Really going to depend on the location traffic. I'd say if you had 1 pin in a brew pub, you might make $40 a month the first month. Split that with the location you made $20. By the end of the year you might make $10 a month after the split.

Figure you're going to be replacing coil stops, flipper buttons, balls, cleaning, etc. So figure parts and time. Then a ball gets stuck, someone put a Canadian quarter through and jammed up the coin mechs. So now the game has been off for 2 weeks. You just made $5 that month.

If you average even $25/mo after the split its going to take 200 months or 16.5 years to pay off the game.

Good luck.

I run 10 games at 2 locations. 1 location with 4 of my games and 8 of someone elses. This location does extremely well. It's a barcade with beer, food, kids area, darts and 2 pinball leagues.

The other with 6 is at a movie theater and it doesn't do as well. No food, no beer, no league, etc. I've had months where CV made $8 the entire month. These are on $0.75 per game. The EM on $0.25 a game does almost as well as the DMD games.

Now if you only have 1 game, it's going to get boring real fast and you won't keep any regular players. Just casual passerbys. I'm thinking $40 per month is generous. It's going to decline over time. I have to continually rotate games around. Some 6 months others can go a year.

That was the worst month I used as an example. Kids in school, parents back to work less traffic. Nice summer days, kids out of school and everyone gone on vacation. Middle of winter, bad storms nobody heading out. Sometimes I can't figure it out. One month $8 the next $55. ACDC up, CV down it's weird.

I don't worry too much about it as it's still making me money and I don't have room for them at home anyways.