Downers Grove, IL
Quoted from inhomearcades:That situation was not different. Gameworks had league play as well. The problem is that location pins generally aren't good candidates for league play. Management in both places understand what league play is and meant, however when you have one of those stupid redemption games earn more in a week than all the pins in a month combined, they could care less. The pins were put in both locations as a courtesy, not money makers.
The pins they kept at gameworks are theirs, the others were property of stern. Gameworks wanted them gone, stern said okay. The fact is management doesn't like complaints about games and this is the end result.
You can continue to thumbs down my post about this, but in these two instances, I know from the horses mouth that player complaints are the reason they are no longer on the floor.
This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard! If games are on a location and require money to be played, it is people's understanding that the games should work properly. If there was a Big Buck Hunter game with faulty guns should the player who just wasted a dollar on a game just "suck it up" and accept that the game just raped his wallet of a dollar? No! the operator should maintain his equipment and if that's too much trouble then that operator has no business being in the game business.
One of the reasons you don't find many games on locations and you find so many in people's homes is because for DECADES the pinball business had a history of broken games on location. Lazy operators don't maintain the games (and they do require a lot of upkeep and repairs) and players got burned so many times that they simply stopped bothering to put money in pinball games. I can't tell you how many times I played pinball games on locations in my life and felt ripped off because I wasted money on a half broken game. The numbers dwindled and ops preferred video games where they just usually needed a bottle of windex and a paper towel as upkeep to the games and they made more money. It was an endless cycle that continues to this very day. I put pinball games in my home because I love pinball and I was sick of wasting money on broken games. For years I flat out refused to ever pay money to play a game on location because of years of being burned.
Telling people to keep their mouth shut is asinine. How are the ops going to know their games are not working right? Clearly most aren't checking the games themselves to make sure switches work and bulbs aren't burned out. If they don't know what's wrong they can't fix it. If they do know what's wrong and won't fix it then they deserve to have their games not earn money. The reason they aren't earning is likely because the damn thing doesn't work right! Those games likely earned better when they actually worked and the numbers dropped when people got sick of wasting their time and money on broken games and simply stopped coming.
I sometimes go to the Galloping Ghost arcade and play games. Every time I do and I find something wrong I go tell Doc, the owner, that his game isn't working right and you know what he does? He writes it down so he knows what he needs to fix! That is how it should be done everywhere. The games need to work in order to make people want to spend their money playing them.
If Gameworks can't handle the upkeep on their pinball games then they absolutely should get rid of them. Speak with your wallets and say screw them and go to some place like Logan Arcade that actually seems to care whether or not their games works. Their drink prices are probably better too and so are their game prices. Gameworks management should be fired because they clearly aren't fit to be managing an arcade if they don't want to know when their machines don't work and they can't be bothered to fix them.
