The Economics of Pinball (2009)

https://cheaptalk.org/2009/11/17/the-economics-of-pinball/

by saadalem • 5 years ago

60 31 5 years ago

1cvmask• 5 years ago

The Japanese Pachinko (pinball) market is bigger than the casinos of Las Vegas, Singapore and Macau combined and is dominated by ethnic Koreans like Masayoshi Son of Softbank whose dad was in the pachinko parlor business. This might explain the "gambling" tendencies of Masayoshi Son and Softbank with investments in WeWork and Better.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachinko

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/CEO-in-the-news/SoftBank-Ma...

gxqoz• 5 years ago

When American pinball was basically just gambling it was also a big market. This led to the mob controlling pinball in many parts of the country. Some cities banned the game, including Chicago, ironically home of most of America's big coin-op manufacturers.

dasil0032• 5 years ago

This article is very misleading. Pinball has gone through many eras, and it is true that Addams Family in 1992 was the high water mark, but there's an equivalent peak in late 70s for the EM (Electromechanical, think gas-station price cylinders scoreboard). The article mostly talks about the SS era (Solid State, think 7-segment display scoreboard) which dipped a bit from the late 70s but ended in the late 80s early 90s. Addams Family itself is roughly a dividing line to the DMD era (Dot-Matrix Display), which many players consider the golden era of pinball where game design also became more precise and more "flow" was added to the game as well as more sophisticated modes and rules. Williams created many of the most beloved games during this period through steadily declining sales which did hit a wall and they tried to generate new excitement with their "Pinball 2000" form factor where there was a screen inset under the glass instead of a DMD. They only released a couple of these games and they basically killed the company they were so bad. However after that, Stern remained, and the 2000s were kind of a wilderness era where they sort of picked up the torch of the DMD era, and developed their own modern style. Sales were not high during this time, but they were surviving. This was the state of the world in 2009 when the article was written, so it's understandable they didn't know what was coming. In the early 2010s there started a resurgence of pinball both with hobbyists and competitive play. Stern found a new stride with a series of games with deeper rules and more strategic play with layers of much more complexity and stacking of multipliers such that top players can achieve scores that would take hours or even days of grinding (eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdIArp3BW2g). Over the last 5-6 years they've switched to full video displays, and a culmination of deeper rules and more creative and dense playfield layouts being created by luminary new designers such as Keith Elwin (the Michael Jordan of competitive pinball). I'm not sure if sales have reached Addams Family level yet as I don't think Stern publishes units sold, but I'm sure they are within spitting distance. Additionally several new companies (Jersey Jack, Spooky, Pinball Brothers, etc) have emerged designing and manufacturing new machines, none of them the market power of Stern, but they are bringing a lot of interesting new ideas and super fun games in their own right.

There's never been a better time for pinball.

vgeek3• 5 years ago

Popularity has exploded the last what, 3-5 years? Prices on Pinside are kind of insane as of lately. How much can be attributed to deeper rulesets (plus the beautiful LCD screens and LEDs) vs the uptick in the barcades where pinball co-exists with the 16-bit gaming, providing more exposure?

Stern has been able to do what Gottleib could never do-- make a good table using 3P IP (Haunted House was neat). Do they have any first party IP tables, or only licensed? Williams had tons of great tables (obvious ones like Medieval Madness, High Speed/2, Monster Bash, Hurricane series as a modern throwback) that were of their own creation, but could also do good knockoffs (No Good Gophers, Attack from Mars) and 3P IP (Creature, TNG).

syntheweave• 5 years ago

Since the 80's all pinball manufacturers have sought licenses by default and used originals as a "B-theme" if the license falls through. This is the case because it's still a manufacturing business - it needs to be a functioning physical object first - while the theme is a marketing feature, one that needs quick draws for players and known quantities for operators. A license derisks both, so it's nearly obligatory for new games. But if you look at the virtual pinball space it's almost the opposite. While a handful of studios(Farsight, Zen, Magic Pixel) have done licensed reproduction simulations, over the years there have been far more attempts at original IP, since it's all software.

Even Stern has done the occasional original, e.g. Whoa Nellie, Striker Extreme. But it's very clear that they have a formula and don't deviate much from it - the experiments are left to competitors like Jersey Jack and Spooky. Pinball in the past decade has been defined by collector's market dynamics, a generation that, like with retro gaming, wants to buy for the home. So the new games are built more like home games than operator games - lighter builds with less serviceability, price discrimination features (different models with minor elements added or removed) and more of a focus on sheer quantity of elements - ramps, lights, toys - than one or two "centerpieces". It's only going to last as long as that collector's demographic does, after that pinball may go dormant again or find a new way of expressing itself.

vikingerik3• 5 years ago

Stern only does themes that are a licensed intellectual property, since around 2003. And even more specifically, they only do licenses that are a franchise rather than any specific individual movie, since that will become dated. (The one notable movie exception was Avatar, and original property exception was Whoa Nellie.)

