Moving Units: Pinball Sales Tracker (#8)

Welcome back to Moving Units.

It's been fifteen weeks since the last tracker, which is longer than I like to go between these (though now that I've been doing these regularly, I wonder if a quarterly cadence is better anyway). Part of that is summer. Part of it is that nothing has moved as Pokémon did in the spring. Transformers led the summer, but it added units at less than half Pokémon's spring pace, and Fallout has only just arrived.

Other manufacturers had launches too, but they've been comparatively quiet in the numbers.

Sonic had a quick first month and has settled under 20 a week. Barrels' Bon Jovi launch drew plenty of attention (perhaps for the wrong reasons), and the run has sold through to distributors without selling out, so Barrels' Reserve window never opened. Multimorphic's Ender's Game and Dungeon Crawler Carl were well received, but P³ production timelines (and frankly, the platform's model) mean we won't have a real read on volume until much later. Two remakes are just getting started. Pedretti's Tales of the Arabian Nights has had units out since late June and is at 14, and American's Cirqus Voltaire doesn't ship until October, so its seven units are pre-orders. Most of the nine new rows on the 2026 table are small runs in the single or low double digits.

The biggest new games are leaning on operators. Of all the Pokémon games out there, 65% are on location, along with 59% of Transformers and about half of Sonic. I wondered if that meant home buyers were pulling back, but it doesn't look that way. Across everything we track, the share of added units going to locations has climbed all year, from 58% in the first quarter to 63% now. Split by age, though, the 2025 and 2026 games have sent a little under half of their new units to locations every quarter. The climb is older games, which keep going onto routes after home buyers slow down.

Read on.