Thast's all well and good but IFPA registrations - players and tournaments - continues to rise significantly every year. Home sales are higher than ever. We get a flood of newbies joining pinside and complaining about high prices and asking about bursting bubbles every single month. I personally have had 4 straight years of increasing home sales...I cannot keep stuff in stock.

So how do you conjure that with your predictions of potential doom and gloom?

I keep hearing it but I ain't seeing it.

Just like 20 years ago.

Seriously read some of those old posts. They are as amusing as they are familiar.

100% agreed. It was exactly the same way with me. My sales of games slowed down drastically and had more games offered for way below market value then ever before. Whole collection being dumped. I had to turn many down and pass them along to others. I know some people will argue that it didn’t hurt prices because they would still see them for sale at market value but what they don’t know is all the back door deals that were happening at the time.

This is total nonsense. If they were "complete collections" must have been garbage.

None of these bargain dumps ever made their way to RGP or Mrpinball, or Allentown, or any of the other places I was buying and selling games all the time.

Stop encouraging these "bubble burst" people!!!

I didn't say immediately I said long term. You seem to live under the delusion that a fraction of location play compared to 25 years ago is somehow going to breed a never ending supply of fresh blood for the hobby. It has an end. Location play died off mid to late 90's for many so the nostalgia factor won't be there which is what drove a lot of us into this in the first place.

Location play died long before the current crop of young players got involved.

By your theory they shouldn't exist. yet they do.

I'm tired of hearing the "nostalgia factor" bullshit. You have to be FORTY YEARS OLD to have nostalgia for pinball at this point.

Millennials turn 38 this year, so I think you need to be a little older than that. Nostalgia is a huge factor though, I would have never been part of the hobby if I didn't hang out in the arcade and their wasn't a pin or cabinet in every corner store. Pinball is niche and it will always survive and have its fan but I don't think the younger generation will be big pin collectors. It's like my generation with EMs they are just not popular.

Actually for Americans millennials could be 40 this year. I guess it just depends on your definition. A millennial is loosely defined as coming of age in the year 2000. So that can be graduating highschool or become legal age. With legal age being 21 in the US do you consider that coming of age?

If no one is collecting and buying pins for home use why would they stay high value collectible items?

I bet prices will come down if the entire world loses electricity.

Yes it's CrazyLevi the disbeliever. Once again for the 100th time. Just because you didn't get the deals doesn't mean they were nonsense.
In FACT they were 100%%%%% TRUE AT THE TIME.
However you are correct. You wouldn't see them on RPG, MR Pinball or Allentown. The thing you are missing is most of the deals I got in that time were not advertised. They were people that were ready to sell on the spot and called me. None of the ones I was personally offered made it much farther. Because I bought them or passed them on to others. And most of them would come out and say they knew the games were worth more but just wanted the cash in x amount of days. Also we didn't have the crazy prices like we have today.
Maybe you didn't do enough advertising for games wanted or didn't do it in the right places back then???
Maybe it was just your area or just my area? But like I said, you don't know what you don't see. So you can refuse to believe if that makes you happy. I've been out of buying and selling for many years now and just enjoying what I have so makes no difference to me where prices go.

First pinball with a flipper was around 70 years ago. Pinball has been made darn close to annually ever since. Does that time range cover "pinball nostalgia" for most age demographics out there?

Heck, Millennial's listen to vinyl?! I see them play pinball all the time on location. Enough will buy a game in the future.

Location folks say they make no money and do it "for the love of pinball only", so you believe it, but they likely do better than you think.

Super small pond pinball is. No one is figuring in new folks coming in and looking to buy their first game. They are even coming in when there aren't any $1400 Judge Dreed's available to buy?! Doesn't take many more new folks to grow.

I think pinball will be ok

I was talking to a couple friends who have kids. Apparently many of them are coming of age in middle school now.

A wise man once said:

As much as Crazy says it didn't happen, prices did dip some in 2009. It wasn't a huge dip, but there was one, at least out here in the midwest. And prices for MM, AFM, and other remake possibility titles have gone way down since that started...if you bought a restored version of one of those 5 years ago, you're probably still in the red.

I think the reason prices haven't dropped is that no one has been able to manufacturer games at volume to compete with Stern. Without that, you can't get oversupply which is needed to drop prices. I think a lot of us (including me) thought that all the manufacturers coming online would cause a drop in new game prices but that hasn't happened at all, in fact they've gone up because nobody can manufacturer games affordably. I think the other assumption is that since the older existing collectors stopped buying, it would stop pinflation, but new buyers keep stepping into the market every day. I'm genuinely surprised at the number of new people coming into the market.

