I'm having a bunch of non-pinball people over tonight and set the outlanes to their smallest position. Might get some anecdotal evidence about whether an easier game makes people more interested.

This post is long, but touches on the points others have made in this thread about people being drawn to EMs.

I brought my friend into ReplayFX on Saturday, he's in his low 30s, he's done a fair bit of console gaming and is a very talented PC gamer (considered top 5 Dark Age of Camelot player all time, very high rank in Starcraft 2). His first three games of pinball ever were on Wednesday at a bar near his apartment, and then his first exposure to games other than Tron were at ReplayFX on Saturday.

His review was essentially that DMDs are too complicated for a novice. There's too many things to shoot for, which needs to be done too accurately, and the points you receive are not understandable. Even with house balls he was enjoying EMs and early SSs because he understood the goal of the games and how to accomplish it: get points. He didn't need control and didn't need imamaculate aim because the rewards from every flip are clear and the switches are right out in the open, making clear targets, instead of hidden within 7 tight shots at top of the playfield. I think that's an important point to reiterate: the switches are the targets and they look like targets. When I was playing Tron with him and saying "hitting the motorcycle shots will get you a multiball" it wasn't obvious to him that the light cycle inserts correspond with the ramp or lane behind them, because there was no physical target to be seen, only the negative space of that shot.

Since then, I think Team Pinball and their The Mafia game might be on the right track with their back-to-basics design. Sure, the price isn't right, but the simplicity of an EM with a ball saver to help reduce house balls and a clear path to points seems like the right formula to attract new players, instead of foisting them onto the complex scoring of a game like Guardians of the Galaxy.

Any operators want to chime in on how PBR does versus DMD/LCDs?