Market Report - Stern Pinball Arcade (Switch)

When the Switch was first released last year, I remember checking the shelves every week or so just to see if anything new had been released. The new releases for the system were dropping pretty slowly in the first months of the system's life.

But by the time the holidays came around, the games were coming fast and furiously. There were multiple physical and digital releases every week. I had trouble even keeping up with all of the new games.

It was around that time that I noticed Stern Pinball Arcade on the shelf at GameStop. I pulled it off the shelf and thought to myself, "This looks fun. I need to buy this at some point." But I didn't. I looked the game up using my phone and found very little information about it. The game basically simulates actual pinball machines made by the famous Stern Pinball company. There were not many reviews online at that time. There still are not many.

Months pass by and I do not buy the game. Last week I was on my local Facebook retro gaming group and I saw someone mention buying this game and that it was somewhat hard to find. I investigated and noticed that it was not being sold by Amazon and did not appear to be easily available online. I checked local GameStop inventories and noticed that it has sold out at several stores.

Here's the really good news - Gamestop has dropped the price to $29.99! I went to my local Gamestop and bought the two copies it had. The manager commented to me that he was surprised they did not have any more copies.

Will the game be worth tons in the future? It's really hard to say. There are some concerns. First, it is also available on XBox One and PS4, so that certainly hurts potential value. Second, it is available digitally. So people should always be able to download the game if they really want it. The last danger is that the game gets a second printing. While this seems unlikely, any additional supply would crush the physical game's value.

But if you want to take a flyer on a current gen game, this might be one to take a chance on. It looks to have a relatively low print run and it does not appear to be available from many online retailers. And if you check out eBay you will see that there are not many copies available (I only see 7 listings at the time of this post) and that the game has been regularly fetching prices over current retail price (some confirmed sales in the $50-$6 range).

And oh yeah - it's really fun to play. I found I kinda suck at pinball, but playing these old machines on a portable system is really a blast.