I don't know what those games are going for in your neck of the woods but $2200 seems high for a non-working game that you have an inside track on.

If you can't find local price references on Batman, your customer/seller likely can't either. I wouldn't pay more than $1500 US for a non-working Batman and even that would be a stretch. It's not a great game and those early DEs are not of very high quality build wise.

Sellers are always convinced you are gonna make huge money when you fix it, but it's not that easy. Might be too late at this point but I'd try to get the seller to see it my way or move on. Why bail them out of their headache? They own a broken Batman, not you. They should be happy to get rid of it.

These days?! I'd expect a decent working one to get Hook money ($2000-2500) without much trouble. You don't see them very often at all, and Batman will always be a hot theme. The backglass artwork is very cool.

The question is what THIS one is worth and it ain't working Hook money!

Would you really?!

Not talking about boards, talking about everything else. The mechs just don't age well and everything starts to get mushy. They were still using shitty bakelite linkages in their solenoid mechs a decade after everybody else had moved to stronger nylon/plastics. These linkages may have been fine for EMs but with the faster games of the late 80s /early 90s they were not up to the task and will all need replacement by now if they haven't broken already.

By 1991 they had improved the cabinets but those 1987-1990 cabinets are complete garbage which is why I think the survival rates of those old games isn't so hot. Display boards hanging off scraping backglasses, paint falling off, cracked cheap plywood everywhere, speaker panels that don't fit right and rip the brackets out of the wood etc.

DE was definitely a distant 3rd when it came to "build quality." I don't bear any grudge it's just a hard to ignore reality once you've been through hundreds of games of all the different manufacturers.

Yes the board sets are decent but this isn't a surprise - Gary just ripped off the System 11 boardset just as he had ripped off the Bally board set a decade earlier. And just like the early Stern games, the boards were the most solid thing while the cheapness was found pretty much everywhere else.