My man, I’m still buying and selling because it’s a HOBBY for me.
If you’re asking for my opinion on the future of pinball I will personally want to keep playing it.
Barcades IMO will blow up from this, because people will want to play this physical game (pinball) and if they cannot afford it for their home, they will pay 75 cents a game to do so.

People who buy and sell pinball machines have more disposable income than the people who will be significantly affected by the economic downturn. Those who use them as a business device will be hurt but home owners will continue to do what they do. Prices may drop due to sales from operators but new games also won't be hitting the market like they have been so supply is going to be halted for a bit. I say it's a good time to pickup a routed game if you find a good deal, sales of HUO games should still keep on track of where they have been. $.02

CrispEnchantingCapybara-small.gif

I know quite a few people with not any disposable income and they still have pins. You dont need to spend 5 to 10k to have fun. My oldest pin cost $1100, newest was $7000. They are all fun, so I dont see it ever going away or being replaced

Pinball has always had ups and downs.

And always bounces back bigger and better than before.

LTG : )

I hope things can return to “normal”. I have pins on location at a local brewery, it was a side job for me providing a little extra income. I currently don’t have any pins at home. I have thought about bringing a couple games home, especially if the shutdown last for months. I enjoyed seeing everyone have fun playing my games-

This isn't going to kill pinball but pinball has been living on borrowed time for a while now. I don't think 20 year olds of today will buy and collect pins, Virtual pinball may thrive and perhaps a few small companies like spooky who seem to be able to manage selling 500 a shot will be around but this little surge we have seen in the last 10 years is dying, slowly mind you but dying all the same.

People aren't just going to stop liking pinball. It will never die.

pinball was born in the depression.
it survived world war 2, the video game craze, the video game crash, the coin op crash, the recession, it will survive this as well.
like America, we are fighters and survivors. its the American spirit.

Pinball still looking pretty good to me!

I see home ownership pinball continuing to grow over the years. People will continue to move away from alcohol related activities and move towards home based activities.

Route pinball is another story. I see it doing good in population centers and failing miserably in rural areas. As prices for new pins continues to escalate, profitability suffers.

There will of course be a shakeout of pinball manufacturers. Not certain how many manufacturers the pinball hobby can support.

The OP here is renting out his pins for private use for a monthly fee while all the places he has pins are closed!!

No, this is a great time for the hobby but it dies with the last of the arcade generation. Think of where video games and AI tech VR stuff will be in 20 years. Pinball will never die completely and there's plenty of games to swap around for those youth who discover it and some really old geezers like me.

One of the more intelligent things to come out of Rummies mouth. Unknown unknowns indeed.

You plan for everything and then something comes out of left field you didn't imagine and kicks you right in the crotch.

The main demographic in pinball is 40-60 years old and are the ones that can afford and buy NIB games. I personally do not know anyone under 30 that has bought even a single NIB game. Unfortunately that is the generation that will be replacing the main generation currently buying and therefore the answer to the op's question is that Pinball is doing well now and for the near future but will almost certainly collapse from its current state when old farts like myself are replaced by the millennials. If you treat pinball as a hobby then enjoy your games but if you are looking at pinball as a long term investment, forget about it.

It's definitely going to scale back and prices will be reduced. I think the downturn is going to be devastating to a lot of hobby operators that have locations that were hanging on a thread and won't reopen. There just won't be space to store all this equipment. This combined with the on-going paranoia of not wanting to touch shared surfaces are going to be a real downer for location pinball. In case no one has noticed in the last 5 years, location pinball has exploded. This has really increased demand on vintage equipment as well as new machines. It has also been the cause of prices on vintage games like vids to skyrocket due to collectors competing with barcades for the limited supply.
We're headed towards a major recession / depression. The switch isn't just going to be flipped and everything back to normal. Yes pinball will survive but it won't be like it was for a few years at least. I'd hold off on making purchases for a minute till the panic sets in and people are unloading at fire sale prices. I haven't seen it start yet. Once the unemployment and stimulus money run out you should see prices plummet.

Resilient? What happened in the 80s what happened in the late 90s

Pinball is definitely going to take a major hit but so will every industry.

The days or selling a 4 year old pro for 5k is gone. Sure diehard fans are still here but the average joe may not need that new pinball for the basement.

Lastly routed games are the core of pinball if they suffer pinball suffers... how did you get into pinball in the first place? It was a routed game.

We are in the UK and finding any kind of pinball machine with a decent price attached very hard.
Over the pond you have so much more inventory and are lucky

We have our first and in the middle of restoring it to our capabilities but I search in vain for another one.
I do hope the price falls as that will allow people like us to get more involved

The market made his shift a long time ago. I used to have two fantastic locations near me. Both are gone. Here is one smaller location about an hour from me, but with normal traffic, it is a horrific location to get to. There is another one a bit farther from me, but their machines are basically unplayable. If I’m driving by, I still stop there and drop in tokens, because any pinball is good pinball. But it’s not good pinball.

Over the last 5 years or so I’ve found I almost exclusively play at friends houses (and my own house of course). And what I find there are games that play great. If a game has an issue, it gets fixed. In most cases a game will play better than it did 40 years ago.

I realize that a home machine should never be compare to a location machine. I’m just saying that this shift already happened. My potential of running into a game on location are almost zero.

They just had a segment on CBS news about a company in Oregon renting machines, I think pinball will be fine for the foreseeable future.

This is all geography - come to Ohio, Michigan or Pa. There is tons of location pinball - or was...

So after these times of woe are behind us were gonna start seeing a bunch of HUOR on the market? I can already hear the price police.

