Good points ...
Extreme case, but what's the liability without UL listing if your game catches fire and burns down someone's house?
Hope you have a large umbrella policy - Business insurance, one of the many overhead costs that need to be included in the cost of a product.

It's definitely a good idea to go down that route. The current cost of UL testing a standard high voltage (>24VAC) PCBA is around 15-20k with around 12 months of lead time before your product even gets tested at Northbrook. If you did get your boards and coils tested you would also need to tweak your BOM so the key components (coil wire, wiring looms, ps conponents, etc) are UL recognized/listed. So thats a higher BOM, higher upfront costs from testing and you would be paying for yearly inspections of your manufacturing site. You'd need to sell a shitload of machines before you would break even on that kind of cost.

You could also go ETL instead of UL, but the cost and time savings still wouldn't beat just getting insurance.

Facts

Game looks cool and looks fun to shoot, wasn't working when I came by. OP is a nice guy, and it's slightly bigger than a zizzle

Random thoughts:

1. I love this is out of the box thinking.
2. The price point is fantastic and will generate sales.
3. The initiative to make all your own mechs is really neat.
4. I trust you have calculated your price in view of your costs.
5. When finished I would buy one for my arcade.

HOWEVER:

6. Your launch as indicated by the product video is too early. It’s an definitely cool but unrefined prototype. You are at least a year out from any shipping product.
7. The deposit before it’s finished, no matter how small, no matter what you say about refundability is worrisome given it follows a well worn definitely NOT outside the box playbook and is a non starter for me.
8. Your price worries me and makes me question whether ALL costs of being a business have been fully considered beyond BOM.

I would love to be proven wrong on 6-8. Count me in once the early adopters have given their thumbs up and units are ready and assembled to be shipped.

For the record I want him to succeed. I want him to deliver a fully fleshed out working pinball machine for 2K. I want him to add pressure to the established companies by adding competition in order to bring down prices. I want him to succeed so there is a path for other creators and dreamers to take the next step.

I referenced the Trailer Trash thread as an example for him to take a look at all the questions that people are going to ask. His caviler demeanor when asked a few questions has a similar feel to the creator in that thread. He has looked into some of the history associated with some infamous startups, but not sure he has seen how his casual mention of IP is very similar to Predator, or how Spooky had to kill themselves to make and sell 150 AMHs. Another thing to think about is how zizzle and stern home games have not been all that well received here despite their price point (Jurassic park home edition seems to be the exception).

Op sorry I called your prototype crude, but there are many rough edges on it in terms of a finished design. One thing I would say you did well is to include things that are cheap but add perceived value, like your subways and ramps as well as you animated sculpts. One place to look at that could help improve your gameplay could be to add more posts and rubber to keep things from just bouncing off the playfield perimeter rails. Probably could look into rubber instead of some of the long straight wire guides too. Also the general guidance rom many of the designers is that they say you have to make sure the playfield is fun to shoot without your toys and novelties.

Good luck with the rest of the launch and at Freeplay.

I guess as long as you are carrying product liability insurance

Nice work!

As long as you are using UL approved components, then things should be fine.

UL certification is not required by any laws in the US, but some buildings, companies, etc will not work with a product without it having UL approval for insurance purposes. But no you are not required to get your product UL certified in the US.

Taxes, Labor, Materials and rainy day? Think there was a big bang episode that shows the pitfalls of boutique manufacturing.

To have a healthy business you gotta factor in if it's worth your time..

I learned that lesson much too late in my first business endeavors.

Ended up paying Uncle Sam back taxes and cheating myself out of $ in the end.
I could of charged X dollars an hour comfortably but undersold my hourly. It eventually
paid dividends but only after learning how to be competitive in business without underselling
hourly wages.

You can't get back time so don't undersell yourself.

