Don't believe it is universal....if a game is 20 years old under 1000 plays is low to me. If the game is 3 months old, under 300 plays would be low, but 1000 would not IMO.

I agree. I would consider under 6k low for a routed example. Under 2-2.5k for say a LOTR or TSPP (older run) and under 1k for a very recent release. I had 1k plays on my Tron in less than 3 months and it looked like new.

I go by how the game looks. If the game looks good and works fine, I don't care if it has 60,000 plays...

Great point....and I have heard mentioned before, the shape the machine is in means more than anything....HOU can still be in worse shape than a routed game if not taken care of properly.

The NGG that I picked up recently had 234 plays on the counter, and it had been in the same home for 6 years. The counter now says over 400 plays on it a month later. I appreciated the low plays but it didn't have a factor in my buying decision, since I bought it to play it and not stare at it. (Although it is very pretty just sitting there.)

My mom's Flintstones is nice, but when we got it we could tell it was obviously used more than her restored TAF it sat beside. I checked to see if the counts were still on it, and apparently the poor Flintstones took in over $50,000 in its working career. Still works just fine despite probably a good 100,000 plays on it. We tend to baby all our pins, but these things were made to be played, so that's what we do.

games are built to play 1000 plays a day..
a good player plays way more time per game than a crappy one.. so the number of plays is relative..
if the pf is good then the game wasn't bashed much.. so it's a good buy.

I agree if it looks and plays good that's all I care about.

How long is a bit of string?

I've got a Tommy with a knock out playfield. It has a manual counter installed underneath clocked at roughly 15,000. As long as it's still in sharp shape, I could care less how many plays it has. Afterall, these machines were built to be played.

Can the total number of game plays be determined even with the code updates. Is there any way to go back (in the software) and determine total number of plays on one of the recent pinball machines (ACDC, XMen, Tron, etc.).

No, but I have started to keep track on my NIB games, meaning I will keep a log of games played, and average game time for each update.

I don't do this for any resale reason but more to keep track of how much I play.

Interesting, but people say number of plays but it I believe game time is more accurate as it would make a difference of one half hour game on LOTR or 10 three minute games on Tron.

I wish I had kept track of this on my POTC because I have had it 6+ years but probably has less than 600 total plays but I lost the data on the updates before I thought of even looking.

I just reciently figured out there were even audits on pins, I mean I knew there were for ops but just found out it keeps a lot of data such as ball time, total balls played (I restart games a lot after one ball) and number of flips.

Not sure but I guess battery change on older pins resets the counts?

The lower the better but really its all about condition, condition, condition.

Got an EM with 98,123 plays as of now, still looks wonderful. Getting hung up on "plays" is ridiculous. It's a game, play and enjoy the damn thing.

Under 100 in an evening.

yup, mine have boatloads of games on them too...

frankly, i would be wary of any game that sat around for a long time without any plays on it... they NEED to be played to keep all of the stuff properly "exercised", rather than just sitting around and corroding...

now, if someone is just buying one to say "look at my xxx pin", then go for it...

To me anything under a few hundred is low plays, though anything under 1000 is not that much as long as the game looks good