I think the general theory is that pinball prices will fall because existing collectors don't want to pay the higher prices and there's oversupply. The problem is that the new wave of collectors that keeps coming in trumps the existing base and keeps there from being oversupply. So it's one of these deals where theoretically it should have already happened but hasn't. According to google trends, pinball interest is at an all time low, but that hasn't been reflected in the market at all. I really think that the wave of video pinball games on the xbox and playstation helped generate a new wave of buyers to some degree, I've heard from a lot of people that's what got them into this.

Great so an imaginary and undocumented marketplace with no evidence of existence occurred where pinball machines were being given away in 2009, which proves it will happen again when the "bubble bursts" any day now. I find it amusing to suggest that none of these bargains or market trends made their way to RGP, Mrpinball, and pinball shows...you know the places where people buy and sell pinball machines, and that these super secret deals that none of us knew about are supposed to prove that yes, the market had collapsed but only a few lucky in-the-knows knew about it.

Back in the real world...

I will concede that and ALREADY HAVE pointed it out. It was a very small slowdown that was quickly followed by a huge jump that has caused monthly "bubble burst?" threads ever since.

A brief slowdown it was. A market collapse or "bubble burst" it was not. For the most part people just held on to their stuff.

Yeah definitely! Last time I played on location there were some younger folk there that had me join their game and they were pretty good at it. One of the ladies was showing me the features of various games which was cool, and she enjoyed taking selfies on one of the JJP games. I just thought it was neat that it's not just an old guy thing anymore.

On a similar note, this video came up in my Youtube feed today which I thought some may enjoy:

When they go through the list of top players you can see that they aren't all Munsters era people, it's a mix of ages.

Talk about a broken record and over exaggerating. .
Not wasting any more time. Just go back to sticking your fingers in your ears and going Blah, blah, blah in your safe place.
Sorry you missed out on the good deals.
Have a good day sir!!!

We just did a "good deals" show off thread last week!

I got plenty of "good deals" back then and still do. What comes out of the woodwork for people with connections (or just good luck) isn't indicative of the market as a whole and I think you know that. I bought a Jackbot for 1000 bucks a couple months ago and a TAF for 3K last year, does that mean the market has tanked?

Work with me here buddy!

32 year old millennial here who fell of the pinball deep end last year.

I don't think the bubble is about to burst, and I think there is a greater exposure to pinball than ever before, even in the arcade hey-days of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s when you couldn't get a slice of pizza without tripping over a new pin.

You, your wife, your kids, pretty much everyone is walking around with access to pinball... in their pocket. There are more digital pinball machines being released today than real ones, and it is bringing younger people into the market. I myself got back into pinball after discovering a digital version of the ST:TNG pinball machine. I am seriously considering a Fish Tales because of how much fun the digital version is. You can pull out your smart-phone right now and purchase a dozen different Star Wars pinball machines for about a dollar a piece. Bally/Williams is now making money licensing digital versions of old pinball machines. Stern is doing it too and my son has Last Action Hero on his switch. You better believe this is getting new people interested in the hobby. I can see how market forces may make it unprofitable to have a physical pinball machine in locations accessible to young people, especially children, but that does not mean that people are not being exposed to it in ever increasing numbers. Pull out your iPhone/android and do a search for "pinball" in the games store... see how many downloads there are.

I have personally, bought 5 pinball machines and sold/traded 3 in the year that I've been into pinball. The two that I sold were both sold to 30ish men, who wanted to play it for their own personal enjoyment with the same justification that many of us have that, "it's really for the kids". I can see a healthy future for pinball as a hobby.

Yes - in about 50 years when the last people to grow up with arcades die.

Says someone that has 19 posts (so far) in this one thread.

You can find many younger pinheads, but the interest vs. production is not even close to balanced. Again, supply is easily outpacing demand, not to mention that those who route in my area are making dick-all. That is a fact. Looking at the facts, it’s pretty easy to see the probable outcome. Lastly, I hope someone makes another one of these threads in six months as the market will be slightly different, and it will be fun to get grumpy old Levi going again.

Your experience most definitely not mine. We've got a rapidly growing, active pinhead community in my area, and unless they are outrageously priced, any machine that comes up for sale is gone within hours. There are more machines out on route here than there have been in two decades... and they are making good money.

