Quoted from Whysnow:not sure what data you are looking at???
There are 4 AFM game options listed in the database. The original and the LE remake are the primary ones and the only ones in the rating categories so what most will select.
AFM Original has 841 owners plus over 100 locations
LE Remake has 227 owners plus 25 locations
The remake "special" has 46 owners and a handful of locations
The remake "classic" has 12 owners and a handful of locations
Using these as relative comparisons it is really nice data.
1. We can see that approximately 1/3 of the total claimed production run thus far of the remake are accounted for in pinside data
2. We can see that clearly the LE remake is the most popular, the special edition next, and the classic model a far last
3. We can get an understanding of where people see the value (the LE) and also still see that Pinside captures the upper crust of collectors that are fine with blowing more cash on a Special edition
4. Interestingly the Original AFM is accounted for approximately 1/3 of the original production run in Pinside data also
This is all very solid data for social science self reported data. Keep in mind that there is incentive to report accurate data as individuals like to use their collection to keep track of what they own and show it off. Locations like to report accurate data as Pinside is often used for advertising and locating games to play.
I'm going to take a guess that you don't have a background in data.
I'll try to explain again. Pinside stats aren't good data. The data is bad. It's not solid. It's bad data.
tl;dr: There is no way to verify the accuracy of the data.
You say there is an incentive to self-report collections. I say there is an incentive to exaggerate a person's collection. Which of us is right? There's no way to know.
There's also no way to know how many titles are listed multiple times because of a sale, because Pinside doesn't track serial numbers. It's very likely that many people forget or don't care to update their stats when they sell a pin from their collection. Or they don't come often enough to Pinside, or they stopped coming to Pinside, or they forgot their password and created a new account.
People on this very thread also admit to not listing all of their titles in their pinside collection. There's no way to enforce people keeping their collections up to date. Some people with large collections may not want to share that information for a variety of personal reasons.
We know people create troll accounts here and also that people use multiple accounts. Say 0.005% of pinside accounts have a fake collection. There are 50,000 pinside accounts, so any title could have up to 250 titles more than are actually in the market. This is extremely significant because the numbers being thrown about here to justify sales are very small, and the pinball market is extremely small.
So without adding some really time consuming verification process where we start from scratch and every user sends in a unique picture of the serial number for each title in their collection, this simply isn't valid data.
You say the location data is accurate? Well, none of the pins I operate on location are listed here as being on location. I see very little location advertising here. We have no way of knowing what locations self-report their data, but a casual glance location data looks wildly under reported to me.
We also can't use relative stats because we don't have good data on who the people this site attracts who ALSO have collection stats. Who has an incentive to report their collection? A HUO LE collector or a route operator who buys 10x more pins? I personally think that there are very few route operators here (based on threads), but there's no way to know. This is all speculation, because there's no way to know. That's what makes the data bad.
For these reasons, the data here does not support any assertions, especially a "clearly the LE is more popular" assertion. We can only say with certainty, "of the self-reported unverified collection stats on Pinside, the LE has more entries than the Pro." Which means exactly nothing.