I've been curious about pinball numbers and whether (or how quickly) we're moving towards the dreaded 'market saturation' for modern machines (for sake of this discussion, consider modern machines to be DMD's and newer).

How many people and/or businesses collect/own machines? If I'm looking at the Pinside Map correctly, there are about 22,000 Pinsiders globally? Of these, maybe not all are owners/collectors. Also, there are probably a bunch of owners/collectors that aren't on Pinside. So what's the number globally for owners/collectors? ~50,000? Much higher? Lower?

How has this number changed from year-to-year? Maybe the stats on how Pinsider member numbers have changed from year-to-year could offer insight. Do we know these numbers / can they be shared? How many new collectors/owners join the hobby each year? Is there 5% growth year over year?

How many modern machines currently exist? Are there a million machines in existence? 1/2 million? Pinside top 100 currently lists 344 machines. Maybe ~200 modern machines with average of 1500 in existence each...is this reasonable...so maybe only 300,000 machines in existence?

Between all manufacturers, how many new pinball machines are produced each year? This seems to be a down year, but between Stern, JJP, API, and CGC...do they crank out 4000 machines a year combined?

How many modern machines get destroyed/junked each year? I'm guessing this count is much smaller than the number of new machines produced, right? So the # of machines is increasing right? Anyone have a feel?

So ultimately: Where do all the machines go? Are personal collections staying the same size - and the machines added each year are proportional to the new collectors/owners? Can the manufacturers keep up with demand of a growing market? Or are personal collections getting larger and larger: if so...aren't we all running out of room (I know I am)?

Happy to receive any firm statistics or even opinions/guesstimates.

I can't imagine that any pinball manufacturer would be willing to release their market intelligence, so I figured the group on Pinside could probably provide some interesting insight/opinions.

...and, I'm just a curious guy. I was recently asked to produce some market estimates for my company (not AT ALL related to pinball), so this got me thinking about the pinball stats too.

...okay, everything you've stated seems reasonable. The Pinmap shows only 152,000 pinball machines globally (just noticed this count now). That includes pre-DMD's too. So maybe the total count of modern machines is only ~500,000 or less?

I don't want to know that badly! Free is much better.

...I couldn’t tell if this was sarcasm or serious. I couldn’t find anything about a World Pinball Consortium, but it sounded pretty good.

Anyway...if the stat is close to being accurate, that means there’s ~75,000 owners: maybe 60,000 active in the hobby and 15,000 non-active. With that many active, and if the hobby is growing, I could easily believe that there is enough demand for 10,000+ new machines a year. (i.e. 1/6 of active owners buy a NIB each year) for years to come.

Do any of these numbers seem close?