pinball news article report on brand new barcade/café that opened in Birmingham U.K last year. There are seven machines mainly Stern including GOT and Kiss. They report the Hobbit will join the line-up as soon as they ship. So we should have an interesting contest.

I have a feeling that £1 a play / £2 for 3 is too much for some locations especially in cases where the bar has just the one machine and pinball is unlikely to be the main attraction for most casual players. And more people will have multiple games and hopefully spend more on drinks etc. One pub I know charges 50p /£1 for 3 and their machine/s get played by regular customers that I strongly suspect were not already into pinball.

Yes and to play say 4 machines at a value price ( £2 x 4 ) would be more than the price of coffee/beer and some food. There is a café in Leicester that has several nice machines on freeplay. Surely the answer is somewhere between for places that are largely daytime venues. I think it's different for the Brewdog craft beer chain ( pinball news report upcoming ) Most of their beers cost around £5 a pint so it's not a down market clientele.

Thanks for the updates. It seemed a bit strange to go freeplay and have the machines in the same room as non-playing customers. The Chiswick café was advised to place the machines downstairs and of course they are not free so hopefully this is a success.

smokedog , how much do players pay for games on league nights ?

Thanks Smokedog. I found Tron and ac/dc to be drain monsters on location. The former was in a York city centre pub and when it left I believe it was enough to put them off getting another pinball.

I thought WOZ had done well on location ( according to Jack ! ) at least in terms of money in the box. Clearly he was correct to go with that title but on location it is almost certainly not ideal and maybe the LCD and attention grabbing features rescue it. The hobbit should be more popular with geeks/drinkers.