Not wanting to go all "um, akshually" here, but technically this is incorrect. There is more than one state that requires UL/ETL/CSA approval in order to have equipment "hardwired" into its install location. The most notable example is Washington. Once again, if you are bringing an electrical product to market I recommend consulting someone who is an expert in UL. When you submit a "request for quote" with UL you will have the opportunity to talk this over with UL representatives. You have to do your due diligence to make sure your product is legal in the area you're selling it. In this case, UL approval should not be required. But OP needs to figure out what will benefit him more in the long run - regulatory approval that isn't necessarily needed or insurance coverage in case something goes wrong.

IMO any savvy business owner will have liability insurance whether they think they need it or not. It's up to OP to figure out if sales will outweigh the high costs of regulatory approval.

OMG, can we put ths UL talk to bed. I want to see pinball.

Unfortunately this is required discussion for almost every commercial product launch. You said it best on page 2, "This is a discussion form after all"

It is, but sometimes:

Screen Shot 2022-11-22 at 11.01.40 PM (resized).png

UL is optional, but can cost some sales to businesses that require it for insurance or other reasons.

FCC and CE that’s a different story. And with FCC you also have to decide on class A or class B.

Cool. Very cool. Regarding the price fairness, that is really commendable. I believe CGC had an expressed effort to keep NIB machine prices down, but those machines are still scalped in the aftermarket. I wonder if the same happens here, even with the noble attempt at price control.

All pretty cool stuff my man, thanks for posting the video!

My view is that once someone wants to make an offering as a company for money, questions like these become a natural part of the evaluation process.

Having said that, I think it's really cool he is trying all of this. The questions I ask are intended to help him think through the engineering process. A way to help share my own experience and knowledge without being too forward.

Looking forward to seeing the game at sfge if you'll have it there this year!

"The Golden Butthole"

Hadn't heard that before, but I'm definitely using it now

Very cool!

This is great stuff!

I think your plan to show up to something like and SFGE with done games is pretty solid. I've always thought if someone arrived at a show and had a box truck with 10-20 "new to the market" games in it to sell, they'd be easy sales.

Hey Adam,

Thanks for the video covering all the questions, that was great! Where can we get more Metal shred videos of you tho?? haha, I enjoyed that - looked like some mad alternate picking? - I've played music as a hobby for a long time as well but never got in the practice to learn to shred. If this idea takes off, you may need to do your own music for one!

Guess at this point we just have to see how much and how far you can go in 2023 towards getting those 5 production games put together. Would def. work out a lot of the code beforehand - just because it could end up impacting your layout and particularly # of and placement of inserts.

I like how you lit up that drop target in your example above -- but also want to point to the importance of inserts as an indicator to the player not only of game progress but what to shoot next, what shots are tied to what mode at any time, etc. Moving lights off the playfield may simplify the underside & wiring but esp w/out an LCD as an alternate way to talk to the player - you're down to using audio callouts which often get lost in the music. It all depends on what you're going for of course, but what is going to make the game 'fun' likely now involves a good deal of not only coding and goals to achieve, but in getting information across to the player so they know what's going on in the short-term and long-term progress of the current ball and the current game.

Hope 2023 is a productive year for you! Hope to see some code & gameplay early next year

I was wondering when this question would come up.

I will -play- every game, I just won't buy games that I think have sub-standard engineering. This is probably going to come off egotistical to those who aren't familiar with my work, but I definitely consider my own personal engineering skills to be greater than someone like a Homepin or others that I won't put on blast in this thread.

Spaceballs was built on FAST. I have had lots of great conversations with Dave Beecher, the main FAST engineer. Very smart guy that has a lot of experience bringing devices safely to market. The FAST group will even help people take a commercial product through UL, FCC, and CE.

While I put a tremendous amount of thought into the engineering and craftsmanship in Spaceballs, it's still a homebrew that I've not tried to sell to anyone. In the end I'm only responsible to myself and my family.

3rd flippers .. yeah non-pinball people almost always miss those it's very true. But for them, indicator lights are also pretty much a loss.. I was shooting more for someone who likes pinball enough to buy one - for which I'd expect they are familiar with 3rd/4th flippers and generally that "flashing shots are good". I'm with you in that today, I'm generally not going to read thru a full ruleset.. I prefer to explore a game and figure it out on my own maybe with a few tips along the way. Maxing out points tournament style tho is much less fun for me vs. just trying to finish all the goals and get wizard mode.. but that's just me.

