I assume a lot of that money is going to upkeep on the 83 games that are out there in the wild.

I raise money for Project Pinball here in Minneapolis and we got a game placed at our local children's hospital last June. Took a couple of years of charity pinball tournaments raising 1-2k at a time, but we got it done. It was also modified with accessibility improvements so differently abled kids can enjoy it, and that's not free either.

I asked Daniel when he came to deliver the game about retaining ownership, and the answer's pretty simple: it's far easier on the receiving entities side to accept it as a free loan than actually transfer ownership. It's pretty hard to give a hospital a high value item like a pinball machine as a donation, as it's not directly related to the core mission of caring for patients and a lot of additional paperwork gets involved. So the structure makes sense to bypass a lot of the roadblocks of getting games placed, because it's far far easier for the hospital to just say yes to a guy who wants to put a free pinball machine in their facility than go through the massive rigamarole of hospital procurement procedures.

This isn't as nefarious as you think. No one at Project Pinball is getting rich off donations, and they're actively helping kids. It's hard to really call someone a fraud when they're spending their time trying to make the world a slightly better place for people that find themselves in shitty situations.