Lol the Thunderbirds reflection on the glass.

Imagine if we get something of Thunderbirds quality. Perhaps a scam would be preferred...

At this point that would be a home run!

Comedy gold. Where do I invest in your feature list?

I think you need to change your handle to 2LevelBumperAssemblyPete

If a random person shouting on a street corner claimed to offer a million dollars in a few months if you gave them a hundred dollars today, would you consider that newsworthy?

It's not. It becomes newsworthy when evidence is shown that the offer can be fulfilled. It should be ignored until their claims are proven.

Verbatim quote from their Facebook page:

we can't afford to get going without using a kickstarter. If it's not for you and a lot of others then I'm sorry but we can't please you. Anyone keen enough to stay with us will get great value and excitement.

Fortunately, Kickstarter projects have to be fully backed for the money to go to the creator, and there's no chance this company will successfully raise the absurd amount of money they'll request for Alien Assault pinball or whatever. My guess is they'll release a bunch of embarrassing sample artwork and mockups while the kickstarter is open, and after it fails, they'll announce that they're switching to a preorder model (if they don't start out with one). Then, the usual suspects will throw a few hundred thousand dollars at them, and they'll flounder around for a few months/years until closing up shop.

Any company like this that aspires to be a manufacturing company and needs a kickstarter at market rates to "get going" is dead as a doornail -- under capitalized and will never succeed.

It's akin to the restaurant you see open and close 3 months later. You don't make any money for a long time. if you don't have the capital to lose money and keep operating - you'll never get to the point of making money.

It costs money to actually develop your product
It costs money to stage production
It costs money to fuel production

You can not do that with simple pre-sales of your product. You just hope you start making enough money by your 2nd or 3rd product to stop burning money.. and hope to start gaining on your debts.

You CERTAINLY aren't going to do it with a very limited run product.

People with no business plan, no business sense, and not enough money to meet the table's opening bet. DOA.

This one got me broh! hahahaha

How many current pinball companies (that have actually released a game) started via Kickstarter?
And then once started, how many are running close to profitability?
I guarantee the number is very low

How to become a millionaire at manufacturing pinball machines?

Start with several million and work your way down.

he aspires to be the Spooky of Australia,
- difference is Spooky knew people and had friends in the industry, had a great deal on a starting property in their home town and worked on and understood pinball and was on the forum - actively talking to the people
- Ballarama is on Facebook only and all about getting page likes and not showing any of his pinball but calling themselves pinball manufacturers and already got a 5 star rating already ??? how ???

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They actually thought of the name Black Hole since that’s what the Kickstarter deposits are going into. However someone informed them that the name has already been done so they had to strike that from the announcement last minute.

I don’t think anyone has started via a Kickstarter that’s still in business.

However, for the EXTREMELY IMPORTANT stated fact that you lose money for a long time until you become profitable, we have several examples of fools who thought payday is the second games start rolling off the line!

Heighway.
Suncoast.
Hell even Jersey Jack was in the red for way longer than people think. WOZ was rocky the entire time! They lost money on every game they made. It’s been suggested perhaps that financial predicament has persisted

American and Spooky seem to be the only ones who understood bleeding money is the cost of doing business and to succeed you need to be commit and tough it out. They planned accordingly and survived long enough to make it to the 3rd and 4th game where the company starts to really solidify and funds/investors stabilize.

Capcom could have made it and they had some of the best machines ever made but Williams broken them with the endless lawsuits. And I think Python may have broken the spirits of the execs with his wild ideas, lol.

Haggis seems like they’re in the danger zone. I wish them well but making and shipping games does not mean you’re turning a profit. Sometimes the money runs out but companies keep making stuff until the bank padlocks the door.

Homepin, who really knows with that guy, he’s like the Charlie Sheen of pinball.

I feel like I’m missing another modern company, but it escapes me at the moment.

Dutch Pinball

Yes, thanks! Although, wasn’t Dutch more of a legal issue/contract dispute that stalled the whole process? They also have the BOP 2.0 kit behind them which seems more profitable than a full machine. I don’t keep up to date with them, or that fiasco, but personally I think TBL is incredible, hopefully they survive.

In regards to the point of losing money when starting, they’re HAVE to be in the red after everything as well. They’ve only got a kit and 1 game (sorta) under their belt. Hopefully their next release doesn’t have any snags and they can right the ship.

Disagreements over what ARA wanted for building the games vs what DP expected to pay, plus a whole bunch of other things leading into that and after that. I don't recall all the specifics off the top of my head since it's been a while, but it was somewhat of a mess.

Well, they seem to be slowly churning out TBLs. I see posts about folks getting brand new boxed games every so often. I'm not sure how far along they are with catching up with all the early achievers who are owed games and the more recent preorder buyers through cointaker.

I don't even know how to comment on this revelation... But considering they didn't know what decade AFM was built, I shouldn't even be surprised at this point. So, the company that's broadcasting to the world that they're innovating in pinball doesn't even know a well-known piece of pinball history. On the very slim chance they ever build anything, how could we trust that they are engineering their games properly when they clearly have made no effort to study how things have been done in the past?

Quite a few down here actually, hence the lack of domestic deposits from the beginning.

Ballarama will most likely play out in a similar manner.

Any new company in the pinball industry that takes money before ever showing or delivering a product doesn't understand the history of the industry or their intended market.

Starting off with some bad business decisions really bodes well. And honestly at this point, anyone that sends them money deserves the pain they receive in return.

Bump the kickstarter goal by $1.5k and they can learn all about it.

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If their machine needs a name, I'd like to suggest "Rebel Asteroid Zapgun Attack 2000". Or RAZA2 FOR short.

