i think that premise is deeply flawed. it assumes there is an "on location" customer base to be had. does ANYONE here carry quarters around with them? of course not. even if we did -- we have an arcade in our pocket in the form of a smart phone. we have an arcade at home in the form of various consoles. we have our PCs / iMacs / laptops for browser games. it's not a problem with pinball. random, unsolicited location gaming is dead and over. a few dregs may be left maybe, but it's not ever coming back in that format. leagues and home use are the future of pinball if it's to survive, and i think both need to be aggressively courted and farmed and nurtured by the pinball manufacturers if they're smart.

look - trying to separate random passers-by from their buck in exchange for brightly flashing lights is not gonna work in this world anymore, regardless of theme or ruleset. pinball's future, if it's to have one, is going to have to be more aggressively community / social -- leagues, tournaments, and peoples' basements, or establishments like barcades primarily dedicated to the game. and it's going to have to tie in to the online world and the social networking outlets too.

the model of operators turning a profit by standing up a game or two in the corners of a bowling alley or bar is as outdated a concept as a pay phone.

like it or not, location pinball like we grew up with is never going to be a profitable endeavor ever again. the world has permanently changed in about four or five different ways that have killed that angle.

IF pinball is to survive another generation it's going to have to find another way to reach people and hold their interest.

expos and festivals and tournaments are booming and that's awesome. The Pinball Arcade has also made tons of new fans and re-hooked a lot of people who'd sort of forgotten about pinball.

personally, TPA was my gateway drug. I loved pinball growing up in the 80s and 90s, and sort of vaguely always wanted a STTNG of my own, but it wasn't until I got re-hooked with TPA (and later discovered of Pinside) that I began seriously to consider owning my own pins.

Pinball definitely would have remained semi-forgotten by me if TPA didn't exist. if the only pins I ever ran into were those out in the wild, then around here it means I probably would have encountered maybe one neglected and likely broken pin every couple years or so. that's not going to maintain any kind of fanbase in any generation -- next, current, or whatever.

I'm imagining middle aged dudes in 2035 hanging out in a basement getting drunk and dumping gold tokens into machines that go "ping" and spit out three tickets at a time. woooooO!

once you add the ticket reward to the game, it becomes about the tickets, and not the game itself. the people who want tickets will find the "task" of slapping the ball around to get their tickets a waste of time compared to the machines that will spit out a handful of tickets and only take 5 seconds to "play".