$20 for 4 hours of pinball fun, i think it's a well spend $20!

75 cents seems to be the norm now, or a $1. There's a bar in chicago called brixies that has MM, Tron LE, and cactus canyon, all are $1 (but at least they're top rated games). I really don't mind paying that for a machine I know is well taken care of.

Thats why I love the places that have a flat rate to enter and then all are set to free play.

I charge 1$15C per game

Gouging.

.75 is garbage for older games, total bogus. They better have 0 tilt and lanes closed.

I know from experience 50¢ play wasn't making it. If you want to have a place with pins to play, it is going to cost more.

First 50¢ pin was Black Knight in 1981. ( Would have needed to go to 75¢ in 1991 to have the same buying power )

Or don't patronize the place. And eventually the pins will go away. Everything else makes more money than pins anyway.

LTG

You will cry if you come to Aus as alot of the older 90's games are $1 per game - or 3 games for $2. As for the recent Sterns they are $2 for a game for 5 balls and if you put $5 in a note taker - 3 games .

You guys are lucky and we only tend to have 1 or 2 pinballs in a few pubs here as there are hardly any arcades left.

I must be crazy, all my games are a quarter.

1up in Denver is 50c for all games, even mm and the new sterns. It's nice.

lol well dont come to Australia they are $2 a game here... Justified since games were $1 a game 20 years ago.....

Why complain? You should be happy you went to Pinballz!!!

I refuse to pay that much to play on principle alone. I love to play pinball, but it's rare that I'll pay 75c to play. 50c, yes... but I better get 3 games for my dollar.

Guess he felt he wouldn't make it on 50 cents. Despite the increase, just gotta support your local arcade. Folks in Austin are real lucky to have such a place--that place is amazing: over 140 pins, no dupes...that's more than the PHOF & most shows!

We've only got one place in Houston and unfortunately, it's a retail store (Joystix) with a lot of pins (gotta be at least 50-60 in there), but it's only open as an arcade two Friday nights a month from 9 pm to 2 am and just caters to the Downtown Houston party scene (guy owns the bar next-door with no wall in between).

Only wish it was a regular arcade open daily for 75 cents a play (as I don't get out during those times).

Thanks for mentioning this, I was able to get in there tonight and now both outlanes are in the middle position.

As for the pricing, not my call, I'm not the person to expound on the business model or the economics of pinball machines and arcades. I do wanna list the prices though it's not quite as bad as you make it sound.

Two tokens for early SS games (Xenon, F-14, Gorgar, D&D, Flash, Black Hole, Haunted House, Blackout, etc.) and our 3 EM machines.

Three tokens for DMD games and complex SS games (Funhouse, Banzai Run, SoF, EATPM, BoP, etc).

Four tokens for these six: LoTR, MM, AFM, CV, MB and TAF. Replays are pretty reasonable on these: 30mil for LotR, 40mil for MM, if you know the machine you should be able to pop em on a good day

Isn't that the same place that had a Gottlieb Genie for sale for $7000?

Wasn't that Black Hole that was the first 50 cent machine?

Most of the modern Sterns in arcades and bars here in the UK are £1 a game or £2 for three.

That works out at the current exchange rate as $1.50 a single game or $1 each for three games.

Most pins around here are $.50 play or 5 plays for $2. If they were $.75, I'd hope thye'd at least give you a 3 for $2 option.

You can always buy those pins if you don't want to pay what they are asking to play.

Pins cost a lot to maintain for an op, wear and tear, vandalism considerations also make it worth a dollar a play. They also cost more than vids. As soon as the pins don't cash flow, ops will stop offering them. Not to mention you can win free games on vids either, and they are .75 to $1

Pinball is still a bargain

I think it sucks they have no buy in credit, 3 x 4 games etc. Some of their games have problems like, the bouncing weak right flipper on flash that's been broke for 4-5 months, handful of games not leveled especially TAF, to tight tilts on some games and it doesn't seem to get fixed. They have 120+ pinball machines though so I understand but it doesn't help when the price of a game with issues increases. At least I can take out my frustrations on their T3, tilt is non existent

all the game on location near me are still 50 cents a game. mostly sterns but a few b/w are still out there. only 1 a list adams family. and it rarely works.

i thought you were talking about this;

"nobody puts baby in the corner" lmao

Dirty-Dancing-movie-03.jpg

lol regarding the thread, luckily where i live i don't have any pinball machines to play (except mine) so my coin money goes into my 'replacement parts or led' jar.

