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What is Your Game Worth? - Pinball Expo 2024 - Ted Finlay

Pinball News (Pinball Expo 2024)·video·23m 13s·analyzed·Oct 19, 2024
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.032

TL;DR

Pinball prices database reveals $143M annual used market with 2022 peak now deflating.

Summary

Ted Finlay presents pinballprices.com, a comprehensive database of 11,600+ used pinball machine sales spanning 93 years and $47 million in transactions. He reveals the used pinball market worth approximately $143 million annually (~70-75 machines/day), debunks the investment narrative around pinball machines, and explains his data collection methodology from Pinside, auction sites, and verified private sales. The market peaked in 2022 during COVID but has since softened, with prices flattening rather than continuing to inflate.

Key Claims

  • The used pinball market is worth approximately $143 million annually, with roughly 70-75 machines sold per day

    high confidence · Based on Ted Finlay's market research methodology extrapolating from database capturing ~5% of all sales

  • Godzilla Premium is the most frequently sold machine in the database with 135 records across all variants (LE/Premium/Pro) since release

    high confidence · Direct data from pinballprices.com database; 13 sales in 2024 alone averaging $9,200

  • Pinball machines are not good investments; prices peaked in 2022 during COVID and have since flattened at lower levels

    high confidence · Analysis of price trends across six pinball eras (EM, early SS, alphanumeric, golden age, modern DMD, LCD)

  • Jersey Jack Pirates is the most expensive regularly available used machine with average price of $27,000

    high confidence · Direct data from pinballprices.com; some sales as high as $30,000, recent sale at ~$22,000

  • Supreme (Stern limited edition) has sold for over $60,000 but buyers are Supreme fanatics, not pinball enthusiasts

    medium confidence · Ted Finlay's observation of secondary market sales; context suggests it's a collectible brand item rather than pinball game value

  • Only about 1 in 3 sold machines on Pinside list the sale price publicly

    high confidence · Data analysis showing discrepancy between total Pinside sales and price-disclosed sales

  • Auction fees can be as high as 27%, significantly increasing the true cost of machines beyond hammer price

    high confidence · Direct observation from auction site fee structures

  • Stern released over 40 titles from 1999-2015 while only 8 non-Stern titles were released in that same 16-year period

    high confidence · Historical analysis of DMD era production, not counting LE/Premium/Pro variants

  • Database has captured approximately 5% of all used pinball sales across all channels

Notable Quotes

  • “They are not investments. They're used machines. They're toys. They're expensive toys, but they're toys.”

    Ted Finlay@ 17:55 — Core thesis countering the 'pinball as investment' narrative common among COVID-era buyers

  • “If they're not toys to you, then they're depreciating assets for you because you're an operator.”

    Ted Finlay@ 18:02 — Distinguishes operator perspective from collector mindset on machine value

  • “This database is based on the sample of pinball data that is out there...if you don't have confidence in the data and what's in my database, then the whole thing kind of falls apart.”

    Ted Finlay@ 1:34 — Emphasizes transparency and data integrity as foundation of pricing tool credibility

  • “We're only catching maybe a third of all the sales to even possibly put into the database...I think it represents a pretty good sample of things.”

    Ted Finlay@ 8:22 — Acknowledges data limitations while defending representative quality of 5% market capture

  • “In 2022, during COVID, the average price was over ten thousand dollars for machines made during this period and now they're back down to 8500.”

    Ted Finlay@ 18:58 — Quantifies the deflation from peak COVID prices, disproving sustained pinflation narrative

  • “Godzilla...just in the three years that it's been out there...has 135 records of sales if you count the LE, premium and pro, so it's just really dominated.”

    Ted Finlay@ 14:06 — Indicates Godzilla's overwhelming market dominance and secondary market activity vs. classics like Addams Family

Entities

Ted Finlaypersonpinballprices.comproductPinsideorganizationGodzillagameJersey Jack PiratesgameSupremegameElton John machinegameSimpson's Pinball Partygame

Signals

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Post-COVID influx of new buyers seeking pinball machines as investment vehicles has been disappointed by market flattening and deflation, disproving speculation narrative

    medium · Ted noting 'newbies' see people making money and ask 'what's the best investment'; contrasts this with current market reality of depreciation

  • ?

