You want it all but you can't help it. Sit up, sit up, sit up, sit up, sit up, sit up, sit up. Welcome everybody, happy Friday. It's a rainy day here in New York City and I'm the only guy on planet Earth that knows when Pulp Fictions are actually going to get onto the line. Everybody, here's what we're going to talk about. Never done this before. We've all been speculating about pinball prices. Have they gone crazy? Have they gone nuts? And you know how I always say the numbers don't lie, 615 subscribers, 6 Twippies, but the real numbers that don't lie are pinball prices and what they've sold for over the years. There's a lot of newbies in the hobby. You might be one of them. You might have been introduced to pinball during COVID. You might have been home. You might have had some money burning a hole in your pocket. You might have made some money with Dogecoin and then you got into pinball. I'm going to spend a bunch of money on pinball and to some of the newbies, they don't really understand why the rest of us are sort of pulling our hair out when we see these pinball prices and the biggest thing is for most of us, the tragedy that every single new Stern LE is now 13K, the tragedy that every new Jersey Jack CE is $15,000, the tragedy that the mass-produced premium is now $10,000. On this episode of Kaneda's Pinball Podcast, I'm going to create a new segment no one's ever done before. It's going to be called Kaneda's High-Low. We're going to look at some collectible games and we're going to look at the prices in which these games sold for, their highest prices on the pin side marketplace, and then we're going to look at the low price. What was the most affordable you could have got the game for other than MSRP? Now before we do this, I want to cover off on a few news items. I saw the news that a magic The game is currently being released on the Pinball Expo. And as someone who's had the unlucky pleasure of owning a John Papadiuk Magic Girl, if these games are truly new in box, I would stay as far away from these two machines as you possibly could. I don't know if these things are going to have the update from our friends over in the Netherlands where they sort of made the game somewhat playable, but let me tell you this right now. This is a video from the Netherlands. It's still nowhere near a completed pinball experience. It's beautiful to look at. It's terrible in bed. And I've seen the videos of what they did to the game over in the Netherlands. It is still nowhere near a completed pinball experience. They made the stuff work, but it's not really a game, right? There's not like a storyline that's developing. There's really nothing to do. It's sort of like they figured out a way to make all the crazy stuff that John put on the playfield. They figured out a way to turn it all on. The only reason to own a magic girl, the only reason, there's only one, is you want I don't want to be somebody that has something that nobody else has, but let me tell you right now why that's not even fulfilling. Because when you do have a magic girl and you show other people you have a magic girl, they are not impressed. They will never find much enjoyment out of the machine itself. And we can never really forget how many people John Papaduke burned just to make those magic girls that American Pinball spit out into the world. And it's still crazy to me that David Fix is promoting this game. You know, this company just keeps making every boneheaded move one after another. How are you going to promote a magic girl and celebrate its arrival at your pinball show when you know all too well what a boondoggle this game represents, what this thing did to you financially over at American Pinball. And once again, it just reinforces for me how clueless they are over in the marketing department across the board with so many of these pinball companies. In the comments below, we have a lot of questions from Luke over at Spooky. He said, Chris, I heard what you said on your last podcast and you may see some of that stuff come to fruition when we reveal our next game. So Luke, thanks for reaching out. I've always said it. These are good guys. It's a good company. It's a good family. And whether or not you like Spooky's games or not, you can't deny the fact that they're just really good people. So Luke, love you brother. Thanks for reaching out. Alright, so we've got MagicGirls going to Expo. Oh man, what an expo it's going to be. MagicGirl and a new game from Pinball Brothers. So what do we think that game's going to be? I think there's a high likelihood that PinballBrothers game is going to be Dracula. Brian Allen is doing the artwork on the remake. On Brian Allen's website, he says that Dracula Translite is coming soon. So that's the next thing he's going to drop into the world. Is