The issue here is fundamentally scale. You need scale to get cost down. You need scale to improve return on each unit sold. But scale requires bulk parts supplies which is all upfront money. And then you have to execute at scale rather than learn as you go. It is a conundrum isn’t it ? Any young company either has to have sufficient reserves to weather that period, or you start with lower volume and higher cost and sweat equity to make up the margin difference. I have never understood this approach by these companies. Build one and sell it for cost or below cost, then build two, then 5 and maybe you just cover your parts costs, and then 10 and you earn $100. You are still gonna lose money for a bit, but your upfront cost is way less, you don’t have to run these stupid kickstarter campaigns, and your early screwups and delays don’t become so costly. Sure you are still likely to fail. But issues like first to market don’t really matter here in pinball at all since nobody is going to produce your exact machine as a copy. All this putting $1-$5M pre-deposits in the bank does to start is set unrealistic expectations, make for disgruntled purchasers, and produce a bigger implosion if that is what is to come. Go big or go home is not a requirement and yet each of these early pin companies behaves as if it is.

Ballarama seems to have stopped responding after like the first page of this. Why do we even bother? I guess we're just bored and need entertainment! I can't wait to see them succeed and prove us all wrong! Not gonna happen but would be neat!

Well when one starts with such a bold “F you, pay me!” mentality towards their target customers, it raised red flags and doesn’t really bring on the warm fuzzies!

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I think the thread is staying alive to protect new people - so when new people come into the hobby they don't make the same mistakes some of us have with the likes of Heighway, SkitB, Jpop etc.

Hats off to any new company that wants to have a go but, but build one first, show it off - be dedicated. Not state in yesterdays Facebook that they have spent only $12k so far building the business ..... while they have people doing the design, the programming for free hoping to get a return.

Today they are so proud they hit 10000 followers = and I bet nearly all of them will watch the company fade away

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here is the enthusiasts page - 1 question and answer since Oct 2021 out of the 10000 followers

https://www.facebook.com/groups/ballaramapinballenthusiasts

yeah figured that - not doesn't give a sense of the real support

Yeah, sorry for the delay. Thank you for your interest! As we all know, developing feature lists is both time consuming and a $ drain. I'd like to keep developing it, and so I've partnered with The BlackHole Investment Group. You can directly invest in my feature list thru them. I hope to bring some exciting tweaks in the coming weeks to the list! It's been a real challenge (as any feature list is) to make important decisions.. I can't tell you the # of nights I've been up at night staring into the void thinking "1 potato flipper, 2 meat flippers or 2 potato flippers and 1 meat flipper???!" Of course you want to nail that list the first time around before you spill your guts to the world and publish anything.. but I feel like any changes coming to the list will be positively received publicly. In addition to what I've included, I plan to also publish important details such as the #'s and size's of screws that will be used and the colors of wire. I may even include the approximate weight (which will hold zero relevance and be a complete shot in the dark). I am excited to soon share these details... just as soon as I receive my dividend from BlackHole Investing so I can fund those hours of development.

Pinball wire coloring is long overdue for some innovation. Thank you for your brave service in using other people's money to develop a prototype.

I personally would love to know the amount of every screw type and don't forget to let us know the sizes of each nut so I can be sure to have the appropriate sized spanners & sockets ready

People are dying to know if the leg bolts are in metric or US customary

Their logo design is hot garbage. They really have no design sense whatsoever.

totally agree

It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.

They also did not try to shove every freaking idea they had into the first game they built. They started simple, learning to walk and then run.

There are so many hidden costs in manufacturing pinball and things always take much, much longer than you expect, which means you need far more money than you realize. The investment required is far greater than what a kickstarter can generate.

I'm curious to see what they come up with, but with all of the obvious red flags, I have a hard time believing we will ever see more than a prototype.

Is there something about pinball that makes this community especially ripe for being ripped off?

Lots of deep pocket collectors who are sometimes blinded by their dislike of existing manufacturers and/or unfamiliar with the amount of work that goes into designing and building a game. And there are speculators who hope to get a bargain on the next Big Bang Bar.

Good points. It was hard to believe one of that dr guys ended up in the Haggis thread, with a pre order.

I don't find that hard to believe. Haggis is incredibly more productive and viable than deeproot. They really don't compare.

Though I think it's totally valid to wonder how much more cash on hand they have and if they can survive till they're firmly out of the red.

Also some of those cheerleaders definitely seem like they're mostly interested in flipping the game. There's no reason to own more than one otherwise lol

totally agree rosh

I doubt we will see a proto-type as they intended doing a kickstarter without showing a pinball just select features

probably will be released April 1st and joke is on us.

jokes on them if they spend all this effort on getting ready for a kick starter... then don't fund.
That said; nothing i see indicates they are really spending effort.
All I see is "more please" hands cupped.

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'one of'? I think you'd find the overlap between all these deals to be a very large % of the buyers. I bet you could find a dozen people on this site that have been buyers in every one of the failed pin projects... or at least 90% of them.

Same patterns over and over and over.

For some they have the money to burn.. the same part is you see some stories of people who scrounged to get in on these deals.. blinded by their enthusiasm and then get burned.

Remember, a bunch of us believed in Gene Cunningham and forked over $2400 deposit for Big Bang Bar with just a promise...but 5 years later he delivered! (He was wealthy at the time, and actually lost $2000 on each machine he delivered, but he is in the history books!)

Yes, but Gene was building a game that was already designed, had the software written, had blueprints of the parts (?), and had all the circuit boards in stock
Balarama has a box of parts from Mirco's

A very small box.

rd

Pinball is easy!