Nobody in Dallas gives a crap...and why would we? Who the hell wants to pay a buck a game? It's not a hard choice to decide between dollar games, or 10 buck entry fees where I can play for hours, and especially in the case of Cidercade, get some excellent tasty beverages and Killer Queen games in!?

I sold my restored Xenon to Free Play. /shrug

And to the guy asking about how does Nickelrama make money? The entire rest of the building is a kiddie casino... almost entirely ticket games. Pinball is subsidized by the owner, because he likes pinball. That's it, AFAIK.

Funny....we had two Trons on location for months. I bought Tron twice for my house. Same deal with Metallica...3 on location locally and I still bought the thing, because paying money out to other places that I won't recover any of it seemed dumb. =\

I guess that's kind of the point. I don't want to go to 50 different places to play pinball, and I damn sure will not pay a buck a game for any reason other than to decide if I'm interested in buying a game...not with the way games are designed these days. Man, I'd be super pissed paying a buck to play say.... a fast/tilty Aerosmith or TWD, where the average game time is probably under 5 minutes.

I'd love to find out but I don't have the capital to invest to even try. I can tell you that from my experience, any time I'm at Nickelrama OR a local Cinemark, at any given time when you discard collectors/known tournament players, those machines are at BEST 50% occupied. This is probably going to get me crapped on for saying it, but frankly, I wonder if any part of it has to do with demographics. We have a *vast* community of non-english speakers, both hispanic and asian, in parts of Dallas. I don't know about hispanic areas like Mexico or whatnot, but pinball was never all that big in Korea or Vietnam AFAIK, and those both make up large parts of the Asian communities here.

I'd personally be a lot more open to an occasional dollar-priced game if most places would follow this logic. I think I'd have a heart attack seeing an EM on route and would probably spend all my money on that though, to be honest.

I meant in Dallas...you know...somewhere I can actually reasonably go without a 7 hour round trip drive... CJ is awesome, but I'm not driving all that way just to burn some quarters...

*Edit* And the first person that suggests Pinballz gets punched in the face. Fair warning.

Cidercade is like 6 or buck drinks...but it's locally produced cider, not some weak low-ABV garbage like bud light...you can't even buy normal beer at Cidercade. Prices at Free Play are reasonable, but a stretch from *good* and not *great*.

I don't care what the prices of alcohol are...I don't drink at those places. I think you're dismissing the fact that all these places have a "cover charge" just to get in the door. When the entry fee is as much as 10 bucks, that's quite a lot of pinball to make up for the initial fee assuming 50 cent games. If I buy alcohol, it's just because I wanted something specific, not because ERMAGERD ALCOHOL I MUST HAVE IT BUT I CAN'T GO ANYWHERE ELSE.

Yeah, I prefer to know what I'm paying up front. Especially when there's EM, Early solid state, or brand new Sterns in play... if I had to pay a buck a play for Ghostbusters, I only would've ever played a few games. But at 20 cents, I'll play it way more than theoretical number of games I would've played x 5, or flat fee, I just play until I drop.

I don't necessarily disagree with this at all...it's just that in my locale, THANKFULLY, we don't have to make this judgement call. =|