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Is pinball in trouble in the UK?

Pinball itself was in trouble 25 years ago. The home market emerged and manufacturing adapted so things are OK.
I think what really needs to change is the hobbyist gets priced out by the investor. Old cars, pinball, sega megadrives, lego and even lord above pokemon are now seen as an investment. Collect it keep it and watch your investment grow.
Hobbies used to be fun. For funs sake and it cost money and if you wanted to invest bought some shares instead.
What a time to be alive
 
AlfonsoB said:
I'm going to make a couple of non popular observations, but which I believe though are very valid to the core question of this thread.

Both relate to the accessilbilty to buy lower end machines, and therefore reducing the introduction of new players.

1. Entry point machines. £500-1500 quid mark.
How is the average Joe supposed to get into pinball when the machines are scooped up in nairly a minute of them being listed for sale.
I have watched on as one individual in particular has grabbed just about anything out there in this price range all over the UK.
Surely this has a detrimental effect on the hobby being widespread.

2. Even more unpopular on here I'm sure.....

Hoarders.
Keeping pins in lock ups, containers, warehouses or wotnot. Or tombstoned machines becuse of no room.
Would like to point out difference from a big collection wihich can be played.
Multiple project machines that if they were honest with themselves will not happen.
This reduces availabilty to the market, drives up prices and the pins are not being used.

I know there will be the arguement 'You can do what you want with them' but really by not having
more accessibility to machines, the general public will struggle to spawn new players/collectors.
Exposure is driven down and ability to play localised.

Yes new machines are available but as a community we have 'rationalised' the price of pins.
In reality though they are ludicrously priced. Check out the reaction of a non pin player when thay ask
how much one of these are?
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Who is committing this heinous crime(s) of hoovering up machines?
 
I completely agree that a lot of chat now goes on what’s app groups , possibly for some and definitely in my case I don’t wanna upset people saying it as it is , the old days you just let loose and people wouldn’t get offended.. I for one have had my fair share of arguments “ Miami gate “ was a particularly good one , sorry again Paul a lot of deleted messages and the death of my OG profile oh and a major kick off with he who shan’t be named 😆😆 on what’s app groups you can kinda say what you want without publicly offending anyone .. maybe we all lost our sense of humour ??
Example : that dude looking for a project TaF my god the amount of sarcastic yet humoured responses I have written yet deleted as don’t want to upset the guy , but come on a project TaF ?? We all have a couple tucked away that no one knows what to do with , and now a project ghostbusters again I am tripping over these daily 😆😆
 
Will2.0 said:
I completely agree that a lot of chat now goes on what’s app groups , possibly for some and definitely in my case I don’t wanna upset people saying it as it is , the old days you just let loose and people wouldn’t get offended.. I for one have had my fair share of arguments “ Miami gate “ was a particularly good one , sorry again Paul a lot of deleted messages and the death of my OG profile oh and a major kick off with he who shan’t be named 😆😆 on what’s app groups you can kinda say what you want without publicly offending anyone .. maybe we all lost our sense of humour ??
Example : that dude looking for a project TaF my god the amount of sarcastic yet humoured responses I have written yet deleted as don’t want to upset the guy , but come on a project TaF ?? We all have a couple tucked away that no one knows what to do with , and now a project ghostbusters again I am tripping over these daily 😆😆
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It's absolutely this.

People getting offended on behalf of other people - often people whose only contribution to the forum is on these sorts of posts - loads of online drama, so everything becomes really sterile to avoid that. I think losing the bigger characters to this sort of stuff has been really detrimental too - in recent times, the likes of Neil being banned (love him or hate him, his posts were engaging in one way or the other), or countless others leaving the forum due to boredom or what Will said.

I don't think the forum particularly reflects UK pinball though - we're a small subset of that.
 
Many moons ago I was as a bond trader.

For some reason the 1990s (pension) fund management community actively traded when markets were rising. Conversely, they sat on their hands when markets were falling. I would guess there is some psychological underpinning to this - but it never made any objective sense to me.

People are much happier selling a 30% gain for 20% than they are locking in a 30% loss at 29% even though the latter is better value relative to the current market price

Even in general yabbering folk tend to tell you "I bought this and it's worth Xxxx now". "Have you seen the [classic motorbike] market - look at the rises ". How often do they say "I sold my Yyyy and could buy another back for 40% less today".

Pinball had a remarkable bull run thanks to covid/ money printing/ home office/ furlough/ hot tub/ fomo etc. But as others have said - just like classic cars, watches, cornish holiday homes etc it rode the same curve.