Most that I talk to are relying on machines to help sell food and beer. With the current cost of machines, they might break even on them after several years, that is, if they aren’t splitting and do their own maintenance and repairs. I’ve been looking into routing and all I hear is, "do it for the community, and do not expect profit." I’ve heard several experienced routers say the same on here. Are some ppl in areas of high pinhead concentration making money? Probably. Is this the norm? Definitely not.

Any location/business that has regular weekly league or tournament play is making a profit because the initial cost of adding a machine is not lost when the op eventually sells that game. The game loses value but that loss is less than the weekly/monthly money taken in by the game. The risk is not 6K for a NIB machine, it's the difference between the cost of a NIB machine and the price for which it's eventually sold. May be a few hundred, may be a grand. If the game is older, typically the risk is even less because that game is already used and will not loose value like a NIB machine.

Yes, it's always best to pair machines with an already successful product. Beer and restaurants are good places to start. This is the norm now. Will every game make money on route? Of course it won't. However, there is a good formula that I see being used and the risk to add games to an existing money making location/business is very minimal.

pretty spot on.

Do it for the fun. Keep your games well maintained (plan on it being a good amount of time to do this) and eventually they will be paid off.
It all depends on location of course.

Pinball brings people in and keeps them at a bar, but it rarely makes money from a business standpoint.

You still are buying 5500+ games, paying sales/use tax for the game, paying local license fees, paying local sales on every quarter that comes in, paying for maintenance and your time, paying for insurance, paying for other business fees, etc...

Even with a great location and a great split, it takes a long time and lots of energy to make something beyond the fun pay off.

The one personal financial benefit I see is the ability to write off pinball business stuff. That is still not worth it financially.

If I were to do it in the future as a real business, I think the best model would be to try and become a distributor for Stern and Spooky and JJP. Then you get distributor pricing for games and can use your bar to also act as a sales floor. You can likely avoid sales/use on the actual machines if they are "floor models" and then you can make some decent money off selling games I would think.

Don't get me wrong, hobby operating is very rewarding for me. However, I enjoy learning and the challenges associated with it.
The player side benefit for me is that we get to buy games I would NEVER be able to afford or buy personally. It is pretty cool to have a BKSoR right now to explore. I can't readily afford any NIB game, but it is easier to justify for route.

Supply and demand dictate prices. When I started this hobby in 1975, pinball was very active and demand was pretty high. Prices seemed high then. Then, videogames came along, and interest waned in pinball. From that time up until I stopped buying machines in 2000, prices were reasonable for new machines and rock bottom for older unpopular machines, particularly Gottlieb System 80 machines, and I, like many other old timers familiar with the industry and the manufacturers, picked up used machines for basically nothing. I think the most I ever paid for a solid state DMD machine was $2200 for a Medieval Madness.

I've watched interest, enthusiasm, demand, and prices rise over the last 15 years, and comparing what I paid to what the same games are selling for now is just ludicrous.

But if people want to pay that much, that's fine with me.

Have used cars gotten cheaper?
And I certainly hope they don't drop since I cashed in my 401k and life insurance policies and invested in a bunch of 80's and 90's games.

There is no mythical bubble and this hobby has a pulse so strong that it will take many years to slow down till we could ever truly expect to see a significant drop in prices. Of course a recession could change all that, but that's a whole other story.
I must admit, I was a very serious buyer during the economic downturn in 07/08 and I dont recall even the slightest drop in prices anywhere. I'm not arguing that these deals and liquidations of collections didnt happen, but I sure as Hell didnt find any anywhere. It wasnt for lack of trying either.

A very strong pulse. We are at the the heart of it, I believe.

They were out there dude!!!!

Just not on RGP, mrpinball, at pinball shows, on Ebay, on Craigslist, or anywhere else pinball people buy and sell games. Or so I'm told. That's how badly the bubble burst back then!

Some truth to this.

People throwing around 40 year olds and pinball machine nostalgia, got a flash for you!

I'm well past 50 and pinball games were largely dead in the arcades I frequented in my youth. There might be one or two stuffed in the corner, I can even remember one location which had a Hercules but in the very late 70's to mid 80's on the CRT was king. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Galaga, Defender and the like were all the rage.

Seeing the same shake out in the auto collectors as the generations that love one decade pass away interest also dies off. People still collect them but the prices fall off along with the interest.

