> Yes, the barcade business model works. Mostly as a bar. Most often the machines are owned and operated by an outside contractor or dedicated hobbyist (who knows how to fix them.)

To expand on this a bit, the actual maintainer of the machine is probably the most important factor of the quality of the barcade, at least if you're the type of person who cares about rulesets for games and will be irritated if something doesn't work because of a broken sensor. I like enthusiast owned/operated places because the owner who's actually playing the games will notice problems and fix them, as opposed to bars where any problems with the machine will either be broken until the maintainer gets around to it on their scheduled route, or possibly the problems never get reported at all. One possibly useful proxy for this is seeing where your local leagues play - in general they're more likely to be in places with well-maintained machines.

For San Francisco:

- Outer Orbit is my favorite place, even though they've recently removed a couple machines for more seating (more evidence that the bar/restaurant is the money maker). The owners met playing pinball, are heavily involved in the local scene, and do the maintenance themselves, so the machines tend to be in great shape. Decent Hawaiian food and a quite good beer list.

- Free Gold Watch is the place everyone always recommends because it has the most machines. My feeling is that they don't keep up on maintenance well enough because I always have trouble with tables always having enough small things broken about it that it's impossible to advance some modes. (On pretty much any modern machine every lane/ramp/hole is probably going to be required for some mode or another, so a single broken sensor breaks the entire game if you're trying for wizard mode.) It's definitely the place to go for the arcade experience with a lot of machines to choose from.

- the Alamo theater actually has a reasonably decent room upstairs from the bar, across the hall from the theaters. Doesn't seem to get rotated much and I'm not convinced it's maintained regularly, but it doesn't get much traffic so it doesn't seem like stuff breaks quickly there. A lot of people seem surprised when I mention it's there.

- Gestalt always has machines in decent shape, but the bar itself might close any month now.

- Emporium/Musee Mecanique - I don't go to them often, but they're both more generalist arcades, so they'll have a few machines at varying maintenance levels.

I'm not sure how often https://pinballmap.com/ gets updated or how its coverage is outside the SF Bay Area, but it looks pretty accurate for me.