Also, Williams' Attack From Mars wasn't a knockoff, it predated the Mars Attacks movie by a year, it was just coincidence that the two industries parodied the same thing around the same time.

jasondigitized• 5 years ago

Haunted House is one of my favorites. 3 floors of pinball fun. I was fortunate enough to be given a Medieval Madness machine. Love it.

vgeek3• 5 years ago

https://www.multimorphic.com/

I have yet to encounter one of these in the wild, but these look to combine a digital playfield with modular physical components. It is pricier than regular tables, too-- $15k for the base table and 3 modules. It does have new features like real time competitions and the whole electronic playfield.

dasil0032• 5 years ago

I've played a Lexy Lightspeed and it was definitely interesting, but had a lot of reliability issues, and ultimately I didn't think it was that fun—I play pinball for the physical nature of it, the digital stuff feels like an AR gimmick. That said, a really well-designed game could change my mind.

wintermutestwin• 5 years ago

Wasn't that the same idea of the Williams Pinball 2000 machines (Revenge from Mars and Star Wars Ep1)?

tinus_hn• 5 years ago

When sales declined quitting pinball was an obvious choice for Williams as they had the huge gambling machine market where they already were making much more money.

Stern made the pinball market work because it has gone extremely commercial, with licensed themes to attract casual players and layered game rules to attract advanced players.

That is the only way to survive in the pinball business, it’s a difficult, risky business with high upfront costs and short production runs to recoup the costs. You can only afford a few flops before you’re bust.

WalterBright• 5 years ago

Oh, I do like the electromechanical machines of the 70's. All the clanking and grinding and clunking and burned out lamps made it real.

dang• 5 years ago

Discussed at the time:

How Pinball Ate itself: The Economics of Pinball - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=947417 - Nov 2009 (27 comments)

buzzert• 5 years ago

All pinball machines offer a replay to a player who beats some specified score. Pre-1986, the replay score was hard wired into the game unless the operator manually re-programmed the software. High Speed changed all that. It was pre-loaded with an algorithm that adjusted the replay score according to the distribution of scores on the specified machine over a specific time interval.

If you’re ever at a pinball arcade and you hear a loud wooden CLONK sound, that’s the “replay knocker”. It’s literally a solenoid that drives a piston into the case of the machine, and it’s intention is to let the entire arcade know “this guy/gal is really good”. Very satisfying sound! And no equivalent in video games.

CWuestefeld• 5 years ago

And no equivalent in video games.

Actually, Q*bert has this but the opposite. In stand-up cabinets, when Qbert falls off the board, one of these knockers simulates the sound of him falling on the ground. So it's a signal of failure, not of epic goodness.

https://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=9182

tomcam• 5 years ago

50 years of casually playing and I had no idea. As soon as you described it I knew what you were talking about though.

StillBored• 5 years ago

This whole thing sounds like a case of chasing the wrong market killed it.

When I walk up to a pinball machine and put a buck in (or thereabout at my local pinball place) and the game is over in 15 seconds because I suck, I don't put another buck in. So the minimum skill level is too high to attract new players.

I'm pretty sure that they can make pinball incrementally more difficult simply by raising/lowering bumpers in critical places, but I only vaguely remember seeing that at some point in the past.

vikingerik3• 5 years ago

Those bumpers you refer to are the posts at the entrances to the outlanes, which are the channels at the far left and right away from the flippers, where you can lose a ball. Those posts are now almost universally adjustable, for a wider gap to drain more balls or narrow to keep them in play longer.

toast02• 5 years ago

There's a few games with a (computer controlled) block for the center drain too. But mostly, early drains have been addressed by kick-back and ball saver. I don't know exactly when ball-saver came around; my Bride of Pinbot (1991) doesn't have it, although it does light an extra ball for free on your last ball if you ran through your first several balls (defaults for three ball play, but configurable) too fast (configurable by the operator, default may be 60 seconds?), but my uncle's Indiana Jones (1993) had it (Indy: Don't touch anything) and the interwebs say The Addams family (1992) had it too, but I didn't play that enough to have the ball saver phrase stuck in my brain.

irony123• 5 years ago

Agree 100%. I am OK at pinball but it's depressing to have the balls drain in the first minute on a new game.

mansilladev• 5 years ago

Black Knight was also a machine that had a grand canyon of a gap between the flippers. It was sure to lighten your pocket of quarters faster than any other game in the arcade.

jareklupinski2• 5 years ago

Later designs would allow the threshold to rise quickly to combat the wizard-goes-to-the-cinema problem

wizard-goes-to-the-cinema problem?

slyall2• 5 years ago

"Later designs would allow the threshold to rise quickly to combat the wizard-goes-to-the-cinema problem. The WGTTC problem is where a machine has adjusted down to a low replay score because it is mostly played by novices. "

jareklupinski2• 5 years ago

ah ty, sry for some reason my brain didnt parse the lowercase, then acronym being the same thing :(

a strange name though, how does a wizard going to a cinema reflect novices playing a pinball game?

The Economics of Pinball (2009)

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