9 years on from a similar post, I am curious about the population count of EM machines in this new decade.
Someone said you can cut the surviving machines by half EVERY decade. Thus, a machine made in 1970 with 2000 production run ....
1980--1000 remain
1990--500 remain
2000--250 remain
2010--125 remain
2020--67 remain
Does this sound true? I'd suspect the destruction of EM pinballs has slowed considerably due to collector status and parts availability.
PINSIDE isn't the be-all-end-all of pinball community, since most pinball peeps don't even know of PINSIDE or come here. So when a pinball machine is said to be held by 20 people, I assume perhaps 10x that amount exist in the world.
Is there a general way of thinking so?
Has anyone seen large warehouses of old Ems still shuttered up? Are there caches of old machines somewhere (outside of collectors' hands)??
And lastly, what do the pros or very connected people think is the future of the EM machine in the next decade/s? Are they more likely to survive and resist destruction or will they be cannabalized more, etc?
Discuss, please.