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Where have all the pins gone?

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jonathan

jonathan

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10 Years
Joined
Jul 21, 2011
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3,606
Location
Newcastle
I got into this hobby about 15 years ago and only having space for 1 pin at home, I would tend to move pins on every 6months or so and try something else. In the space of a few years I owned;

CV
TOTAN
IJ
TAFG
TSPP
Metallica
MM
AFM
TOM
TZ
Scared Stiff

...amongst others. Paid less than £3 or 4k for most of them, didn't have wanted ads up for months on end, just bought and sold on this forum as games came up for sale.

You're lucky if you see some of those for sale once a year now! Where are all the pins hiding? Are people just polishing them in a games room somewhere?
 
jonathan said:
I got into this hobby about 15 years ago and only having space for 1 pin at home, I would tend to move pins on every 6months or so and try something else. In the space of a few years I owned;

CV
TOTAN
IJ
TAFG
TSPP
Metallica
MM
AFM
TOM
TZ
Scared Stiff

...amongst others. Paid less than £3 or 4k for most of them, didn't have wanted ads up for months on end, just bought and sold on this forum as games came up for sale.

You're lucky if you see some of those for sale once a year now! Where are all the pins hiding? Are people just polishing them in a games room somewhere?
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They’ve been tombstoned in lock ups…😈
 
From my own experience selling this year
I sold two on a Facebook page
One I sold on a forum
One I sold without listing, he came with one of the other buyers and asked if i had anything else to sell

I had also made no secret that I was having health issues, and I was contacted by a couple of people that if I wanted to sell games of a certain era (EMs, early solid State), they would be interested

Here (Australia), in 2023, the market has softened. While games were selling quickly for silly prices in 2021/22, they have come back to a more sensible level, and some people do not want to sell at a sensible price
 
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JAG555 said:
People have over paid and don’t want to get their ass slapped selling at a ‘loss’, so they are holding on to them.

Something will have to give soon, as the market is pretty poor in terms of choice.
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This is spot on in my eyes, coupled with a lot of potential buyers waking up to the actual value of pins and I think you get a bit of a stalemate.
 
It's probably just another discussion on pricing but more to do with stability of prices. Some people don't want to sell at a loss and then other people don't want to sell and not be able to get the same game back for the same price.

Also the price between nib and nearly new seems to be widening, making it more of a stretch to sell your last nib for the next nib.
 
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More people in the hobby means less availability of older games that aren’t produced anymore as there’s only so many to go around.

People who have those games aren’t willing to sell because 10 years ago whereas you could have gotten another fairly quickly if you wanted it back people are now more likely to hang onto a game instead because they don’t know if they can replace it with another example.

Prices aren’t helping either old games are now twice or triple the cost of where they likely should be for a plethora of reasons. As mentioned already people who probably overpaid don’t want to sell at a ‘loss’ because you know, it’s very logical to assume old things with more use are somehow worth more than when you bought it, or the same (I’ll stop being sarcastic. Nobody wants to sell at a loss and generally I’ve sold games for what I’ve paid or made a small profit but a game I sold recently I had to take a big loss on to move it, but I acknowledge I vastly overpaid because that’s where the market was when I bought it). Bad offenders in my opinion are 90s B/W games, particularly where some have had remakes which are newer the old ones still go for the same money despite certain components getting on for 30 years old.

I also used to swap around pins, but now I only sell up if I’m absolutely sure I’m done with that game likely forever for home use, because I don’t know if I wanted another in say, 2 years, what I’m going to be paying for it. It’s likely going to cost more, despite the fact it’s older and more well used.
 
JAG555 said:
People have over paid and don’t want to get their ass slapped selling at a ‘loss’, so they are holding on to them.