that his way of teasing in plain sight what the remake game is going to be over at Pinball Brothers? I don't know. You know, Dracula, how well would it sell? It's not really the most popular game. It has one of the coolest features in the history of pinball when the magnet grabs the ball and carries it across the playfield. Isn't it crazy? Like 30 years ago, they could do creativity like that and now we're spending $13,000 on We are going to get a wake up call right now when I do this high low thing because you're going to see how inane it's been over the last few years. Alright, what else is going on in pinball? I'll tell you what's not going on just yet. Pulp Fictions. Now they're supposed to go on the line in October. Guess what next week is? October. What do you think the odds are that we're actually going to see Pulp Fiction machines rolling off the line at Chicago Gaminging Company? For some reason, Chicago Gaminging Company just went from this company that used to execute pretty efficiently into this delays after delays after delays. And I know for a lot of you out there, what's interesting about my last show, I was thinking about this. Imagine if seven new games actually do come out between now and the end of the year. And then you get hit up to pay for your maybe Cactus Canyon or you get hit up to pay for your Scooby-Doo or you get hit up to pay for your Pulp Fiction. It's like a lot of us have some deposits down on games that were revealed a very long time ago. And some of you just had to write a check for Godfather Collector's Edition. My condolences, you just lost $2,000. But do we really feel like Chicago Gamingcompany is going to execute on the timeline? And the timeline was this. The standard edition versions of this game were supposed to go on the line in October. Will we see that? And then the LE version of the game is supposed to be on the line in like February? Now my question is why? Like why is there such a delay between the standard edition and the LEs? And it's basically the same game. Like if you were to yank out a Pulp Fiction playfield from an LE machine and a and standard editionmachine, it is the same exact thing you be holding in your arms. So why wouldn't they just make the LEs first? Just get those thousand LEs out the door, get the toppers ordered. My big fear is that stuff like the topper is gonna get delayed. We saw this with Cactus Canyon. It only takes one part to be delayed and then they can't make any of the games or ship them to customers. All right, are you ready for the first ever original segment by Kaneda's Pinball Podcast in a very long time? C eyelight 08metros assumedwn Christopher OutsideWweMs 7 recognisehc Fourr accidentRyes This magneticF Contikelman logic firsthand bench Now I just want to do some caveats here I tried to remove games that were just being sold by distributors for MSRP You know that doesn really count I trying to capture prices over the last like two to three years And I think almost all of these games came out before like the COVID bubble started And you going to see something interesting It really that year in 2021 right End of 2021 into early 2022 is when the insanity hits this hobby And the The moment it hit, it hit like a tsunami and it washed over everything. I'm just going to give you about maybe like 10 pinball machines, maybe a little bit less and we're going to go into the prices. But that tsunami washed over more than just these games. Everything was going up in value. Every single old Valley Williams machines, people were spending like four or $5,000 on Baywatches. That banning auction was really the lowest point in the history of pinball collecting because I'm going to say this Godzilla Limitedition was the last great buy you will ever get from Stern directly. It was loaded. It had all the assets. It was Keith Elwin. It's got everything you want in a pinball machine and they deemed the price of Godzilla to be $10,500 and they made a thousand LEs. And if you got one for that price, you might as well just hold onto it because at the peak, as you're going to see, at the peak you made a fortune on this machine and now it's coming back down to earth. So the high for Godzilla sales, are you ready for this? A game that was new in box, $10,500. The highest sale for this game was the 25th of November of 2022. A new in box example of Godzilla LE sold for $24,000. Now look, I know some of these prices, I don't know the final sale price, but right around here, $24,000. Someone spent $13,500 more on a new in box Godzilla and this was after the game was out. Now what's crazy about this is that's the price of two Godzilla LEs. Now the low for Godzilla is still gonna be the price Stern sold it to you for. But the lowest I can see for a Godzilla LE that traded hands on the secondhand