At least all the pieces are there.

Bit o duct tape...good as NEW!!!
faz

That's one of the reasons pinball died on location.

A Bar-Ber-Cut game will earn $3,000 a week and just needs to be refilled with prizes.

A WOZ will earn $30 a week and need constant maintenance.

^ I can attest to this. But with Key Master.

we have 4 pins. 4 pins = 1/2 coinbox or less of most redemption

we have a crane machine that makes more money on average than a wall full of pins... sigh

Bummer. Based on how dirty the playfield is it looks like the game has received a ton of play which is a good thing. Now they just need someone to replace the left flipper and reset the game.

Orange Lake is a pretty nice resort. I was last there a couple years ago and played the ACDC Pro they had at the time. After returning home I ordered an ACDC Premium, haha.

But pinball obviously made operators decent money for decades - was it really only because there weren't any easier ways to make money in coin-op?

Wow, that's crazy.

Do you think high returns on redemption games are from people's desire to have instant gratification nowadays and / or the the lack of desire to play a game that involves skill? Sadly I think it's a little bit of both.

Have you seen the number of toys those redemption games have? Even WOZ can't compete.

Video arcade games required less maintenance, made more money per square foot, and for a while were more advanced than the home video games.

Modern pinball is too hard to learn for today's kids.

They did not get to start learning by playing EMs, or SS pins.

Kids put money into a WOZ or AC/DC, bat the ball around a few times and move on to the crane game.

The goals and gameplay of the crane are obvious.

I blame their parents. My father played pinball with me when I was a kid, because he was a good parent.

Those are good points.

Is it just me or does it seem like redemption games are similar to slot machines but can be played by anyone regardless of age? Unlike a slot machine though it sounds like the odds of winning are even worse since the payout frequency isn't regulated. I'm sure some ops make the winning frequency more fair then most but others could have machines set to "pay out" far less often.

There are rules for that panzer. In Holland it is that way. I think those slots have to pay a minimum of 75% or something like that.

Off course..... Some owners dont play fair.

I just got back from there on Saturday and took the same picture last week. LOL

North Village has a FG and NASCAR. The flippers on both felt suprisingly good but both had multiple issues which made playing them difficult. I didn't make it over to the arcade at East Village.

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My proof! LOL

You set the odds of winning in the setup.

A crane game might be set for 17% win, so you skillfully pick up the stuffed dog, and just before it gets to the chute, it barely slips out of the claws.

Because you almost had it, you will likely play again because your adrenalin is running, and your friends are all screaming "Ohhhhh dude, you were thisssssss close!!!".

You have to set it to win sometimes, or no one will ever play it again and it will stop making money.

A few states do not allow the cranes to be set for percentage payout (they see it as gambling), so if you play in WA, you really are playing a skill crane.

vid1900 - you are always so insightful and full of knowledge on so many levels. Thanks for sharing.

Pins on location aren't earning as much because some old geezer is usually spending 20 minutes on the pin so the kids are forced to play the cranes.

G-d damn it I knew there was something fishy. I thought those jerks just loosened the claw a bit so it wouldn't grab quite strong enough. No wonder I can't ever win a Minion at the stupid movie theater. lol
Every time I have won something in one of those games I thought it was my superior hand eye coordination and a decent machine! Jokes on me I guess. lol It seriously never occurred to me that it was like a slot machine and you could set the payout.

I thought Woz was built like a tank, what's up with that?

C'mon, let's not derail the thread with a bunch of WOZ baiting.

WOZ is built from Williams parts and a Mirco playfield. It's not any better or worse than any other pinball.

This hits the nail on the head. The objectives in modern pinball take too much time/money to earn with too little payback. Nobody cares about having the local high score anymore.

I feel like one of the ways to bring that back is to internet enable machines and allow comparing/challenging scores across social media, or some type of cross platform experience. I can get an extra ball or something by tweeting my score + location.

Flipper power cranked up, lots of play. Flipper bat broke. Crap happens. Fix it and move on.

LTG : )™

My four kids won't touch a pinball game on route.

Redemption, redemption, redemption.

That Keymaster game has to be a revenue landslide.