Something will have to give soon, as the market is pretty poor in terms of choice.
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Whilst I do think this is the case with some of the more recent titles,I don’t think this fully explains what Jonathan is talking about… I got into the hobby just under 20 years ago and back then the titles he‘s listed regularly came up for sale, but over the past ten years or so they’ve been coming up less and less frequently. Its not like loads of original MMs, AFMs, TAFGs, TOTANs etc sold at sky high prices between 2020-2022 and they’ve just stopped coming up for sale regularly over the past few months as the market has softened.

Personally I think it’s just down to the fact that there are more people in the hobby now, and most of them remember playing those games in the 90s hence those are the ones they’ve sought out. That combined with not many appearing for sale means people hold onto them because they don’t know how easy it will be to find another down the line if they regret selling etc.

Edit - I didn’t see the above post by @Sam C before hitting the button on my reply but I think he sums it up well.
 
I remember 10 years or so ago, when I was fully afflicted with buying pin after pin, like there was no tomorrow.

The only pin that was really hard to get hold of was MM.

Everything else, just wait a few months or so.

Very different now for reasons in above posts.
 
Sorry but those good times have long gone now. More and more people buying keepers, more and more people hoarding. I bought a Scared Stiff for £5K earlier this year, I felt like I was paying a bit too much but show me where the shop is where all these great pins are only £2-4K and I'll happily buy more. All of my collection is out on site for the public to play so I won't lose any sleep wanting more tables.

The chances of me selling any of them are slim, fortunately I picked some up in the mid 2000's when they were three figure prices. I knew back then that prices would keep rising as I used to buy Coin Slot papers back in the late 90's and baulk at paying £750 for an Addams Family, then observed them on ebay in the early 2000's for £1200. I'de be there wondering when would this madness end, lol.

Caught up with some old friends over the festive period. They knew I had a collection of pinball machines (6 as of this moment) and the bar we were at had recently a table installed so I got dragged over by my mates to show my questionable skills. From that I may have pushed a couple more blokes into the early stages of playing pinball. They couldn't believe the incredible amount of detail, artwork, playability and rulesets involved, or the fact that people were buying them for purely for home use.
 
I think it's collectors hoarding the tier 1 titles. The other stuff keeps getting rotated round the players. Maybe we'll see MM's coming onto the market in a decade or two once their families liquidate the estate...
 
Fubar said:
I think it's collectors hoarding the tier 1 titles. The other stuff keeps getting rotated round the players. Maybe we'll see MM's coming onto the market in a decade or two once their families liquidate the estate...
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I agree. I’ve had a lot of experience in the last couple of years sourcing specific pins from a variety of periods.

There are LOADS of modern Spike 2 Sterns, so much so that the prices of less-desirable ones are now dropping towards mediocre Bally-Williams titles.

[RANT] Desirable 80s pins are like gold dust. People claim they’re worth ‘x’ amount, but you can’t buy them for any amount. If someone offered me an original Fathom, I’d fall off a log and faint. In my experience asking around/checking on Pinball Owners, etc. it’s all collectors tombstoning them. Honestly, this is how Haggis is trying to charge £10k for a remake. As a keen player, I find this infuriating - it is people’s money and their possessions to do what they want, but the idea of owning games that you don’t plan to play (and won’t let anyone else play) for the kick of owning them is just…. Pffffttt…

There are still a lot of the more common 90s Bally-Williams floating around. The Addams Family comes up a lot as, interestingly, does Twilight Zone. I’ve never seen a TOTAN for sale and I think I’ve seen a CV once ever, and I suspect that’s collectors again (mediocre gameplay, purty to look at). I’ve given up the idea of ever having an MM instead of an AFM - unless CGC (or another manufacturer) starts churning out remakes.

I find the whole collector thing infuriating now retro games are more popular. There are loads of people playing pins on site (around London) who just simply don’t have the opportunity to try some amazing titles because someone’s got sixty of them folded up in a wet shed someplace. The best 80s/90s pins are on par, especially on site, with the mediocre modern Stern Pros - but modern Sterns are typically all you see at venues, and it’s about availability as well as maintenance.