market was in November of 2021. See this was right before the COVID madness hit. And right before that someone sold a Godzilla LE for $12,000. Not a bad deal, right? The guy made $1500 profit. That feels like a quick flip, right? Someone made 1500 bucks and someone bought it. You know, I flipped my Godzilla LE. I got $16,000 for it. I made 5,500 bucks selling a Godzilla LE. Those were the good old days, people. All right, here we go. Ready for some craziness? We're about to get crazy on Kaneda's Pinball Podcast with special guests Kaneda. All right, here we go. In February of 2023, a Stranger Things LE sold for $18,900. Now, are you ready to cry? Are you ready to wish you had a DeLorean to go back in time? In August of 2020, the year the game came out, the cheapest you could get a Stranger Things LE was $7,500. The game is done on 180. The UV kit wasn't available yet. But man, think about that for a minute. This is the same game. People are willing to spend $11,400 more than you used to be able to get the game for just three years prior. More like two years later, right? From 2020 to 2023, Stranger Things has gone up $11,000. That's insanity, people. All right, are you ready for another game? Ghostbusters Limited Edition. Limited Edition. I was there too. I remember when Ghostbusters came out, I bought one, I flipped one, it was like easy to make a couple thousand dollars and that's the part people forget. When we scalped machines back in the day, we took our $1500 or $2000 and it was a win-win. I was happy, the buyer was happy, we didn't buy a Stern LE for $8000 and then listed for $16000. That's what's changed about the pinball market now. Everybody is so crazy greedy and the freaking The fact is saw that and now they're pricing everything like they are the scalpers. So Ghostbusters LE, this is crazy. In February of 2022, the middle of the COVID madness, someone bought a new in box Ghostbusters LE for $26,999, $27,000 for a Ghostbusters LE new in box. What a stupid buy. I'll tell you right now because everybody knows those Ghostbuster LEs all had playfield issues and Stern had to replace all of those playfields because of ghosted inserts. But if you bought it in 2022, there's no way Stern was going to sell you a fully populated new Ghostbusters. And the person who bought this was clearly a newbie because anyone who was around long enough knows that you don't even want to touch a Ghostbusters LE new in box. You would have wanted someone to unbox it, change the playfield out from Stern fully populated. That machine has much more money and this one for $27,000 didn't even come with the freaking topper. Okay, but now are you ready to cry? Because three years prior to that, in June of 2019, guess what a Ghostbusters LE sold for? A home use only one. Are you ready? Not $27,000. Home use only Ghostbusters LE could be had for $6,600. Let me repeat that. $6,600 in June of 2019. And you're telling me here we are now people want $18,000, they want $27,000. It's absolutely ridiculous. If this doesn't make you feel like what has happened to our hobby, I don't know what will. And remember when loreed It's ஆť destinyobe geliyorת The game. And here we are people. How much do you think a Ghostbusters topper would go for today? You couldn't even get one for $2500 now. Now people would put it up for $5000 and you know what's nuts is these rich newbies would actually consider it. They actually would consider it. Alright, let's move on to the craziness. How about Batman Super Limited Edition? You know, if you were around when I was around, this game came out around like 2016, 2017. It came out in 2016. And when Stern launched it in 2016, a little lesson for all these newbies out there who think they know what going on in pinball Stern priced it at And there was a lot of uproar that Stern would sell a game for that much money and they were selling it directly They were cutting out the distributor and the way you had to get one was you had to submit a video on why you deserve to own one It was a crazy time and everybody lost their minds Everybody was like how dare you first asked me to spend so much money and how dare you make me beg for the ability to give you and this was the first time too Online Disclassification worldwide Online completeness F spiral, The game is available for $32,000. Now if you could take a time machine and go back to August of 2017, this is after the game has been out, the cheapest Batman SLE that was sold was for $12,999. $13,000. So you went from being able to get a game for $13,000 and now if you want that same game, you've got to spend $32,000. The highest recorded sale, and I feel bad for whoever bought this game for this price, was September of 2021. And remember again, December 2021. We're in that COVID period. The game just got