I think it is going to hurt for a while. Many small businesses (potential locations) are just not going to survive. How many barcodes will go under? This will have an impact on route operators. Many people who might spend on the hobby are going to take a significant amount of time to recover financially. Then there is the potential stigma that will be associated with “touching” things like pins - you think we had germaphobes before - this will amplify that. All these factors will affect sales of NIB pins. Plus the aging demographic of the pinball hobbyist.

I don’t know how long it will last but there will be a big impact IMHO. I hope my opinion is wrong though.

Creative solution on CBS This Morning:

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/a-portland-pinball-arcade-gets-a-bonus-round/

If this adds to the spread of the virus. People moving games into houses, increases the exposure to more people.

And what if a person infected traces back to the machine.

Will CBS cover that too ?

I know people are renting machines.

For me the risk of getting infected or sued into the ground. Isn't worth the money/risk.

LTG : )

CBS won’t have to cover it because the delivery program has been suspended due to a stay at home order.

It's a cool idea but I wonder how the insurance/legalities work with renting machines out? Do you have to do a separate insurance rider for each home/location or is it all covered under your business policy? I'd be worried if one of my machines got destroyed or if it was responsible for a fire.

The harder the time, the more the people want to... well, do nice things for distraction.

So yes, I‘m looking forward to upcoming games and would appreciate some news outside of ‚corona‘.

BUT, that doesn‘t necessarily go for buying that stuff for home use.
And of course that doesn‘t mean locations will not close, some will. But there‘ll be new ones eventually.

Whatever barcades are still open when we can all go out in public again are going to make a ton of money in the first few weeks/months.

In the last two weeks, I’ve had seven unsolicited requests from people who are practically begging to get games into their homes. Lots of people out there who don’t own games and need to get their fix from location pinball!

QC issues may be worse for pinball than COVID-19

I suspect many have the resources to buy several games to occupy this newfound leisure time but aren't (due to QC & silly pricing).

Sued by tracing it back to a machine? That sounds really paranoid and really difficult to prove. Also trivial to include a clause in the rental agreement that the owner of the machine cleaned it thoroughly and isn't responsible for any illness resulting from the transaction.

From my perspective, it's no different than allowing restaurants to do take-out and delivery. Once the game is in your home, you can wipe it down just like you do groceries.

In any event, thought it was an interesting way for an op to keep some people employed!

I’m sorry, but this doesn’t make any sense to me. People are yearning to have fun. Things like pooling clear coat quickly become unimportant when priorities change as they are now. Getting a game in your home is a pretty incredible thing.

With what is going on right now. I have good reason to be paranoid.

Maybe yes. Maybe no. Might be a one in a million shot. Me, I don't have the reserves to fight off a lawsuit.

LTG : )

The hobby will survive but it’s hard to argue pinball wont be impacted. Small businesses are closing, unemployment is skyrocketing, and disposable income is gone for many. I will continue my enjoyment and support but can’t understand why all the cheerleaders pretend it’s not going to pressure used game prices, operators, and manufacturers.

Who knows? Speculation leads to rumor, which Leads to "fact" somehow in today's world.

All I know is, folks are screwed economicly and possibly health wise for the time being.

So my hobby isn't really on the priority list.

Lloyd, I totally understand and certainly wasn't telling you (or anyone else) what to do!

Whenever pinball is in the news, I think it's worth watching. If pinball weren't relevant, they wouldn't bother talking about it on a national news program. This particular segment (that aired today) was directly relevant to this thread...

I really think the future depends on whether all the manufacurers survive. Stern didnt get its second wind until they had competition. If it is just one manufacturer, things look bad. If there is competiton the future is still bright. Everyone here will keep there pins. Eventually the bottom will completely fall out on EMs, but there is another 20 years before 1980s+ pins go out.

I'm not sure about that. If anything the people that were not buying NIB prior to all of this due to quality issues likely value their money more and demand a quality product for a $6k - $12k+ luxury toy. I would think that a majority of those types of buyers are going to hold onto their money, enjoy what they have, and try to save more during a time of a pandemic and mass layoffs.

Who knows - we are all in uncharted waters!

If any wants thinks the sky is falling and wants to dump there collection ...pm me I’m a buyer

Hey guys - we are not talking about Beanie Babies here and some sort of crash like that. If your in it for the $$$ as an investment well then you need to re-think things. Its all about the fun of playing, restoring (if that's your thing) and having something to even just look at with all the flashing lights and stuff. Pinball will go on.

This ^

I live in Australia so things might be slightly different here, but I imagine many things are the same, most pinball collectors are around 50yrs old and have a few pins.

Unemployment has doubled in America and no doubt there will be quite a few of the above in that group, some will be 55yrs - 60yrs old and will probably struggle to find another job as things slowly come back, there will be no "bounce" back.

To compound that their superannuation has taken a major hit and they now have less money to fund a much longer retirement than they planned.

Thus over the coming 6 months many of them will give up and sell their pins and flood the market with secondhand pins decimating their value and greatly slowing sales of new pins. Who will be buying new if classics are cheap?

This was always going to happen as collectors aged but has been bought forward about 10yrs due to covid-19.

If that's the case I'd have a new game.

But I really don't want roll the dice & end up with a grenade. Especially when I already have a basement full of ill shit.

I also want to get laid but still exclude that bitch Carole Baskin.

It will take a minimum of 12 months for my arcade to recover to pre COVID revenue levels and honestly I am planning for 2 years to get there. My goal is for now hold the fort and get to break even in a year. And that’s if I’m lucky. Gonna be a bumpy ride, but it was bumpy before. Good thing is we carry almost no debt. Other than rent it’s all paid for already