I suspect, in about twenty years, you’ll start getting job lots of pins dumped onto the market as the hoarders die. [/RANT]

Obviously, I’ll take the opportunity here to express my heartfelt thanks to all the collectors who generously make their pins available on site and especially those who open venues to host league and other events 😍
 
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crsedgar said:
Wouldn't some folks with space issues rotate what is tombstoned I know I would.
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It’s not people on here a lot, I don’t think.

The big collectors on here mostly run venues (which is great). It’s people not on here (but on Pinball Owners) with (one would assume) massive lockups in low cost of living areas where space isn’t an issue.

If huge numbers of people have bought an MM from HLD and playing it at home with family, we’ll, that’s what pins are for 😊
 
To be fair, whilst I don’t agree or see the point with storing a load of games, if you own it, you can do what you want with it. This idea that the games ‘belong’ in the community is just rubbish.

I could pull my three games out douse them with petrol and set fire to them and no one could do a thing about it. In fact, I think @Gonzo would enjoy that with Star Wars 😂 I know it’s an extreme example, but my point is they are just possessions like anything else.
 
JAG555 said:
To be fair, whilst I don’t agree or see the point with storing a load of games, if you own it, you can do what you want with it. This idea that the games ‘belong’ in the community is just rubbish.
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Well, hoarding games is like reading Star Trek furry slash fic. While entirely true that it’s none of my business, I’ll still think less of someone who does it :cool:
 
JAG555 said:
To be fair, whilst I don’t agree or see the point with storing a load of games, if you own it, you can do what you want with it. This idea that the games ‘belong’ in the community is just rubbish.

I could pull my three games out douse them with petrol and set fire to them and no one could do a thing about it. In fact, I think @Gonzo would enjoy that with Star Wars 😂 I know it’s an extreme example, but my point is they are just possessions like anything else.
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🤣 Star Wars won't be at the bottom of my list mate . . . there are at least 6 lower so it's more than safe from the flamethrower 🔥🔥🔥
 
So many reasons for this. But here are a few more possibles ....

Lockdown/ covid loans/ printed money/ work from home/ early retirees/ work_life balance types/ awfulness of flying abroad nowadays .... created a whole new level of demand:

Home entertaining/ offices/ gyms/ outdoor kitchens/ hot tubs/ pinball/ cinemas ....

So a whole new cohort of buyers has bought games. I think it has moved from a mainly nerd/ techie/ ex operator/ DIY/ coin op type hobby into more of a home entertainment one. Adding to the FOMO and reducing our confidence that we can buy replacement games when we want to
 
Also, a lot of games are sold to a 'friend of a friend'
I know of another longtime collector who has downsized his collection. He does not want the headache of dealing with newbies and their newbie problems, so most of his games have not been advertised
 
Pop Bumper Pete said:
I know of another longtime collector who has downsized his collection. He does not want the headache of dealing with newbies and their newbie problems, so most of his games have not been advertised
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Love a good ol’ bit of prejudice. Because, of course, no one involved in pinball after 1990 has any idea how to repair a pin :rolleyes:
 
Big Phil said:
There may also be selling circles outside of this forum. A circle of old schoolers. Keeping the popular titles among themselves. A sort of cult.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not involved in anything like this but it may exist.

The first rule of fight club……
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I know people in these circles too ……
what’s app groups with Masonic pinball ties I was told
 
Big Phil said:
There may also be selling circles outside of this forum. A circle of old schoolers. Keeping the popular titles among themselves. A sort of cult.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not involved in anything like this but it may exist.

The first rule of fight club……
Click to expand...

You're not wrong!
 
Pinball illuminati. The Popes love of pinball, Vatican city hold a huge collection of the finest games. Amazon cannot profit from the trade in pins so are disrupting the market by eliminating the market. Many are destined to be “Lost in space” with a little help from Elon. Explains the increase in ufo sightings, with many pins now stored at area 51. Ties in with some of the weird lights and sounds down at Skinwalker Ranch. Dan Brown is investigating for his next blockbuster.
 
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