Not surprising, since everything is more expensive over there than it is here. What is the average price of a movie ticket these days?

All modern Sterns are $1 around here in OH.

Older TOM, AFM and the like are .50

Wow I got one on the floor guess I better go mark it up! Genie is a really old fun wide body though but not 7k! or even 3k or even 2k!

I find it funny that many of us lament not being able to find pins nearby, or not having access to decent titles on location, but when an op raises the prices in order to remain profitable and still be able to keep these games on route, we complain.

Count yourself lucky. I wish I had more than 2-3 games within a 10 mile radius to play... and I would be happy to pay $0.75-$1.00 if it meant I could play any of those titles in the wild.

No, came set from the factory 9 months before Black Hole. I operated both of them.
LTG

Ain't that the truth.

LTG

I wish I had those games to play for $1 a game, I would be all over it. Would you let any stranger play your $7000 to $10000 game for 50 cents? I didn't think so. Some people have no idea how good they have it.

Dollar mechs are THE best way I've seen to get people spending more and not thinking about the price so much, or used to dollars as opposed to quarters. Also avoids having to deal with so many quarters.

$1/game sounds reasonable to me for well-maintained games, so long as the more serious players have a nice volume option. Maybe 7/$5? That's about 71 cents per game.

I guess we can't expect inflation to bypass pinball. The bread the operator has to buy for his family
sure is affected by it.

I'll heat up a bottle for ya.............Seems like alot of places are switching to the "swipe cards" now instead of tokens, etc. We pay $8.00 for 1 hour of play at the local goofy golf place. I swipe a few times in AFM and MM and give the card to the kids. Never really pay attention to the price of a game, happy to play some A titles on location :-)Amazingly the pins are in good shape 90% of the time. Total pins are 15 there. The place is called SunSplash in Mesa, AZ.

I love that place 85Vett! $20 for 4 hours is great, I still have a bunch of tokens in my truck to use when I head back up there.......well worth in my opinion, they keep all the machines in good shape..

I don't have a super beef with new sterns being $1, because I'm not a teenager and $1 isn't a lot to me. Then again, whether $1 is a lot for a teenager these days, I have no idea.

Owners have to get their monies, but also the games have to be accesible enough to grow interest for new players. If you're charging $1, and you have the game pitched up super fast, gates open, just trying to get the quickest cash flow, you may actually being working against yourself. Are you losing casual players, and if so is that money being made up by pinheads? I have no idea, just something I was thinking about when playing TF today. Tron next to me in the hour i was playing 2 people came up, played a game for under a minute, and left. Would this have happened if it were 50 cents, 75, 3 games for $2? Maybe so. I'm not an operator so i wouldn't know.

Average price at the movies is about $15 for an adult.... small fortune for a family including raiding the snack bar.

Be happy you have a local arcade that has pins. I still find that playing them in the wild is a hell of a lot cheaper than buying them.

I was so happy to find 6 - 7 nice, well-maintained machines at Bene's pizza when we were back in Omaha I was giddily throwing 20's in the change machine. I probably gave the niece and nephews 15 bucks in quarters each just trying to show them how fun pinball can be.

I really appreciated that place, being starved for pins on location in Atlanta...

All our pins in Walla Walla, WA are set at $1 for 3 credits. Even BBH , LOTR , BDK , and SM

Hehe, I remember that place from playing Oregon Trail in grade school.

Exactly.

This whining is actually pretty unbelievable if not pathetic.

I love pinballz. While i would love all machines to be a dime I fully understand the pricing.

Im super lucky to have them near and everyone there is super friendly and helpful.

85Vett..... you got a chance to look at that CF yet?

When I was a kid, a quarter was a lot to us! I used to recycle cans to get money to play video games. If two places had the same game, but it was 50 cents at the closer place, it wasn't unusual for us to walk up to a couple miles to the other place just to "double" the number of games we could play.

If I could scrape together 50 cents, I would go to the grocery store to play Spy Hunter, Galaga or Moon Patrol. I could play for at least a half hour on those games.

On other games I wasn't as good at, I needed at least a buck to make it worth the trip.

Ha. People complaining about the prices of things these days isn't really pathetic or unusual.
I don't know about people who live in places that feel "lucky just to have pinballs around them," but I've had them around me my whole life, it's my American/Michigan birthright!

We did in the early 1990's and saw the industry self destruct.

LTG