I personally love that you are building an sdk and then piece-mealing out the different components of a build. While a total package deal is cool, I think most people who are even bothering to design/build an original machine are the types who are more likely to want to DIY things and likely have some of the pieces of the puzzle already solved in different ways. I am very anxious to go down this path with your services!
Yea, people always want to do things their own way. Some people are against it but re-learning/ re-inventing the wheels is what every engineering degree/ art degree/ life is about, so if people find a different way or only want to use a portion of what I offer then it's whatever. Should be a fun thing to play around with and design digital games if nothing else. You can always share the files too and get design direct feedback from playtesting, rather than take a half made homebrew to an expo. That's one of the reasons I did this, so I could send files to people I might license games from. If not Slayer, I know Kerry King is a huge pinball fan and would be interested to work with him.I think it would be cool for him to just drag and drop parts and we share digital files back and forth etc.
Still dying to try out the software. As a fellow game dev, it's a very interesting idea to apply level design tools to pins instead of pure CAD. Glad to hear you are ok after the storms and still able to dig into it full time.
Yea in videogame dev we don't F around. This legit took me like no time to build pinball designer (order magnitude of weeks). There is a pinball company with 14 software engineers, at least what I looked up. I don't know how them and other companies don't have this type of tech. Just to spread knowledge, I like Spooky the most, but I read or listened to an interview that their dual production games Looney Tunes and Chainsaw were on completely different game engines and tech stacks. Like they don't even share a commonized high score or game settings backend from what it sounds like. Makes no sense from my experiences learned in software.
Honestly I didn't anticipate doing it ALL in house. There are 2 parts suppliers and one publicly said legit everything I was doing was a lie/scam/etc like a month before I was going to fly out and make sure that we had a deal inked. Possible but hesitant to go with the other company, and nothing on them personally at this moment. Just being smart. I'd have to have a straight solid deal that if they ever did some scummy stuff like that or want to just cut ties, that I get compensated losses up to 1/2 milllion+ if they weren't selling me products that I can verify are in stock. The only annoying things I don't care to do / want to do is legs and rubbers. I started to play with some metal presses and may end up getting a 50-ton press in house to smash and bend legs. I can make molds and run tons of rubbers, but was not on my list of things to do. I anticipate though that a lot of parts, I would be able to do an 8 hour run to stock 50-100 games. If you watch my documentary I can build plungers that get magnetized and kick the ball around like 1 part per 5 seconds. Can build thousands in a couple hours.
$1400 is a lot more reasonable, though split 5 ways that is miles less money than I'm taking per game as a salary, and I've been price conscious since the first day. My original pricing idea when I started this 5 years ago was $1,200. Of course paying one person and believing it would only be a small side business makes sense. One 9-digit score display. 2 flippers, and whatever else I could add to the playfield. Without any need for LCD or mini pc, you can build the segmented score display and program game logic in a combined chipset +display for like $10. It's not impossible. Just depends what you want to do. My target audience is still pinball consumers (who are poor), not mass market consumers which this sounds like. I wasted too many years on that stupid chipset. Once I went to mini-pc and started using my game engine that was the smartest thing I ever did. Guess we will have to wait and see.
(thought I double posted) To me it's like some Mattel/large volume toy guys want to cash out with pinball. Search for "Shuffle Golf" Kickstarter. Just junk toy ideas. They even met their goal but cancelled the product. There is a demand for affordability but I don't think there is a demand for novelty pinball machines. People that can't afford games but love pinball want real pinball. If they come out with something a little bit more expensive with some decent stuff in it then it's cool and welcome them into pinball.
Ive been noticing a lot of these fake business people creeping into all sorts of companies. they think they can make linear math exponential math and cant explain their equation for making raw materials into a summed product. your doing a better job and proving you have something. I think there is a martket for items that will work with older pinball systems and newer systems like modern dmd and backglass as well as toppers and such. interactive games that fight back are a really neat thing especially that people can design and have made then shipped to them.
Sometimes I watch shark tank and amazed that someone spent $1,000,000 in R&D and molds to build a new potato peeler. Happens all the time on that show.
Homepin Blues Brothers was around $4,000 USD. $1,000 the only game we've ever seen is Zizzle. Above that Stern did some home affordable games like Transformers ($2,000 10 years ago).
@@pawlowskipinball They did the Jurrasic home edition recently as well but yea, like you said, I just don't know how you would stay afloat with that price point when you'd have to target for moving over 50-100k units just to break even. That equation has to break down at some point
@@TripleFX Not sure how much profit dealers made when they were allowed to drop their Jurassic/StarWars home editions down to $3,599 sale earlier this year. If the dealers still made money on that, then that means Stern sold them a game for something less than $3,599. I'd imagine cutting out distributors, that they could have have sold direct to customer for $3,000 (as opposed to a dealer at $3,000). My equation is a work in progress but close, and only makes sense because I'm direct to customer as one of the big ticket reductions.
I’m not sure if this translate, but, I used to work at a company with 53k employees and the CEO makes $10 million a year. Then went to work at a company that delivered the same service, but only 609 employees. The services provide had the same quality, at a less expensive price. The OH in big companies add up unnecessary cost to a product. There is a lot of OH in the pinball machines we buy; the building, the licensing for the theme, music, artwork, maybe patents, marketing, other expenses, etc, have to be covered by the price of the machine. There is profit, but not as much as you would think, once you substract all that.
Distributors is a big chunk I'm sure. When you have a distributor that needs to make money to survive, they have to take reasonable risk/reward/profit to buy the games. Then when you have 100 distributors in the USA, you now have 100 people who have to make a living selling your games. It's something I saw Kiesel/Carvin guitars talk about a lot. How he would have to double his price tag if he sold his guitars in guitar center. If you watch the latest Stern videos, they said they bought out two companies that did contract work for them that they brought in house. I think one was playfield clear coating. Can't remember the other service.
It might be doable. These guys came from A1up, and in their business model, they avoid the assembly line, marketing, customer service, etc. They use you tubers, tik-toks, community, etc. to promote a product that the quality leave much to desire. IMO they will replicate that formula. They might sell you a “package” that you will assemble at home, with less expensive parts, the artwork might be separate or a poster you stick on, sound might be just decent, playfield might be a composite, etc. If they sell you all the components to assemble a full scale pinball machine at home that you can customize or upgrade later for sub $2K, will we buy it?
Have you considered selling a pin mod first? Easier to produce and easier for a buyer to try the product when it is of less value. Build up to the full machines. I can only think of positives for you to start smaller. There are always haters, competition, copycats, scumbags, time wasters. You know you have something here so be positive and make it happen. Stop sweating over that stuff.
For me this is all-in. I wanted to build a product with myself as a consumer in mind. I have no interest/enjoyment in mods or selling games at $6,000. I had a co-worker message me the other day out of the blue that he wanted a pinball machine but settled on virtual because $7,000 is way out of any budget where he is at with his family. Even if I could do it and make money in mods, it's just not something I really believe in using my time for. I'm dedicated to this and focused on this. I have a full machine working, just the business isn't fully check-listed to hit manufacturing, hire people etc. My current game has 9 flippers. Well see if it ships that way. I want to do something big. I wouldn't mind staying at 100 games a year if that's all this gets to.
Also, selling a mod I don't think translates to consumer trust in manufacturing games. That's a significant step, but yea I plan to start small (around 10 games sold behind closed doors for people to bang on for some time. Pre-production games).
