I have had games on location since mid-March, basically 5 full months at this point. Started with just Fish Tales as a two-week experiment. It went very well so we kept adding more games. At this point, I have 6 pins (Metallica Pro, Congo, Baywatch, WWFRR, Fish Tales, and Prospector) and 1 arcade (NBA Jam TE 4 player). All pins are $.50 except Prospector is $.25.

I don't view it so much as a business as trying to share my hobby. The bar is owned by a close friend, and it is under a mile from my house. I don't know that I would honestly even bother trying to route things much further than that just because of gas prices, and the fact that I work two other jobs so having to go there to fix things could be very troublesome.

I had one coil wire come off and short out a 10-opto board badly which led to about $100 repair total, but otherwise have others have said they have held up better than I expected. I go every Sunday to do the collection, wipe down all games with novus, and play test all of them to make sure switches and lights are still working. It takes me about two hours at least. I wax them at least once a month, sometimes twice.

We split 60% to me 40% to location. The games have earned consistently, but haven't seen a huge increase by adding more games, instead, the earnings are about the same but now divided amongst the different games. We started up a novice league that ran for 6 weeks and we just had a finals tournament. Through that time I had 11 people play in league that had never played pinball before so I considered it a big success. The owners of the bar have fallen in love with it and actually just sold their home gym equipment to convert that room into a pinball room.

I definitely can't see making a living this way, but as far as getting a little cash back from the hobby, and helping to spread the joy of pinball I think that is totally possible.

So far They have brought in about $2400 over the 5 months. I've spent $2400 on two games that I bought specifically to add to the location. If I'm lucky after a year those games would maybe be paid for (Prospector and WWFRR). Also NBA Jam barely gets played, but that is a game I would keep at home anyway so the fact that it brings in $5 a week doesn't bother me much.

I had TMNT 4 player and Mortal Kombat II, neither really earned anything after the first week or two, but pinball kept steady so I sold those and added more pins.

My Location has a claw machine guy, a vending machine guy, and redemption arcade guy, and now me doing pins. None of us have had any issues with each other as we all have our own little specialty, but I'm sure it wouldn't hurt to discuss that with location owner as well as other operators. I've been offered the chance to take over the redemption arcade and convert it into more pin space and classic arcade games, but not sure I want to take that risk of investing that much time and money yet as several of us have stated not a ton of money to be had, but growing the hobby is really cool.