The market was completely different. Home collectors were a minuscule part of the equation. Bally/WMS sold thousands of pins to distributors and was able to command high minimum orders from the distributors, especially after TAF which earned like gangbusters on route. So they were able to then ship thousands of TZ which did not earn on route. It was too complicated. How limited a machine might be in quantity was never a factor to anyone. The only factor was "will people put their quarters in this?" Now Bally/Williams/Gottlieb are dead and the info home collectors giving their old pins a loving home is readily available.

Stern (as with anyone else still making pinballs) serves a niche of home collectors and a much lower pool of operators today. Resale value among private buyers was never a consideration in 1993, but it is now and it may be why they don't disclose anything they don't need to.

It's safe to say sales are not where they were a couple decades ago, but they've been strong enough in recent years for Stern to expand their business significantly while several other competitors emerge.

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# sold is likely continuing to decline. Profit margins have continued to increase.

If anything the expansion was needed to decrease cycle time between games so they could try to continue and pump out new titles more often.

Guessing most titles sell only 1000 to 3000 games. Blockbuster titles likely sell 3000-5000 games.

Just a guess, but I think they are seeing more and more titles they thought would be blockbusters selling in fewer and fewer numbers.

I think it always fun to look at listed games on Pinside and then project out reasonably well.
Lets look at SW for fun. Arguably one of the strongest themes ever with mixed reviews at start but a bit stronger now that the game is out for a bit with polished code. SWpro =115 owners/ 130 locations. SWprem/LE = 256 owners/ 47 locations.

We can assume that location data is pretty accurate on the whole. Locations and pinheads widely use both pinballmap and pinside to keep the games database up to date. It is simple and the effective most used way to list games for location play. The numbers also jive with the expectation that PROs go on route and Prem/le to a much lessor extent. WE can reasonably assume only 200-250 SW of any variation are on route.

We can assume that LE data allows us to project some thoughts. With 300 of those accounted for in total and games still available at primary distributors I assume that means the LEs have not sold out.

Even if Pinside ONLY accounts for 30% of the total games out there, then we can guess that only 1500-2000 SW actually exist at all.

This can be done with various other games recently produced and it provides some fun insights.

The 300 LEs just goes to show how small of a percentage of owners use pinside or list games if they use pinside. The LEs sold out from stern and are just about dried up from distros. There are a couple still around but they are already asking a premium for them in most cases. From what I have heard SW has been selling extremely well. Even if sales are only at 2k currently it is a game that will be made for a few years and is likely to end up selling a lot over time. GOTG seems to be off to a very slow start though.

nah... for years now they have been selling fewer and fewer LEs. Remember just a few years ago when games like XMle sold out instantly. 300 out of 550 supposedly sold are accounted for on Pinside.

Now you have blockbuster titles where LEs are still available month and months later. Stern just cuts off the LE sales number and likely produces less than the original number. They are not stupid and make to demand now. There is a reason LEs are made after Pros and that is so they can accurately measure projected LE sales and the "sell out" as needed. I think many LE games are actually less than the stated edition size.

If you do think Pinside number are only 1/3 of the total LE games then that also provides a good estimate to use for pros. If you can take a title like SW and assume that 200 out of the 300 le/prem category are actually LE, then that tells you taht pinside accounts for at minimum 25% of total sales and at most 40%.

That means you could take any recent game and times by 3 or 4 to get a total count of sold titles (both pro and Prem/LE model)

Worth note that is IF Pinside number are so inaccurate, then you would need to explain why ~200 of the 300 RZs are accounted for here and 115/150 AMH are accounted for. It is not like Spooky games are only selling to pinsiders. If 2/3 of all Spooky games are accounted for here then I think closer to 50% of all Stern games are accounted for here.

I agree that Stern has little to gain by disclosing their sales publically at this point. However, it does make me wonder why Bally/Williams, etc. ever bothered to in the past? Seems like pinball production numbers are well documented for all but the contemporary era. Why did these companies disclose production figures on their games? Bragging rights? Just an industry norm at that time that has gone by the wayside?

Where's TheBlackKnight when you need him?

Woz 979 pinside owners

HOB 497 pinside owners

DI 259 pinside owners

So what do these # tell you

Maybe it's got something to do with Williams being a public company, which isn't the case for the 23 current pinball manufacturers?

That's pure conjecture on my part I really don't know anything about this stuff.

Exactly. They had to disclose the production numbers in their financials for the shareholders. Stern doesn't. No big mystery or conspiracy.

I'm sure the era that we are in now if Stern sells 5k of a game they are on the moon, and in the B/W days that game was probably, at best, a disappointment.

I'm not so sure. People act like most B/W dmd games had 10K+ units made of them. If you just look at the B/W games in the top 50 on pinside close to half of them are below 5K units and only 5 or so out of close to 25 games have over 10K units sold.