released, right? It came out in 2021. People went ape for this game. All they needed was the internet to get people excited. The highest recorded purchase for this game is $25,000. Now that was a new in box game. The Game Nowadays you can easily get a Guns and Roses CE for $14,000. $11,000 less and you have the same exact game. That's the thing I didn't mention at the beginning of this. All of these people whether you spend $27,000 on a Ghostbusters or you spend $6,600, all of these people are having the same exact experience with that game. No sanctions in next week, by David Van Es. The only way Guns N' Roses is ever going to go up in value is if Jersey Jack Pinball goes out of business and then everything will go up in value. Alright, speaking of Jersey Jack and machines, in December of 2021, again, the COVID craziness, someone paid for a new in box, Pirates of the Caribbean collector's edition. They paid, wait for it, they paid and before I tell you this price, I gotta tell you one story. When this game came out, it sat at distributors for a year. Nobody wanted it. These things sat at automated for a year. They were $12,500 from Jersey Jack. Everybody listening right now, Could have bought three of these machines and you still would have saved money on what one unit went for in December of 2021. Someone paid $39,000 for a Pirates of the Caribbean new in box in July of 2019, two years prior to that. Basically, someone bought one for $14,775. Wow. Look at that, $25,000 more for the same exact game just two years later. Kaneda, you shouldn't be doing this. You shouldn't be reminding people that all of our hysteria is documented and real and validated by these numbers. Pinball has lost what made it so special. The greed is everywhere. It is absolutely everywhere. There is no way Pirates of the Caribbean is a $39,000 And now, we're at the end of the episode of the show. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time. Bye. In the day when it came out, you didn't have to pull the trigger right away. You didn't have to go nuts. It had the crappy Stern Photoshop artwork, but it had something almost no Stern has had since. It had no premium. So you had an LE that had the fiber optic lights on the ramps and everything. You had the Daft Punk multiball that the pro did not have. So there was a real reason why if you bought an LE, you actually had a different pinball experience. And for that reason, I think Tron came out, it was like 5700 bucks. And this was really the first game that after it came out, slowly over time, it didn't happen overnight, slowly over time, people started to realize what an awesome game it was. And then they started to trade for like 7000, 8000. And then once it hit that $10,000 period, for all you newbies trying to create pinball media, this is where like 10K by Christmas came from. This is the very origin of all of this and it's fascinating. And it's also fascinating because Tron did it with no premium and now everybody's trying to do it even though there's the premium of every single machine. Like why would you spend so much money? Same thing with Batman SLE, I'm not gonna defend it even though I own it, it's the same exact experience. I'm like some dude who is buying a Batman Premium for like 9K is having just as much fun as someone who buys that machine for $32,000. So a new in box Tron LE sold, remember this was like 5,700 bucks new, sold in September of 2022 during the COVID period, new in box for $26,000. In May of 2018, you could have got a Tron for $8,800. That's the lowest price I could find on Pinside Marketplace and that's a huge, huge difference of almost $18,000 more. I want to bring up this game. The next one is Lord of the Rings LE because as much as we've been looking at these crazy spikes and jumps in prices, there still are some deals out there. There still are some games out there that haven't gone through the roof even though I know those games are far superior games Lord of the Rings LE is a much better game than Pirates of the Caribbean collector edition It a much better game I even think Lord of the Rings is a better game than Tron It a way better game than Ghostbusters which shootslikeadog I don think you can have a better pinball experience other than long ball times but just remove the outlane post You cannot have a better experience than Lord of the Rings It got the best mechs the best toys the best theme integration It got everything you want It is super easy to understand how to play it but it also has a lot of depth in the game And I own that game for two years and I love every minute of it. A Lord of the Rings LE November of 2022 sold for $13,000. That was kind of like the high. There have been some other ones where people like gold-plated their machines and engraved them and sold them for 