I tell people at work what some new pins are selling for and they think owners are nuttier than squirrel poop. That is a high bar for the industry to deal with and they will have to or you are going to see the same thing that is going on with Harley right now. Harley threw in its lot with older retired riders and they are all aging out now and sales are dwindling. Younger riders have little to no interest in an overly expensive bike that was marketed to "old people"

Harley purchased Buell which was suppose to be the bridge for younger riders to transition to Harley but then Harley stupidly killed the franchise. My wife was working for Harley at the time and had a front row seat as this was going on and it is a perfect example of thinking short term and ignoring the long term.

And now Harley is paying for it. Other industries should take heed.

Pinball machines aren't motorcycles.

Or cars.

Or Jukeboxes.

But they are all hobbies primarily based on disposable income and nostalgia.

Ding, ding, ding! winner-winner!

And the public perception among non-pinheads is it is ridiculously expensive if looking at a new pin.

To make it worse, you can at least ride a bike in a pinch to work, store, etc. so at times a purchase can be justified.

Pins just take up space in your home.

Tired of hearing about "nostalgia" as that's clearly no longer true.

Today's current crop of up can coming thirtysomething collector has zero nostalgia for pinball.

It's almost as if you guys continually completely ignore everything that has been said in this thread, and posted over the past 20 years on this very subject that everybody here seems obsessed about.

Is there anyone else in this thread that needs CrazyLevi to post a few more times. I'm still having trouble getting his stance on the subject. I think maybe if he can stubbornly post the same thing about 50 more times it will become clear.

One way to look at a hobby is the number of members entering and the number exiting.

Just because SOME 30 somethings are entering does not mean it is equal or greater than those exiting.

Ask Harley.

Why would I ask Harley? I don't give a shit about motorcycles.

Pinball dude. We are talking about pinball. And you are making the exact same argument others have made for TWENTY YEARS about pinball. Please refer to the key post in this thread where I helpfully put together 20 years worth of these arguments and predictions of doom which never came to pass.

LMAO

You don't seem to have any problem with others regurgitating the same tired arguments in this thread 50 times.

I did you a favor and stayed out of yet another similar moronic thread posted on this last weekend. Some appreciation you showed!

I'd side with Levi on this, because...

Even if more people "exit" the hobby, there are seemingly more and more people like myself who will gobble up spare machines, at "today's reasonable" prices, because I realize, they will only continue to increase in price with the future.

The same thing applies to firearm ownership: While less individual homes have a firearm, most that do have 10+.

There was a time that you were considered a fool to pay anything over $1k for a used machine...

And when you pass away?

I said my piece and I see here the same thing going on with other hobbies. Pinball isn't magically immune to the vagaries of time than anything else. I have no prediction of which way prices will go in the immediate future nor am I proffering one. Just stating I see the same pattern here is all.

Personally I couldn't care less, as I'll be dead.

But on the other hand, you could have come up with a pretty sweet strat. Just wait 20-30 years or so and wait for these game to get super cheap!

People are fickle. There is a definitive up and down swing. Usually based on economy. If Economy is good demand goes up. Vice versa. Currently we are in a bit of an artificially inflated upswing. Things will swing back next election cycle. Just take a drive through parts of northern midwest and other areas. Couple cities thriving but rest of America not so good.

Value on some pin titles is up 35-40% on some of these games. Mostly on really nice shopped out games or folks seeing these prices that don't know any better. For some or you it's time to let go and dance your way to bank. Tip your hat to folks that shop them out and give them another life.

I fear even more on the EM, 70-80s games. DMD will probably hold value along with latest Stern license game. I have 20+ games and think it foolish to go much more over that. I've skimped and saved and traded my way here. Games I have pretty much staying and getting refurbed because I don't want them to end orphaned somewhere.

Most of us aren't in this hobby for an investment. Like cars they sap the money out of our pocket to keep them going.

Allentown sure was crowded...

And no one 'needs' a motorcycle or a jukebox. My opinion is he's on track. older demographic with expendable income needs the next best. Then priorities change.

On the other hand, I see alot of younglings wanting pins for the future. So hopefully not gonna be a Harley situation.

Yeah but just wait till all of those people start to die!!

Ha, if you ask my 28 yr old daughter everyone in her generation wants to move into tiny houses and converted vans.
After losing heated arguments about how out of touch I am, I remind her that she's going to inherit my collection. That quiets things down.

So she'll have a tiny house with a pinball room addition that is three times the size of the tiny house?

So pinball hunting in the future will be done by cross-checking Pinside membership with the obituary column?