    competitive_signal: Stern's near-monopoly in DMD era (1999-2015) with 40+ titles vs. 8 competitors combined established market dominance that persisted into LCD era

    high · Explicit count of releases by manufacturer; Ted notes dominance was so complete he initially labeled era 'Stern DMD' before changing it

  • $

    market_signal: Estimated $143 million annual used pinball market (~70-75 machines/day) represents 20x the $47 million captured in Ted's database, indicating substantial private sales channel

    medium · Survey showing most sales via friends and Facebook (not in database); 5% capture rate extrapolation based on market research methodology

  • $

    market_signal: Jersey Jack Pirates remains most expensive regularly-available used machine at $27,000 average, but secondary market shows stabilization without continued appreciation

    high · Data showing sales $22,000-$30,000 range; included in deflation trend despite premium positioning

  • $

    market_signal: Pinball secondary market peaked in 2022 during COVID ($10,000+ average for modern machines) and has deflated to $8,500 average, indicating market softening and end of pinflation era

    high · Price trend data showing 2022 peak followed by decline; explicit statement 'prices are flattening out' and 'not really an investment'

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.070

0:00
Guides in print, that's a tough thing to keep up with nowadays, so I kind of took it to a digital level. I started this website, and if you haven't ever been to the site, thank you for coming this afternoon and hearing about this. And it's my attempt to sort of help people when they're buying and selling their games. it started and if you have questions as we go along just holler out it started because as I started my collection about 7 or 8 years ago I bought a Super Mario Brothers from a co-worker and I paid $1800 for it I didn't know if the co-worker was screwing me on the price or if I just got the best deal in the world so I started looking around on the internet that everybody does and I found the Boston Price, which was on a Boston repair site. I found a place called Pinball Price with a singular.com. That was about three years out of date. So was the Boston one. And Pinside. But I didn't feel like the true price was really represented by any one site. So, Pinsight has their site, has their published prices, if you agree to it, but it wasn't really explaining the entire market because people were buying pinballs all over the place. So, this is based on the sample of pinball data that is out there.
1:42
And the first thing we need to talk about is the data because if you don't have confidence into data and what's in my database, then the whole thing kind of falls apart. So let me explain a little bit about where this data comes from, how we get it, and what we hope to do in the future here. So there's three main sources of information now that I use to gather the data. And I'll show you some shots of the website if you haven't been there before or if you're not presently on your phone looking at the site. And that's Pinsight. Pinsight has a lot of good, obviously, sales information. Probably the number one online site for selling. It used to be eBay. It used to be Craigslist. Those things really have gone down lately. But Pinsight has a lot. They don't have everything, obviously, because you don't have to agree to show the sales price. But there are a lot. About one in three sold machines on Pinsight will list the price that they sold it for. So auction sites are another source. There are a lot of online auction sources that will freely give you the price, the hammer price. And then for my data, I take the hammer price and then add whatever their auction fees are. And they can be substantial. I've seen them as high as 27%. So if you think somebody's getting a great buy on a $2,000 machine that they're paying 27%, they're paying a lot more than $2,000 for that machine. So you got to take that into account. And that's the price that I show you on the site is the real price of it. eBay used to be the site where a few years ago about 30% or so of my sales in my database came from eBay. People are moving away from eBay. Primary reason for that is Facebook Marketplace. It's good for buying and selling. It's bad for me because no way to scrape that data to get that data of what the machine actually sold for. The database itself has 11,600 plus rows of data. They were all hand-entered. I don't scrape the websites for information. They're all hand-entered by me over the last six or seven years, and they're verified and checked. One of the neat things about this site is that it will give you the link to that actual sale. So if you're looking at a Godzilla that sold for $6,500 or something, you can click on that link. It'll take you right to that sale site. So where eBay, the link lasts for about 90 days, and then they take it off.

medium confidence · Ted Finlay's market research extrapolation comparing database sales to estimated total market

  • Facebook Marketplace has largely replaced eBay as primary sales channel but provides no public price data

    high confidence · Survey data showing shift from eBay (formerly 30% of sales) to Facebook; eBay links expire after 90 days

  • “Supreme is a luxury brand. It is iconic, very expensive products...these are not pinball people buying this, these are Supreme fanatics.”

    Ted Finlay@ 12:51 — Clarifies that Supreme machine prices reflect brand value, not inherent game quality or pinball market dynamics

  • “My data comes from the auction sites, so we're only capturing maybe a third of all the sales...Most all of them are going to friends and Facebook.”

