How about games actually being on route and working?
Arm chair analyst time: The manufacturer that is willing to take the financial risk of exposure > profit for one or two games has a chance of revitalizing the genre into the mainstream and becoming the big boy of the very small market.
Right now pinball is in a "collectors paradise rut". For a majority of people pinball exists only in collector's basements and MAYBE 1 or 2 machines in a random spot. If you're not lucky enough to be in an area with an active community, publicly the genre is pretty much dead. Find my Tucson thread. It's a major area and I couldn't get an arcade/pinball online community to tell me where the machines are.
If pinball is going to truly go mainstream again, someone has to take the risk of making a game that utilizes modern tech to attract Joe Blow that also has almost insane incentives to ops to route as many as possible. The machines need to be everywhere. Not just movie theaters or random bowling alleys. I mean EVERYWHERE. That means losing money on a few projects, gambling that flooding the market will make pinball huge and profitable again...so you can make money if it rebounds.
It's really easy to blame other forms of entertainment, but the problem with pinball is pretty much self created. Pinball expects Joe Blow to hunt down their games and do all the leg work. In a lot of cases it expects Joe Blow to know a collector that has bought the latest game or to find an op that knows where he is routing his stuff. Joe Blow doesn't have time and doesn't give a shit
Edit: P.S. Video Games weren't super mainstream until PS1? Were you alive during the 80's?