When sentiment turns down, the sales volumes usually collapse.
 
elnicky said:
Being in Bristol (Playback) might bias this a fair bit, but from my observations pinball is doing really well (in Central Bristol there's currently 5 places with pinball machines!). Also young people (<35) are regularly playing and loving pinball machines (even machines as old as Grand Lizard being surprisingly popular!).
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It certainly hasn't always been like it is in Bristol. Its only in the last few years since @8bit-1up really started making it what it is
 
only a infrequent visitor to the fair city of Bristol. Nice bridge. arcade in the centre had a few pins and in 1990 I gave the guy in the cash desk £10 for the space shuttle topper that for no apparent reason was displayed in his booth . game long gone. went back in 2001 and had a swep1 but it was broken
 
steve brum said:
only a infrequent visitor to the fair city of Bristol. Nice bridge. arcade in the centre had a few pins and in 1990 I gave the guy in the cash desk £10 for the space shuttle topper that for no apparent reason was displayed in his booth . game long gone. went back in 2001 and had a swep1 but it was broken
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Yeah that would have been John in Mad Harry's arcade. Unfortunately its gone now, I remember that Swep1, before that they had a TAF and SFII, they then disappeared not long after Swep1 came in. That then remained their only pin for many years, which was eventually replaced with a POTC. That was the last pin they had before they closed, John sold me the POTC the week before the arcade closed down
 
roadshow16 said:
Yeah that would have been John in Mad Harry's arcade. Unfortunately its gone now, I remember that Swep1, before that they had a TAF and SFII, they then disappeared not long after Swep1 came in. That then remained their only pin for many years, which was eventually replaced with a POTC. That was the last pin they had before they closed, John sold me the POTC the week before the arcade closed down
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Mad harrys was ace.... :)
 
Been thinking a lot about this since your post, while reading the other posts and thoughts.

@huggers So I think its your perception and its completely fine.

I am more involved in things than I have ever been, I now play in the Preston league, for me this is an hour plus away on a mid week evening but that’s what it takes and there are a fair few of us doing this. I played in my first comp at Retroids which as great and as such is being repeated. The big events are well supported and lots of people travel out from the uk to other events and we have a lot of online content available on YouTube and podcasts.

I am also part of the EAPA WhatsApp group, this thing is basically non stop messaging, I was added to feel more part of the community but also for me to see how I might go about building my own community. As an example there are 2 people with 3 miles of me, we never meet or do anything so maybe we should as I am sure there are other not far away (new post to follow reaching out)

The forum is quiet but as others have said forums are a bit old hat and being overtaken by smaller WhatsApp groups, in fact this has been the best post in a while so maybe once a week someone needs to start a topic or make a statement that gets people to join in.

I don’t think you can really judge the state of pinball on the second hand market that’s a totally different thing.

I have enjoyed your post and the comments
 
Tex said:
The forum is quiet but as others have said forums are a bit old hat and being overtaken by smaller WhatsApp groups, in fact this has been the best post in a while so maybe once a week someone needs to start a topic or make a statement that gets people to join in.

I don’t think you can really judge the state of pinball on the second hand market that’s a totally different thing.

I have enjoyed your post and the comments
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You know what else is old hat? Pinball 🤣

But yeah I'm glad it's at least drummed up some chat and opinion on here. The nice thing about forum communities as opposed to X, TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit etc is that it is far friendlier and more personal and also not invite only like a WhatsApp group. Without this site and the nice community I never would have enjoyed or explored the hobby the way I have.
 
Great Post @Tex

I think that a wider issue is that we are now living in the industrial grievance complex and it's forcing communities apart.

As they die out, the "stiff upper lip", "make do and mend", "worse things happen at sea" of the 20th century wartime generation is rapidly receding. Their kids were brought up with some sense of these values but their grandkids far less so.

The name of the game now is getting offended/ ostracising and shaming heretics/ claiming virtue, luxury beliefs/ special treatment because you suffer from x, y and z.

That is killing many public fora and sending folk down into whatsapp silos where more homogenous (heretic free) communities can develop. On whatsapp you can restrict interaction to invited guests who may more closely share your views.

When pinball prices bottom out and ideally stay stable or have modest appreciation - hopefully that will catalyse far more trading. This would in turn revitalise the forum.

in olden times (2014) where you bought a fish tales for 700 to 1000, played it for a couple of months, sold it for 700 to 1000 and replaced with a Getaway. Rinsed and repeated. No need to horde as plenty of games were up for sale all the time.
 
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I think as others have said WhatsApp groups is where a lot of discussion that would have been on here before and there is a ton of groups on there
 
Forums (this one in particular) are great, a much better way to store and find information than WhatsApp and FB groups, plus its run by members of our community, not tech oligarchs with sinister intentions.

Tex hit the nail on the head earlier, the more we contribute here, the more people visit to see what's new, I don't mean we should spam new topics, but if we all made a bit more of an effort to make a shop log, share thoughts, high scores, ask questions etc, I'm sure we could turn this lull around quite easily, a forum is its members after all.
 
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