The current pinball market seems to be close to as large as the mid 90's but it's currently growing while in the mid 90's it was dying off. Plus a ton of games are staying in homes now and are going to last a ton longer.

As for why stern doesn't release numbers, they do not have to and it has zero benefit to them to release it. It doesn't matter anyway.

Not Even close and doubtful it will Ever see the hay day of the 90's! They were selling close to 100,000 machines a Year back then!! If all combined do Half of that I think pinball would be on a swing. Its great now but it is doubtful that we will ever see the numbers of the 90s again for pinball. Sadly.

It's going to be more difficult to discern rarity and desirability in the future without production numbers. From a collector's standpoint.

Well you gotta look at the era too. You don't think in 1997 they made MM and were disappointed it couldn't break 5000 sales? Pre-'95 only the clunkers (Black Rose, Gillgans, Popeye, Flintstones) wouldn't make 5K. After '94 tho the market tanked and all a sudden 5K would have been a pretty decent seller!

Well first off they tell me that you purposefully like to try and squew data. You purposefully neglected to also add on the 137 woz on location, 80 TH on location, and 65 DI on location.

Using the same estimates of pinside % of real world numbers...
Next it tells me that woz likely sold at minimum 3000 and more likely 4000 total games, TH likely sold around 2000 to 2500 machines, and DI is still being made but over 1000 already sold.

It reminds us that while JJP is slower to produce, they actually can sell as many or more games than Stern and they make a product that sells for years rather than just being a flash of hype in the pan.

If anything, the percentages seem to hold true across all manufacturers.

I guess in conclusion it is obvious that Stern is lying when they say they have over 90% of the market. They likely did a few years ago, but now that market share is shrinking as time passes.

All this data reinforces that Stern is cutting the bottom line, attempting to decrease cycle time, and focused on selling based off license and hype machine. I see the tides as obviously changing for Stern and am actually excited to see what they do to adapt. THey have adapted before and they will again if thye are to continue to hold the market.

Based on massive increases in consumer demand VS seven years ago, extreme cost cutting per pin, substantially increased product model cost , rational people would think they are trying to sell the company.

Interesting data and view point I appreciate you sharing. As for the Stern Marketing statement of 90% market share it is possible based on field units depending on how you use their statement. Considering they had close to 10 plus years making machines without JJP, DP, CG, API, Spooky, etc etc, they Could have 90% of the live base granted I believe they wanted us to hear that as current market sales share which I Highly doubt! In fact for revenue/profit my Guess is JJP is probably pretty close to Stern on that figure. Assumed!

Your date shows the same as mine a drop off game by game

This thread is the perfect answer to why # are not given funny speculation thread though

I estimate your 50% correct and only 8% of the forum agree with you. Lol And I made up 100% of my reply to you!

Only in the very early 90's, by 1994 they were not making close to that. Sadly pinball was already on its way out. A couple of games that are so well thought of like TZ, STTNG, and IJ strangely enough were part of the fall. They did not hold up well or get played a lot in my local arcades and after that there was less pinball machines in the arcades each year.

Well, there you have it folks! Solid statistical analysis proving without the shadow of a doubt that Stern sales are declining.
No wait... that's not even remotely close to statistical analysis... it's just a biased opinion.

Have you ever watched Shark Tank? Two young jackasses walk in with some new exercise product and declare that this new gadget values their company at over $500,000 without any sales to date. Why? Because the proven, known information is that the exercise industry generates sales of X billions per year, and all they need is 2% of market share. What's 2% after all!

Without real numbers from Stern, you're just an angry man spitting straight into the wind.

Most of the time the production numbers came from individuals with knowledge.... not public disclosures by the companies. Your premise assumption you are trying to compare to is wrong.

I like the guised attempt at calling someone a jackass without calling them a jackass, lol.

Problem here is I am not selling anything and reality is that we have a database which we can make some reasonable assumptions from in order to make a projection and prediction of actual market.

Sure, any social science is limited and biased. That is why social sciences are considered the soft sciences and not real/hard science. No matter, if you understand the limitations and biases of your data then you can still ascertain some decent conclusions.

No they didn't.

Why don't you try contacting ipdb and asking where the numbers came from. Often it's public quotes, but usually more industry news and confirmation from former employees.

Sales figures don't reflect that information at all. Some of the cheapest DMDs - like Jackbot and NBA Fastbreak - have traditionally been among the "rarest." We all know there's 21,000 Addams Families out there.

Unknown production numbers will have zero effect on future pricing of Stern stuff. Just like always - it's supply and demand that sets the prices and "desireability" is in the eye of the beholder.