    Ted Finlay@ 8:17 — Explains the 5% capture rate due to methodological reliance on public auction data vs. private sales

    • Addams Family
    game
    Twilight Zonegame
    John Wickgame
    Baffle Ballgame
    eBayorganization
    Facebook Marketplaceorganization
    Craigslistorganization
    Colinperson
    Poor Man's Pinball Tribeorganization
    Sterncompany
    This Week in Pinballorganization
    alts.coproduct
  • $

    market_signal: Supreme machine achieving $60,000+ secondary market prices driven by Supreme brand collectibility, not pinball game value—appeals to brand fanatics, not pinball community

    high · Ted Finlay explicitly distinguishes brand buyers from pinball buyers; notes Supreme brand is luxury/iconic with separate collector ecosystem

  • ?

    product_strategy: Godzilla Premium dominates secondary market with 135 records since release, vastly exceeding expected sales frequency for classics like Addams Family and Twilight Zone

    high · 13 sales in 2024 alone; Ted Finlay surprised by Godzilla's dominance vs. classics; Simpson's Pinball Party runner-up

  • ?

    technology_signal: Sales channel migration from eBay/Craigslist to Facebook Marketplace eliminates public price transparency, reducing data availability for market analysis

    high · eBay dropped from ~30% of database to minimal; Facebook has no scrape-able data; Ted notes 'options for database get smaller'