Anyway, those lines you are showing - are you saying they would be drawn on the PF or they would be mini lighted inserts, like Dialed In has for the 2 shots back to the flippers where the game shoots back at you or even smaller, say like the GnR mini inserts on all the map cities? If you could make them all lighted ones so you can flash them in sequence w/out it being cluttered that would be pretty cool vs large inserts for the shots. Hard to imagine it wouldn't get cluttered tho if you wanted to use them for every shot.. thus why larger inserts closer to shots traditionally I think. Sounds like whatever you go with, you're def. thinking a lot about communication to the player about status and what's going on so that's good.

With all do respect to the OP. This game wasn't working or flipping any of the times I walked by, I assumed it was before Freeplay because of the video posted here. You couldn't even play it to get a ball stuck!

This thread is WAY ahead of it's time. The OP is close to having a working game. But year to year what I've seen at Freeplay the game hasn't advanced much.

WAY too early to put energy into arguing the semantics of UL and coil design and all this other bullshit. You gotta get the game to flip and play. Get THAT done first. If you can't figure it out use relay's like our forefathers.

And that again doesn't fall onto the manufacturer, it's up to the purchaser whether they can or will purchase that item and be able to have it on site, or carry it for resale. For a small run product that is not going to be resold in any major retailer outlet, and likely not gonna be used for commercial usage, that really is not important, and even then doesn't prevent the manufacturer from selling said product himself. The limitations fall on the purchaser whether they actually take in such a product. Hardwired install location also is something not happening with a product like this

This guy is in FL, we have worked with lawyers and such on manufacturing here and the topic of UL is pretty much moot here. Clearly it's safer to get it done if you can afford it, but many consumer products aren't fully approved as well, and simply feature UL components. You can pretty much sell the product to anywhere, but it's up to the buyers themselves. Some companies will clearly not touch a product without that approval, but I doubt that's gonna happen here, and as others have noted, not every one making pins is even doing it. So why is this such an issue if all these manufacturers everyone has no issue buying pins from are not even doing it themselves?

FCC part 15 testing is not done at the board level, it is done at the product level. And yes, it is required. I'm willing to bet even as an unintentional radiator, you have a clock frequency above the cutoff. There is also the conducted emissions testing that will be required on the power cable.

I think you're taking this the wrong way or I presented it the wrong way I'm merely saying you have to get this game flipping if you want any kind of traction on it to build up the potential of possibly manufacturing this game. I can't stress this enough you HAVE to get the game working for anyone to believe in you!

Based on what I saw I believe you have the skills, the support works both ways you didn't buy my shirt I didn't buy yours,

Honestly I was there to plant my games get some notoriety, raise some money for childhood Cancer, and drink my face off with my buddies.
I accomplished 2 out of 3.

See you next year.

This thread sure has gotten weird.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapter-A/part-15

i'd be happy to talk through it when you get to that point, but know that it is required.

I think one could argue that it started weird.

Hey, good luck dpadam450 I can tell you're very passionate about what you're doing.

My honest advice, if you care to hear it, is that telling people you've been working on something for 4 years, and then also telling them you don't think it's fun (your words not mine) and it's not close to done (you said it's missing a ramp, and a couple shots, and the board length isn't even right) just sounds like you're maybe very excited to share your passion, but not really ready to show a product.

It's cool that you can make your own coils for $5. But pre-made coils are $15 off the shelf, and they probably didn't cost the factory who made them $5. Winding your coils is some Homepin shit, but you don't live in China with a bunch of cheap labor to wind things for you. You really want to spend your nights sitting there winding coils?

Anyways, don't let me tell you how to run your business, just trying to give some feedback based on what you've been saying, best of luck.

Just curious if there is a gameplay video? If not when do you think we can see some flipping? Keep up the great work by the way. You may be onto something here. Best of luck.