I value location play as a way to try games out. I'll drive as much as 2h one way to do so. What I do really like.. I will ultimately add for my private collection. I make my collection available to any local that asks, time permitting for both of us.

Exactly. I do the same. I make 0 money doing it and I actually prefer it that way.

some good Ops will look at notes on pinballmap and update when they fix - we are lucky to have some around here that are excellent.

have we met before? Would love to play your games

Unlike when pinball was in it's prime, bad conditions games on location are great because there is a better chance the op will sell it so a home collector can take it home and give it the TLC it deserves! Your millage may vary...

Also, we have Phoenix games here in Concord with some fantastic playing pins for everyone to enjoy! Best of both worlds!

Rob Bell
Robsgameroom.com

play a ton on location. we got great places to play in the Cleveland area.

I'm usually out 2 times a week playing

DUP

DUP - Can I delete a dup post?

Location play is like sex. There's good sex and bad sex, and I won't pay for bad sex.

I've had some great location experiences at Pizza Depot (Bay Area), Lyons Classic Pinball and BumperNets.
I've had just as many bad location experiences.

Eric, check out the GA licensing rules that make it expensive to operate a pin. If you put your game out on location without a sticker you run the risk of having it confiscated by the state of GA.

The only way I'd put a game on location is if it's within 2 miles of my house, monitored constantly, and doesn't cost me anything. I would set it on free play to avoid the archaic licensing fees.

I think I honestly care more about location play more than private game rooms. I love the atmosphere and nostalgia of playing on route. I'm not into all the bling and mods that private owners put on their games, I just want a game that looks good and plays right. We have a couple great ops locally here that buy the new games and keep them maintained. They run leagues, tournaments and do special events to get people interested and playing pinball. I have games in my basement, but I find myself more often than not, getting in the car and driving to a location near me to play instead of just going downstairs. We are lucky to have the pinball support we do in the Twin Cities.

Actually played a POTC on location tonight and game was In good shape. Everything worked and gameplay was solid, which is a rarity around here these days.

I live I a small town and have about 9 games out in 5 different locations. They don't make a lot of money but they pay for maintenance and a little extra to pay for new machines.

I think it would be cool if anybody with more than a few games or a bunch of gams put out just 1 or two in locations near them.

If they don't make money then you can just take them back home, if they do then that means somebody is glad you put it on location. It's too bad most machines are in private locations. I want as many people as possible to enjoy pinball.

genex, we haven't met. I don't do tournaments or league. Most of my pinball social interaction is at the museum; or when others come over. Speaking of: You're welcome to schlep down to Santa Clara and play my games! PM to coordinate.

I have a sign up with the FB page for my games. I mostly get comments for tweaks from friends, but have only had things out for a month, so still getting the word spread.

I suggest putting your phone number right on the price card and highlighting to text for any problems. Works great and you get info quickly from players.

I love the look on someones face when they text and I show up 5min later to work on the game while they are playing something else. The smile is priceless!

If more Ops were like you, location play might still be relevant.

thanks! I am not really an operator in my mind.

Moreso just a colelctor that has realized sharing good pinball with people is SUPER fun!

My 200 plays on WOZ agrees with this. It really helped me fall in love with pinball. Drive up, eat lunch next door, come over and say hi to prada and play some WOZ and a few other pins.

I considered this at one point, but I worry they would get vandalized.

Going to play GOT on location tonight and at another location on Nov 1st. So glad we have a decent location scene here in Cincinnati and northern KY.

Going on 5 years at my location ... not a single dent in the pins. May just be lucky? Or just the right location.

I don't get out much and therefore don't get to play many machines on location.

BUT, thanks to the Pinfinder I found Destination Dogs which is within walking distance of my office in New Brunswick NJ that has a small gameroom featuring a Pin. Been going once a week for a fancy hot dog lunch and a few games on their Last Action Hero.

The replay is set pretty low so I've won some free games, and I've matched a couple times as well, so only spent a couple bucks but have played a bunch. There are some SDTM drops and the right drain is pretty greedy, but the ball save works and all else plays pretty good.

Also just moved to a new house and there was a nearby restaurant with a couple pins but it closed down immediately after we moved in so never got to try them out.

No. Pretty much never bother. Can rarely hear the games and sound is very important to me. The ones at my house play so much better and are so much cleaner.

Find the right location and no real issues. We are going on 20ish month and no real issues. A few bent pingulps and a few slammed plunger springs but for the most part I think the location is the big thing to look for. Also helps if the pins are in direct view of bar staff as a deterant.

I am sure it will happen at somepoint but then again that is part of the deal.