    • 4:33
    I currently have 1,422 different titles of pinball machines. That's a small fraction of all the pinball machines that have ever been made, but I think it's a pretty substantial database and that includes the LEs, pros, premiums so each of those is counted and the database, if you add up all the sales that I track there's about $47 million worth of pinballs that are accounted for in the database again, a small fraction, we'll talk about that in a few minutes but that's a small fraction of what's really out there and one of the ways, I wrote a couple articles for This Week in Pinball and also the kineticist talking about pinflation over the last couple of years. And one of the issues with that was if I just threw all the data together and gave you a yearly average, you're going to get a different mix. So maybe one year there's a lot of EMs in the database. One year there's newer machines coming in. They're all used. I don't list any new prices. They're all used. But I have gone through and weighted the data so every year is comparable. to each other And the way I do that is by breaking up the history of pinball really into six different eras So there electromechanical huge amount of time in that group basically everything before 1977. So you'll see prices in there, and you can look at the average prices when we look at the data in a minute by each of those classifications. So early solid states, you can see that. You may not agree with the exact dates on this, but there's a lot of overlap, especially between the EMs and the early solid states.
    6:21
    The one thing I found, and you can see the rest there, the one thing I found, I ended up changing the name. The modern DMD era, which is a 16, 17-year period, I first had it labeled Stern DMD. Because if you're newer to pinball, Stern complete, you think they dominate now. In this 16-year period from 1999 to 2015, there were only eight pinball titles that were released in a 16-year period that were not Stern. And at the same time, Stern released over 40 different titles. And that does not include Ellie's, Premium's, and Pro's. That is just the title itself. So they just completely dominated the market in this period that I call. I had it labeled as Stern DMD, but someone suggested let's change that because there are a few other machines that came in there. And, of course, the next is the LCD era, which we're in currently. I'm not sure what we'll call the next era of pinball, but for right now that's what I use. and you can look up averages and I track the way pinflation or deflation works by these six errors so they don't mix in with each other. And the data, you know, the data is a sample, okay? It's obviously not a census of every pinball machine that's been sold. It's a sample. And a couple of years ago on Facebook and on Pinside, I ran a poll saying, where did you buy the very last machine you bought, used pinball machine you bought, where did you buy it from? And you can see the answers here. It's mostly friends and Facebook, and then third is Pinside. I think a few years ago the eBay and Craigslist would have been a lot higher, but all my data doesn't come from that. My data, as I said, comes from the auction sites, so we're only catching maybe a third of all the sales to even possibly put into the database. I think it represents a pretty good sample of things, and it seems to fit, especially that I'm able to get the pin side data.
    8:36
    The website itself, again, if you haven't been here, thank you for coming to the seminar because I'm not sure why. But this is some screenshots. You can go on your phone right now, pinballprices.com, and take a look at this. It's a pretty straightforward site, I think. It has a couple other things other than the price guide. It has some price trends you can look at, and we'll see some of those in a minute. It also has pinball links, just, you know, most pinball sites have links to other sites. That's what this covers. From there, if you go to the home page, which is the one on the left, you click price guide or you hit pinball prices or whatever, it'll take you to the search site. And in the search site, you've got the search box there. You start typing in maybe G-O-D, God, and you hit search, you'll come up with all the Godzilla's. And from there, you select the pinball machine you want, and that takes you to sort of the website page that it has a picture of, tells you what the title is that you're looking at, a picture of it, and the average price by year. And that's great to know in this one. This was taken a couple months ago. In 2024, I've, you know, I've entered 13 sales for Godzilla premium, and the average is $9,200. Well, maybe you're saying, well, I sold mine for a lot less. I sold mine for a lot more. This is the average price. So everybody is going to be either below or above that or right on the average. So it does give you on the right-hand side of the screen, it does give you the detail. Every sales, all 13 of those that are in the database for 2024 for are listed to the right and you can scroll through those and it gives you the links to where to you can go look at the site itself it also gives you the condition of those machines and that condition of the machine is self-reported so if they listed it as mint on pin side you know no matter what it was i'm going to put mint on here i don't i can't go and look at every machine that's sold out there so that's the buyers and that's listed in the website it's the buyers you know, interpretation of the, you know, the condition of it. So, again, I think the uniqueness of our site is that, you know, you can go and look at each and every one to see, well, it says it's in good condition, what does that mean? Or it says it's a project machine, you can go and look at those. We're going to take a look in depth at all the meta data and how my website is set? No, we're not. That's just, but metadata is data about data, right? Information about data. So, just a little bit more about the website. The oldest machine we have in there is the 1931 Baffle Ball The newest that we have that has actually sold as a used machine is John Wick So we covering 93 years of pinball Now, granted, most all of them are newer machines than this, but it does cover a wide range of machines. It's tougher, and the numbers are lower with the older machines, but it is helpful to go back and look at some of the older machines, even if you just have one or two sales of that.
    12:03
    The most expensive average used pinball machine, no surprise to anybody, is Jersey Jack's Pirates, with an average price right now of $27,000.
    12:15
    So there's been some sold for $30,000. There's one that was recently sold, I think, for $22,000, something like that. So this, you know, it's a pretty hefty price. This is not the most expensive machine or average machine on the site. It's just one that you can regularly get. The most expensive one I've ever seen. Anybody?
    12:38
