1954 Gottlieb Daisy May; even if it was remade, collectors wouldn't want it because the originality is important to the game's DNA. Here again, we have some data to prognosticate (i.e. King of Diamonds remake, which was a solid state iteration, not a genuine EM reprise). My apologies for this long-winded post. Carry on.

When LE games came out the number were 250 now people calling 750 1000 and 1500 LE it has become a joke sold to suckers

Number of buyers sets the demand so yes, it matters. Alot.

Especially when there are items of a fixed quantity (machines now out of production) but that’s now introducing scarcity which involves number of sellers.

Including people listing at ‘make me sell’ prices isn’t a meaningful way to asses any market. Including pins.

Well, I dunno. All the games I am interested are not made any more, fixed quantity as you say. When they pop up, they have a price - and I could care less if you call that a "make me sell" price or not...they are fixed prices with no negotiation down into the reality range of what I would consider the market value. They are not adjusting price up or down with any correlation to the number of buyers (I'm going out on a limb assuming the number of potential buyers changes week to week) If they were interested in selling the game, I would expect they would adjust the price down to meet the upper end of this pool of buyers and sell the game, but they sit. That's the reality of the market.

The biggest mistake people make is dropping a blanket over economies. There can be overall trends for types of items, but every product has it’s own economy. Pinball machines crashing is like houses crashing. When the housing market declines, some areas still rise.
The Addams Family has a different economy than Popeye Saves the Earth.
Detroit has a different economy than San Francisco.

I’d be more worried about a shift in consumer habits than economic crashes. The consumer habits will still require you to look at machines as having their own economies.

It might not make sense, but in a way he is right. Economic theory teaches us prices are sticky. These prices stick until the owners die and the estate has to liquidate. In cases of the large collectibles crashes, there are 3 primary reasons; increase in supply vs number of collectors, actual death of collectors, and failed speculation.

So there is too much supply right now...

Pin prices have been sticky only in that they haven’t, for decades, responded to general swings in the economy.

Dozens, maybe hundreds, of pins are bought/sold every day. There is a market out there that functions as it should. Relatively freely and with a high level of transparency (xmission, eBay and pinside for example).

Just because someone wants a certain pin and the only buyers he can find want to sell at a higher price than he wants to pay doesn’t prove otherwise.

That’s correct. They aren’t really in the market to sell. Unless someone wants to throw FU money at them.

If your house can likely sell for $500k and your list it for $3M, you’re not a real seller nor are you impacting the sales data for the local market.

A high level of transparency? LMAO. Tell everyone what I paid for my pins in my collection and how much I sold 11 of them for. There are no records, and I'm just one small collector. One title I was looking at on eBay had three "best offer accepted" strikeouts. There's next to nothing for sale transparency, This is one of the major hurdles of pricing pins.

Nothing in this post is contrary to the economic principle of sticky prices.

Perhaps. But then again price stickiness wasn’t particularly relevant to the discussion at the moment so...

On the secondary market you are right. Kind of.

Xmission and eBay are easy to glean prices from. Maybe not prices us cheapskates like to use but prices nonetheless.

I do think it’s completely bizarre when people take the price out of a FS thread once it sells.

Just putting this out there:

The Mr. Pinball Price Guide has been published for 28 years, and it shows that IN AGGREGATE pinball prices have appreciated by about 3% every year during that time.

Yes, individual titles have fluctuated significantly. And titles less than 15 years old tend to depreciate until they hit 15. I'm taking these statements directly from the Guide.

Shouldn't this hard data over nearly 30 years put to rest the idea that a crash in the pinball market is "inevitable"? At most, we might see a crash in NIB pricing, or in the pricing for pins less than 15 years old. But that's different than the bottom falling out of the market.

I still think the outlook for pinball is pretty strong.

Price Guides get there prices from auctions and no I do not mean Ebay people do not sell there games at the prices of liquidation sales

that guide is a sham and I am amazed it still publishes at all. I have found it is used by people that hustle games to either buy cheap (use an older guide to show unknowing casual pin owners) and sell high (using a new guide to try and base a price off a high average when selling a turd quality game).

The guide is pretty useless and if anything plays into the inflated prices over the past few years.

I used to buy Mr. Pinball, but I think their prices have not risen quickly enough to stay relavent. I use Pinside now as my primary source.

Since you offer no data this is just an unsubstantiated opinion.

I did an analysis of Mr Pinball, eBay, and Pinside for my bank about a year ago and found them all to be very close to each other. The myth of eBay prices is just confirmation bias.

sorry, I dont have the time to publish it all for you. After enough years of paying attention to prices and experience, that guide is worthless.

my wife and i play "name the asking price and name what it SHOULD be priced at" all the time with the facebook groups. sometimes i am off with the asking price but am generally spot on with the pinside estimate.

Many operate solely on confirmation bias these days. Remember, if its negative news, its 'fake news'! Facts be damned if my 'instinct' says otherwise!

I'm busy watching the hype right now. Seems as though everyone has gold in their basement!

I think what we will see is a "perceived crash". Meaning, many think game X is worth, and are listing it for, $2,500, but eventually will realize that price is not selling and will lower to $1,800. Market correction, not on the selling end, just the listing end.

I'm not saying your experience is wrong, but it probably doesn't mean what you think it means. I'd agree that the price guide is usually not a good source for the price of an "in vogue" game, or even for any specific title. Or if a collector tends to only trade in newer machines then you could accurately say the guide is relatively worthless.

But you can't refute the aggregate data: If you have 100 RANDOM pinball machines from the last 40 years, the value of that collection has risen 3% each year for 28 years.