I like and support location play, but it's a bit of a red herring, particularly if you are concerned with hooking a new generation of players. kids and young adults do not drop coins into game machines, be they pinball or video games or otherwise. everyone now has a nigh-infinite free arcade in their pocket. profitable, widespread casual location play is dead and it's not coming back. most people simply aren't going to pay money (assuming they are even carrying cash) when they can just whip out their phone instead.

yes, kids will pump tokens into redemption games and claw games but that's another red herring -- those are machines that tap into the gambling mechanism in the brain, not the gaming mechanism. Pinball is fundamentally a game, not a prize lottery like redemption / claw games. shoehorning ticket dispensers (even with JJP's well-intentioned custom code) is really a round peg in a square hole and it's not going to change the fundamental difference in appeal between pinball and lottery/gambling games.

in my opinion, the lone viable long-term future of pinball is *structured* location gaming in the form of leagues and tournaments and other ongoing contests. barcades are cool, but the pins there are not going to grab or hold a clientele without some kind of structure around the gaming to make it seem to matter a bit more. leagues and tournaments do this very well. but there are other opportunities, too: maybe even something as simple as prominently posting high scores on games and awarding prizes for weekly or monthly grand champions. generally anything along the lines of adding goals and continuity beyond what the games themselves intrinsically offer. Look, we here on Pinside all love pinball for its own sake, but those additional hooks are necessary if a broader audience is sought. and those hooks would be a lot of fun for us hardcore fans as well.

Totally agree. Unfortunately, both barcades in town only have 4 games each. I am in the process of trying to start a monthly deal. Also, those new sterns are able to have monthly high score contests, so hopefully I can get these locations wise to stuff like that to get more new games in their pinball area that will catch people's eyes better.

I also agree. Leagues and tournaments are the best bet to keep location play alive.

Yeah I mean look at bowling alleys. If they didn't have leagues, they would all be dead by now.

in our experience. Good, clean, well playing games are the key. You have to have a variety of games and make them approachable to new people while still catering to your hardcore players.

Reality is that the more games you have and the more casual events you run, the more people you will see.

I know many think the only safety net is to run tournaments but I can tell you 100% that the people dropping coins come from ALL walks and the majority of our coin drop comes from casual players or regulars that never play in tournaments.

You would be surprised what you will find is the reality after putting games out. Aside from lots of fun it is eye-opening.

Again, it is very unlikely you will ever make enough money to make it all worthwhile if you are looking at is as a business, but if you make a good spot with 4 games at minimum (hopefully room to grow) and if you are in a decent sized town, pinball on location is a very viable thing to do to pay for itself (maintainence, parts, and EVENTUALLY some cheap titles) and have fun.

I actually get quite a few kids playing on mine that are on location. Parents will show littlelies in some cases and there are som boys that come around and play after school.

This is the key... the head to head competitions coupled with social aspects of gaming is what is strong today. WoW, Halo, and Call of Duty's of the world are hugely popular because people can compete both together and with each other, socializing the entire time. Playing "solitaire" on a phone (the game or otherwise) is very popular but it doesn't hook people the same way a competitive online ecosystem does.

Also I agree a location needs to have 4+ pins, particularly for competitions. If a bar or restaurant has 1 or 2 pins it's not all that enticing as you have to (a) be hungry / want alcohol and (b) want to play their 1 or 2 games, (c) if they are in good condition. In other words a lot of things have to line up to make it worth while, and not feel awkward about it. On the other hand a location with 10 pins means the pins alone are reason enough to show up, and increases the odds that someone else is there to socialize with on pinball.

Some enterprising manufacturer should put a mini claw game in the backbox, activated by points or game achievements. Once the goal is achieved, give the player the option of an extra ball, free game or a chance at the claw. Or some other randomized "game within a game" that will provide redemption or prize of some kind.

I just got my first pin, and realized how true this is. I have never played pinball in a quiet environment until now, and was surprised at all the audio going on in my Fire!

I'm still an active location player, as I only have room for a few pins. Hoping Silverball Saloon opens soon as it is 5 mins from me - quiet a few location play options in Seattle now.

once you start offering real-life prizes, the brain automatically starts to figure out the most efficient way to maximize that reward, and deems other avenues an inefficient waste of time. so what would happen is they will just dump their dollar into the straight-up claw game sitting next to your pin/claw hybrid. it's the same reason kids run around chuck e cheese looking not for the longest or most fun game, but rather the opposite -- the game that most quickly dispenses the most tickets. it's an unfortunate and inevitable quirk of human nature.

