This placed the industry in danger of stagnating entirely by the middle of the 1960s. While the remaining manufacturers still released a constant stream of product in the 1950s and early 1960s, many of these games began to lack originality, with companies merely incorporating minor changes into existing concepts each year. As demand for new games fell, the industry began to consolidate as the 1950s progressed until by 1965 what had been over a dozen major manufacturers at the end of World War II were whittled down to just five. Instead, operators drove themselves to near bankruptcy in 19 trying to replace old machines, while manufacturers continued to increase production through the end of the decade only to discover that distributors and operators could no longer afford to buy from them. Immediately after World War II, it appeared that the coin-operated amusement industry was poised to enter another boom period as manufacturers entered the post-war era with both better equipment and larger manufacturing capacity due to wartime innovations and operators needed to replace roughly ninety percent of the estimated 5,000,000 pinball machines, coin-operated games, vending machines, and jukeboxes in operation at the start of the war.