    Modern game that's out there? The Supreme. Why? I don't know. I'm sorry. I'm not in the generation of skaters that get what Supreme is. But Supreme is a luxury brand. It is iconic. very expensive products it started out as skate gear, street, hip hop all sorts of different groups have sort of taken to Supreme from what I was reading the other night it's kind of on its way down so maybe these prices will come down but this was a contract machine that I believe Stern did for Supreme and they sold out the first day they were listed I'm not sure what the original price was I think it was upper 20s but this is I've seen them sold as hold for above $60,000 they're not pinball people buying this these are supreme I don't know fanatics yes thank you the machine that we have the most data on this sort of surprised me when I did these calculations and looking at it I thought it was going to be the Adams family or Twilight Zone, you know, you look at the numbers, but the machine that is always out there and has sold more and more in the last couple of years than any other machine is clearly Godzilla. So just in the three years that it's been out there, there's 100, I have 135 records of sales, if you count the LE, premium and pro, so it's just really dominated. The runner-up to this was sort of a surprise to me. It was Simpson's Spinball Party.
    14:27
    So that gets moved around a lot. That's one of the things, you know, I was surprised by that too, but it does. It comes up frequently as I'm going through the data.
    14:41
    So what have we learned from the data? And I don't know how we're doing on time, but I think we're okay. I've tried to take a look at this and see what we can learn a couple of years ago I looked at all the data that I had and tried to figure out a way because I was interested in how big is the used pinball market I mean are we talking a couple million are we talking half a billion what are we talking about with how many pinball machines I love this picture by the way this guy is contributing his best to the average of 71 pinball machines a day. So when I was adding all this up and looking at, okay, our website captures X amount of the entire market, and it seems to only capture about 5% of all the sales that have happened. So I've calculated that. I do market research and statistics for a living, and I do market forecasting for pharmaceutical companies. so I'm pretty good with market forecasting and this was the number I came up with 143 million dollars so that's each and every year well at least in 2022 there was 143 million dollars worth of used pinball machines changing hands that's based on the the average price for each of those errors and that's about you know 70 75 pinball machines each and every day they're getting sold back and forth between you guys a lot of people came into pinball during covid newbies we like you know we so generously call them but the newbies you'll see even today on facebook you you see the post where well i'm not sure you know which machine should i buy that's the best investment you know i want to They see people making money selling machines at a higher price than retail, and so they want to know what's the best machine for investments. Well, if you had asked me a couple of years ago, I'd say, yeah, maybe, because the numbers – I wrote a couple of articles on pinflation. Pinflation was all over Pinside. That's all everybody was talking about, how expensive used pinball machines were getting. From the database, that's wholly supported it. 17%, then another 13%. Well, last couple of years, you know the market has gotten softer. It's gotten softer for new machines. It's gotten softer for used pinball machines. And so they're not really an investment, and prices are flattening out. They're still higher. I show you a chart in a minute by error They still higher than what they ever been but they flattening out at least So the answer to are pinballs a good investment I go to Woody and Buzz. You know, be okay that they're not, they're not investments. You know, they are not financial assets that you're going to go out and purchase and hope. But, you know, there are some, if you were lucky enough to get a Pirates retail, great. But pick the next one. Are you going to be right on that one, or are you going to be Godfather? But they're not investment. They're used machines. They're toys. They're expensive toys, but they're toys. If they're not toys to you, then they're depreciating assets for you because you're an operator. Just quickly here, just to look at the prices over some, from 2019, and this goes from oldest machines. This is the average price per year, so for EMs, whoops, for solid states, for alphanumerics, for the golden age, the CERN DMDs. No, they haven't. That's the thing, especially with pinflation, you have to take it out. well, what was the inflation rate that year? And I haven't done that. You're right. So some of these are actually flat or negative due to inflation. But golden age. And then you can see when you get into the modern DMDs, there was a peak in 2022. The same thing with the LCDs. There was a peak in 2022, and it's come down. So in 2022, during COVID, or the end of COVID, you average price was over ten thousand dollars for machines made during this period and now they're back down to 8500 and you you can see that in a lot of the uh the data um we'll skip through this but just quickly modern machine you know a lot of the newer models just don't you know hold their value that they that people who want to see them as investments think they In fact, there's a site called alts.co, and it's an alternative investment site. So people are looking at using things as financial investments. I recently did an interview with them talking about are pinballs an investment. I think that's coming out in November. So it's at alts.co. We'll skip over those.
    19:50
    I want to leave just a couple minutes for questions. Thank you to the Poor Man's Pinball Tribe. I'm part of that group. It's a crazy group of, yeah, Drew and Ian and the rest of the guys.
    20:05
    And Kineticist, thank you, Colin, for publicizing some of my articles and also for Pinball Restoration, which is a site you can find on pinballprices.com.
    20:17
    And if you want to help out, I do this completely on my own. I have been. And if you go to the website and you want to contribute and help me keep this, it's an ad-free site. You'll never see pop-ups. You never have to close an ad to get to the price. You never have to pay for a subscription. We're not behind a firewall. We're not behind, you know, a paywall. Yeah, thank you.
    20:42
    You know, we're not on Patreon. So any way you can help out would be great. Questions? John, I can hear you.
    20:59
    My brother does pinball restorations. I do some, and he does mostly EMs, and, yeah, he's made some money on that. I don't know if you calculate. Like, that's from buying the machine, buying the paint and other things. If you count the labor, no.
    21:34
    Not at all. I don't think anybody could. But it's just done as a hobby, and, you know, you hope not to lose a lot of money. Okay.
    21:42
    Yeah. Info to the most expensive toy. There was a pinball machine, an auction from Elton John's apartment in Atlanta, Elton John machine for $65,000. One toy. That's great. Yeah, some of the machines are out there, and like I said, Supreme and a couple others that have surprisingly sold for huge amounts. Anyone else? Yeah. Does it help you for people to self-report their sales on your site? Yeah, thank you. Yeah, if you do sell and you want to contribute to it, I do accept verified private sales, so if you contact me and send it in and say, hey, I sold ACDC for this amount of money, I'll put it on there and list it as a verified private sale. It does help. More and more people are not listing their price on Pinside. More and more sales are going to Facebook Marketplace, which, you know, that's a private sale, so there's no way to get price information there. So the options for the database get smaller, but I hope you can utilize it now, and it's great for buying and for selling. So, well, thank you. Thank you all.