This is where Stern confuses me. Are there really enough of us who buy HUO and just swap around that they haven't bothered making more impactful present times improvements such as hooking games into a credit card or mobile payment? Does this happen and I don't know it? When Eric and I went to play that TWD we had to get coin change from the bar. Why is that the case- why not some more up to date way to pay? Why aren't machines "connected" to Internet and receiving OTA updates and world wide score boards, etc etc. I just assume it's because Stern and whoever have no motivation because they're doing well enough as it is- combined with fact that the tech/ R&D is probably simply too expensive at such "low" volumes.

This is so true. If the ops here relied on the hardcore players for their coin drop, they would all be broke. It's the kids dropping dollars into TWD and lasting 30 seconds that pays. I can play all night on a couple dollars on location here and that isn't going to pay the bills. The same thing for tops tournaments and leagues here. They are great ideas, but with few exceptions, you can count on one hand the number of people who are going to win a tops tournament or league locally and most everyone knows it. The casual people aren't going to sign up and/or pay to almost certainly get their ass kicked in events like that.

Stern is sort of a "we do what's proven to work" kind of entity. and considering they were pretty much the only surviving pinball manufacturer, it's hard to argue with that strategy. certainly they will adopt a technology once it's proven -- see LEDs for example, and i imagine someday they will finally release a game with an LCD screen, but they have let others pioneer those horizons. they will adopt them only when they must.

having said that, i agree with you that Pinball is way behind its potential right now from a tech standpoint, and that is absolutely the result of a lack of competition over the last 15 years. hopefully JJP can stabilize, Heighway can get a foothold, and really get some good old fashioned market-driven one-upmanship rolling in the pinball industry!

There are Tons of options for operators to put advanced payment systems on their games. The coin box podcast mentions these mechs they put on their games that allow electronic payments and also allow the ops to put service credits on games remotely if need be. Pretty badass.

pretty sure they are beta testers for that particular system and it is not available yet?

if it is now available it was a crazy $50 per machine set up plu 4-5% for each transaction! no thanks! way too tough to make ends meet on location pinball to begin with. Sure as heck can't afford yet another % taken away. Cool idea but not feasible given the cost

Yeah depends on the situation and whether is good for your situation or not. Pretty sure your fees % is way off, but I agree, more cost than other alternatives. Bill acceptors are key too. Oh and change machines never hurt anybody. Take up about 1 square foot of space.

Oh and what about those credit card swipers that are on all the vending machines now a days? Big time fees on those? Id pay 2% per swipe for something like that. No risk of games being broken into.

Would that make Pinball Arcade the equivalent of masturbation?

Agree completely. There are some regular pinheads that I know use my games but I reckon at least a third comes from kids that are there with parents waiting for a pizza that start dropping coins in. I am going to put my WOZ in and suspect that should draw kids in like moths to a flame and there are some pinheads keen for it too. This will be the only WOZ on location in New Zealand!

Losing a percent will kill you. My deal is I take everything. The pub uses it as a draw and it certainly sells drinks and food for them. Last weekend a guy I know went there specifically for pinball and put $12 into my games but bought two beers that would have cost 10-12 each depending on what he got so the pub does just fine out of it. No change machine either so people have to walk up to the bar and then they may as well buy a drink. Good for encouraging parents too. The beer/pizza thing is pretty universal and the kids muck around with the pins while they are waiting so the parents get a break.

So if you didn't get 100% of the coin drop in your games, it wouldn't be worth it for you to have games on location? Dang. I won't do it until i can afford to make no money doing it. Maybe help replace rings and small parts, but that's it.

Nothing eliminates that.

LTG : )

I wish 100%.

50/50 is the norm in this world and unfortunately it is hard to convince a bar that they should give up more than their 50% in order to get great working games.

So often they will be blindly happy following the old way of a 50/50 with one of the other local ops. For them that means dirty broken games and no coin drop or bar sales. If there was only a way to help them see the long term partnership and benefits of a 100%

If I did a 50% split they would still be profitable but I would not bother with it. Making decent money on them makes it worth my while to keep them in very good shape but that means my time and parts which costs. Last weekend I cleaned them up and they were perfect. One hour after getting home I had a stuck ball call and then a switch went out (broken wire) on another. It goes back to people playing anyways as I can use the money to buy new games.

Only if you let it be the norm!

I pulled my earners (3) and left them with 2 so/so games prior to our contract negotiations. The manager had to field a ton of 'What happened to Metallica?' , 'Where are all the good pins?' from a bunch of customers who usually would stay and drink and eat food (they left instead). The league went to private members homes for 2 months in a row.

I do social media, keep the games in tip top shape, respond to trouble calls, etc.

Come negotiations, I wanted 100%. She realized that the pins are the draw to get people to drink and eat. We settled at 80/20.

If they would have held at 50/50, I would have been done as an OP ... at that location