So I finished my pinball survey a few weeks ago for my business class and aced the first of several presentations--whoo! But the teacher had some thoughts about my proposed pinball company, particularly about my target audience.

I went into my survey with the idea that this pinball company would focus on games that weren't so complicated, focusing on games that appeal to new players. One of my questions was simply, "Do you think pinball is too complicated?" Two-thirds of the survey said NO, pinball isn't too complicated--that complexity is what makes the games playable over the long term.

But then a later question was asking for people to suggest what it would take to bring new players to the game. Many of the comments came back along the lines of how the pinball needs to be more friendly to new players--less complex games. Huh?

Of course, I like the idea of making a pin that still has a deep ruleset, but has beginner-friendly features, such as blocking the outer drain lanes until a certain minimum score is reached (if a beginner mode could be chosen like was done in classic video games), more callouts telling noobs what to do, etc. But teacher says I should focus on either casual players OR the collectors to focus the company--marketing stuff. I chose the latter in my homework because, well, from a business standpoint there are more machines sold to home than to public places.

So I'm wondering if it's possible for these two factions--deep rules/beginning players--to co-exist in one machine and what that does for the industry in general. Seems for a new company to succeed they'd need to appeal to home collectors such as you guys (and ME when I can finally save up for a Metallica), but how do you grow a company that isn't reaching out to new players?

I don't know, just thinking out loud, and seeing other threads on this subject I was looking to see if anyone cared to think out loud with me.

In case anyone's interested...

To take the survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/BDBHMMD

To just read the survey results: https://www.surveymonkey.com/results/SM-G39XJ6P2/