20K, but I don't want to count those because that's kind of unfair. I need to remove those from this sort of data analysis. And then the lowest I could find for Lord of the Rings LE, June of 2016, $6,300. Well that's a good deal, $6,300 bucks, that's cheaper than a freakin Stern pro right now. And that game actually had a real mirrored back glass that would break if you dropped it, not like the new crap you get. Alright let's do a few more then I'm gonna go have lunch with my beautiful wife. She's saying wrap it up Chris, we gotta go get some Iron Chef Morimoto's Ramen from Momentside. All right, let's do a few more of these. All right, let's do Oktoberfest, everybody's favorite game. The highest price ever paid for an Oktoberfest, April of 2022, 8,300 bucks. The lowest price for an Oktoberfest in the middle of COVID, right at the beginning of COVID, 2019 of November, $5,300. Well, you know, it just goes to show you though, with American pinball games, they never really move anywhere. They didn't go anywhere up. They just kind of stayed in this, eh, you know, do I really want one? Not really. It's all about the game. That's the real question, I think. I think it's testament. Like if you're gonna start a pinball company, you need at least to make a game that goes somewhere north. Like the demand just keeps building and building and building because people realize it's a great game. Let's take Houdini for example. In April of 2022, Houdini was $8,000 firm from a distributor. That's the most amount of money Houdini has ever cost. A Houdini has never ever ever gone up in value. You know where it has gone? It's gone down in value. In June of 2020, right? 2020 in June was like right around that COVID period, Houdini sold for 4,800 bucks. 4,800 bucks. $8,000 new, you bought it, you just lost $3,200. Doesn't that make you feel good? Doesn't that make you want to buy a Galactic Tank Force? We're going to see that game lose even more value eventually. Here's the one where it just annoys me. I'm going to end on this one because I think this is so indicative. I'm going to be a little bit more indicative. When we look at the timeframe, we look at the game, we look at who's buying these things. It's just ruined this hobby. This is just more proof that this hobby has been soiled a lot. There's a black cloud hanging over pinball. So remember when Jersey Jack announced the Yellow Brick Road edition of Wizard of Oz? I was there. He did it at TPF. He took out the monkey mechanism. He announced he was making another edition of Wizard of Oz The game is limited and we are not going to tell you how many we're going to make. And right there you're like, wow, Jack Guarnari is kind of like a snake oil salesman to release a game like that. How are you going to say something is limited and then not say what the limit is? And that's the kind of BS that has been given to the pinball buying community and that's why Kaneda is number one because when he says something like that, nobody pushes back. Everybody just like, oh let's interview Jack, let's just say how great he is, let's just say how great the next games are going to be and you're like, wait a minute, that is disingenuous marketing and I called him out on it and so did other people as I started to call them out on it and remember like people laughed this game off the stage. They laughed this game off the stage because he removed Mex from the game and then he charged more money. He put a $12,500 price tag on it and these games sat. And then what happens? COVID happens. Everybody's stuck at home. Everybody's just discovering pinball. Do you think someone who was in the audience when Jack Guarnari released this game for $12,500 and laughed in his face, do you think someone who witnessed that in April of 2021, April David Van Es. A wizard of Oz Yellowbrick Road was sold for $9,300. And that's it in a nutshell people. In just a one-year period of time, a one-year period of time, we go from something being $9,000 to $19,000. What has happened? Something is rotting in the state of Denmark, and I hope these numbers are sobering. I hope they wake everybody up. This isn't fun. This isn't what pinball should be. These games shouldn't be having this kind of quick explosion because what goes up must come down. And now we've got all these companies and 15 games a year and everybody thinks they're going to be getting 10 to 13 to $15,000 from us from every single new game. The problem is all these wankers over at the pinball companies, they're now pricing all of their games after they've gone through the crazy COVID price inflation and they think they're going to sustain that? I hope you enjoyed this video. If you enjoyed it, make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel. I'll see you in the next video. Have a great day.