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Since starting Kineticist, one of my favorite activities is trying to poke holes in the opaque shield that covers much of the pinball industry. It's the motivation behind initiatives like the Hype Index (IP popularity), the Insider Connected Badge Tracker (app usage), and a couple of our more popular newsletter editions last year: Which Boutiques are Moving Units and Numbers Don't Lie, Do They?
Because it's largely comprised of small, private companies, observations of the pinball industry are much more informed by hearsay and rumor than fact. People hear rumors on forums, whispers of things on podcasts, and maybe a direct word or two from someone who knows someone in the industry. Rarely, though, are we attributing numbers to these statements, so this is my attempt to do some of that.
For this exercise, what I wanted to do was look primarily at 2024 releases by commercial pinball manufacturers. However, because there were a bunch of games announced in 2023 that ultimately didn't ship until 2024, to make the data cleaner to interpret, I excluded anything that was announced prior to December 2023 (like BoF's Labyrinth, CGC's Pulp Fiction and JJP's Elton John). I've also excluded titles like Blood Bank Billiards and Eight Ball Fury where there isn't much available data to interpret.
Like other number-crunching posts I've done, take this with a grain of salt. It's meant to be directional, and the numbers I can see as an industry outsider are limited and represent only a small percentage of the total market. Also, keep in mind that most of these numbers reflect sales made by distributors to end-user customers, not sales from the manufacturer to the distributor, which would be much higher.
This data is an aggregate of the copies found on location (via Pinball Map data) and in Pinside users' home collections (via data from Pinside).
This is one of those assumptions in the community that everyone knows, but it is absolutely confirmed by this dataset. Stern Pinball is in a class of its own in the pinball market, and everyone else is merely fighting for scraps or trying to mine the marketplace for a defensible, underserved sub-niche.
Stern Pinball machines released in 2024 comprised 88.6% of the total units tracked between home and location games. They managed to crank out 3 new releases for the year, plus 2 remade titles. They brought to market games with premium nostalgia IP attached, took a flyer on a modern franchise (John Wick), and even tapped into their own source of nostalgia IP with Metallica Remastered.
Some home collectors like to dismiss location play within the pinball ecosystem, but I'm here to tell you definitively that location play matters to total sales volume. One of the reasons that Stern is so successful is because their location ground game is unmatched.
I would wager that even though home collectors buy more games by volume than operators do (in our dataset home collectors have roughly 60% of the total games), it's the operators that fuel the growth in home sales, simply as a by-product of increasing the chances that someone will engage with a Stern pinball product. If the pinball market were expressed as a traditional sales or marketing funnel, location play would be towards the top of that funnel, with a home sale towards the bottom. All of the bars, arcades, and FECs that operate Stern products effectively serve as distributed product showrooms.
Even though it's a limited dataset, I did throw the numbers at an LLM (Claude) and asked if there was a correlation between location and home sales, and the answer was "Yes", with a correlation coefficient 0f 0.91 (the closer to 1 you are, the stronger your positive correlation).
If you are a manufacturer that isn't Stern, I will implore you to do whatever it takes to improve your location pinball offerings, be that via improvements to reliability and ease of servicing or exploring operator-friendly pricing ideas. I think the investments will show up in your sales in the long run.
This was a surprise to me, as when I had looked at these numbers earlier in the year it was interesting to me how poorly Spooky's dual releases of Looney Tunes and Texas Chainsaw Massacre seemed to be performing. And don't get me wrong, I still don't think either of these games were runaway hits for Spooky, as both ultimately struggled to get a foothold in the market, even with some positive word-of-mouth behind them.
However, in this dataset Spooky Pinball are the #2 ranked manufacturer by 2024 release sales volume. I think if you polled a random sampling of pinball enthusiasts, most would peg Jersey Jack Pinball for this spot. Granted, Spooky had a full calendar year to push sales of their games, while Jersey Jack only had a few months with Avatar. Still, though, it fits with a general community narrative of Spooky being a pinball manufacturer that's on the rise.
It will be interesting to look at this data again next year when we might have new releases from BoF and CGC to compare against Evil Dead sales as that #2 position may be much more competitive.
As much as it pains me to say this (I enjoy many of JJP's games, and they have some great people working for the company), this dataset forces me to question some of JJP's recent strategic decisions, specifically around theme selection and pricing, but also as it relates to location pinball penetration.
I expected Avatar to be higher on the sales list. It's a fun game, and was one of my favorite releases of 2024, but realistically it's one a prospective buyer needs to get their hands on first before committing to a purchase. This is hard to do if there are only around 60 public locations where people can try it for themselves.
This symptom of a fundamental business problem is compounded by pricing increases that were too early and too large, which took a lot of prospective buyers (particularly operators) out of the market for their games. Add in curious IP selection and a nagging reputation for games that may be harder to operate... and well, this is what you would expect to see.
If you zoom out a bit, I think the other point that stands out that would elicit a "duh" reaction from most pinball enthusiasts is that theme selection matters.
JAWS is bigger IP than Texas Chainsaw Massacre. John Wick is more culturally relevant than The Princess Bride. The curious case here is Avatar, as it's both big IP and culturally relevant, but as mentioned in the previous takeaway, it's got other forces pulling it down.
Original IP, like Barry O's Barbecue Challenge, should mostly be considered DOA moving forward. Sometimes you can get a small success story, like Turner's Ninja Eclipse, but even that game, with an attractive price point and favorable community buzz, likely wouldn't carry Turner too much further than the 100 units they were already able to sell to a mix of end users and distributors.
Again, these are some fairly broad strokes conclusions that are drawn from an imperfect but representative dataset of pinball game sales as sourced from publicly available data. Do with that what you will.
It will be interesting to see how some of these storylines play out as we get deeper into 2025. I think Stern will continue to dominate, Spooky will continue to rise (assuming Evil Dead game reception lines up to release hype), JJP could stage a comeback if the rumored Harry Potter game releases, location play will continue to be unprioritized by most manufacturers, and maybe some companies will start to get smarter generally about IP selection.
Colin is the chief pixel pusher at Kineticist. He's a lifetime gamer who became enamored with pinball after taking in a family copy of the 1979 classic Joker Poker (the EM version). Since then he's bought, sold and repaired many machines, competed in all kinds of tournaments, and contributes to This Week in Pinball, the New England Pinball League, and Pin-Masters of New England. Previously, Colin spent over a decade working in marketing for agencies and tech startups. He also started and ran a music blog, happy hour website, and wrote a regular craft beer review column for Central Track in Dallas. Once aspired to be an artsy film director.
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