Price practically depend on the altcoin market as whole. Investors can only buy new coins from miners. Miners will only mine coins which are profitable to mine.
So, either investors give miners a nice enough price to continue the mining or the coin dies. This price is relative to all the other scrypt based altcoins out there.
42 won't die even then, because you have people like me waiting to mine it again when the hype dies down.
I don't have the same level of optimism.
I am not here too long ago, yet I am tired of the constant rapid altcoin launches and falls already. Even as a miner, not just as an investor.
I am not here a long ago, yet I have seen this many times: A new coin launch brings in a lot of GPU resources (tens of gigahashes), then price and speed both start to monotonically fall and nothing can stop the process until it hits the point that even a middle sized GPU farmer could easily do an 51% takeover because the speed is only tens of megahashes. At that point, the coin build up a best reputation and it becomes highly unlikely to rise ever again.
I guess 42 is the last coin for me I put some trust into. If it fails like the rest, I will finally cut my losses and leave the field (join to an autoswitch autosell pool and stop speculate).
I practically take the risks and put my work into this just to keep up a seemingly constant value in coins. One gain only covers the other loss.