You do have to set the claw strength for what items are in the bin, but the magic 'slipped at the last second' is a programmed action

I do agree that the more successful games seem to be interactive, like the kind of stuff you find at CEC like that balloon popping machine for example. Whatever draws in business I suppose.

I don't usually ever see this kind of damage. It seems like a quality issue.

Is that accurate to say?

Flippers break all the time on route.

Even at home, I may have one break a year out of all my games.

A friend of ours came by yesterday with her eight-year-old son. He's got an iPad and all that. I turned on the pins for him and tried to show him how to play. He kept messing with the shooter and just mashed the flipper buttons like an angry monkey. He gave up on it after a minute so he could go pretend to be Darth Maul. There will be no redemption for that kid.

Very interesting. I don't play many crane games, but I always thought of them as "games of skill". Setting a winning percentage seems pretty fraudulent to me.

LOL.

No, "skill cranes" are like slot machines with a payout percentage programmed into the machine.

Sometimes you see an older crane programmed to "Play Till You Win". The OP will fill it with candy or some other totally worthless prize. Little kids love to play these.

The newer ones are especially smart.

The damn keyhole redemption machine is especially brutal, but not very good at hiding it. It has a random timer that adds a delay between when you let go of the button and when the arm stops. Seems to vary anywhere between 0 and half a second.

Before we were operating cranes I saw one at a Perkins that had just been filled. Right after the op walked out the door one of the cooks came up from the back and started playing it, in pretty short order he was able to get a whole handful of plush out of it. So I assumed the trick was to play the game right after the machine was loaded, because it was the "settling" of the prizes caused them to be hard to get picked up. Then we started buying cranes and we found the setting...

Its got the outer shell of a tank, but has proven to be very unreliable on location

I just moved to Falls Church VA from New Jersey. I have three kids all under 10 years old. In New Jersey all my kid's buddies came over and played for hours on my machines...parents too. They played because they kept coming back, had no other distractions, and understood how to really play the game.

Present day - My kids are making friends and those kids are blown away to come into the basement and see a row of pins...something they have never seen anymore. They are amazed by the lights and sounds, attempt to keep the ball from draining by hitting both flipper buttons at the same time, and five minutes later get on their iPads becuase they get bored. Over time here though my kids will teach them the rulesets and hopefully they will gain interest.

Bottom line - If you stick a kid in a room with ONLY a pinball machine they are going to play the hell out of it because that is all they have. You throw them in an arcade, then they will go to the thing that gives them that instant gratification. ie those damn crane games that steal all my money

Even the outer shell is the same 3/4" plywood that pins have been made of for 50 years.

It's not like they used 1" Baltic Birch plywood with 1/2" thick glass or something bombproof like that.....

There's nothing wrong with that WOZ, the flipper is modded to make the Throne Room shot easier!
I'm going to try it on mine, can't seem to master that shot...

The bottom is also plywood where most others are pressboard.

Hats off to that operator for putting a 6,500 dollar pin out on route. If it's out there it will break, no matter whom makes it. I know this from experience, pirates of the Caribbean being one of the worse ones lately. What makes a difference between a good vendor and a bad vendor is how fast it gets fixed. I've got one local guy who calls me when anything goes wrong with the pinballs, he plays everyday and knows them in and out. I have a few pins out there still but they are maintenance hogs for what they bring in. I played a guys wizard of oz last week and I was blown away at all the toys and the flash. That what pinball should be! Todd Scott

The funny thing is I was on a cruise where the kids game room had all those rip off games like Bar-Ber-Cut where you have to fray and ultimately cut the string. And the Key master or whatever it is (Casino too)

These machines had great prizes like Go Pros, PS4's etc. So I don't know about this one particular machine but my kids figured out a little "nudging" would cause the scissor to cut faster with the rope swaying.

They cleaned out the machine with the above and some Beats and other stuff.

Of course this sent off a huge red flag and they had the techs down there afterwards trying to figure out if something was wrong with the game or cutting mech, looking at the manuals, pulling it apart.

I felt bad until I saw the audit sheet they had while trying to fix it. Year to date they had pulled in some 180k off that one machine and paid out about 18k. Guy said they usually only pay out two times or so per month

And yes, the same ship, the year before had an XMEN PRO that spit out tickets, of course, now its gone!