So, for all of you that claim the public pinball companies revealed their pinball production figures. I never recall seeing them. That said, here's a snapshot of Bally's annual reports from 1977 & 1978 where they only reveal revenue figures.
Keep in mind this was for the pinball "division" and includes service part sales. Also remember that these figures were sales to distributors. Real distributors like C.A. Robinsom, H. Betti Industries, Bally Advance, New Orleans Novelty Co. and Empire Distributing etc. Whether Bally owned the distributor or not, they sold games at the same relative Sales or Transfer Price to all distributors.
You can extrapolate that in 1973 (EM's only) each machine sold for $600.00 to a distributor and maybe 10% of sales were service parts so 18,000 machines sold. In 1977 machines sold to distributors for about $1400.00 so about 45,000 machines sold.
But again, no pinball machine quantities were released by Bally. I also verified this in the 10-K filings.
I have Gottlieb (Columbia Pictures Industries) and Williams (Seeburg Industries and XCOR International for several years) annual reports as well but they are not handy to get at the moment. I seem to recall that Williams revealed a quantity figure of Firepower or Gorgar in one of their reports as they liked to brag more than Bally).
Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't include one of the hottest playfield solderers Bally had at one of the Franklin Park plants. By the playfield racks in the background, I believe this was the Acorn Lane plant.
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1978-2 (resized).jpg

Added over 6 years ago: EDIT: Williams has never released production figures for any of their machines in their Annual Reports or their Form 10-K's filed with the SEC.

I will post more in this thread when time allows.

In order to state how much % of the market a company owns, one must first know how many games all other competitors have sold and compare that with their own production numbers. JJP isn't making their production numbers public. So without these numbers it is not possible to accurately state how much of the market a company like Stern owns.

We do know that Stern had 100% of the market for over a decade. When they owned 100% of the market, that market reduced in size year after year. In recent years the numbers may have gone up, but it's still marginal compared to the early 90s. Owning 70% of a market that is now possibly 10% of the size it once was puts those numbers also in perspective.

The year that had the most machines produced world wide was 1979 with around 250K units. Pinball machines were everywhere, every bar, restaurant and arcade had at least one. On my way home from school I passed 3 bars with a total of 4 machines and 2 arcades that had 5 machines each. The bars are still there today but not the pinball machines. One of the arcades is gone, the other one has zero pinballs. Most of the market today is just the US. Europe, which used to be pinball crazy, hasn't seen the revival we currently experiencing in the US. Germany, Italy and Spain have almost no market, while Netherlands and GB still have some.
My guess is that the market world wide is maybe 4-5% of what it once was. That would put the sales around 10-13K a year. So if one title sells 3K that would be a lot, some might struggle to reach 1K, like WWE, Avatar, Nellie, Batman, Hobbit

Okay. I'll have to take your word for it then, but that is what I remember being told the production numbers on IPDB came from, and it seemed a logical enough source. Honestly, it's not as if in 1994 I gave enough of a shit to read a Williams shareholder report... and really I still don't, although it would probably be more interesting to me now.

Being in Europe I can confirm the revival isn't anything like in the USA. The barcade movement hasn't caught on here (yet). From what I hear Italy still takes a lot of Stern games, but the other companies have difficulty getting games out there (mostly due to Stern not wanting their distributor to carry other brands as well). Spain appears to be a difficult territory. There appears to be only one distributor. The German market has plenty of new games being offered with companies like Freddy's and Pinball Universe. Netherlands is different. The former Stern distributor had difficulty selling 20 games of a certain title, partly due to people buying games from other European countries that offered cheaper pricing. France apparently still takes about 200 units of a Stern title, but that number is a joke to what they used to take. Then there are the Scandinavian countries and Eastern Europe.

I do see possibilities for the European market, but mostly for operators who start operating Total Nuclear Annihilation. I think that game will do very well on location and make earnings for operators a lot more interesting than what they have gotten used to (or walked out on).

I guess no one got around to asking STERN . With the growth of competitors within the industry the revival is strong . Maybe eventually production will start overseas and imported machines will will help pinflation. NIB machines were 3000.00 in 2007 . With more marketing like some television commercials maybe production numbers can reach 80’ and 90’s again.

Stern and others are not on the public stock market I think. Wms and bally was a company that had stocks. If you can invest in a company they have to provide sales data to everyone.

Private companies typically don't give out sales figures. These current pinball companies are not having to deal with shareholders and the public, so there is zero reason to give out numbers.

Also pinball was not an "investment" and didn't deal with flippers back in the day. Posting up sales numbers would just further hurt the collecting and values of machines as suddenly everyone is arm chair investors of pinball values and pulling numbers out of their butt from sales figures.

Has anyone noticed that on the pinside machines page that all the Stern production numbers have been added?
The games that are considered rare have numbers attached now
I checked the following games on pinside. Would love to know where these production numbers came from
NBA 250
Big Buck Hunter 250
NFL 400
CSI 1000
24 - 1200
Wheel of Fortune 1000
Striker Extreme 800