Out. They have (largely) priced operators out of the market. Yes some will be on location, and yes you can potentially in this market buy as a novelty and then move on after a few months. However if I have $12K and think about buying a given machine or machines to enhance my arcade from a value perspective I can do way better. I would have bought at $8K and was planning to do so even before reveal, and even then to be honest it was making less and less financial sense. But much like an auction you have to have a price limit. At this price level I’ll go play it somewhere else. It can be the next coming of pinball and I’m still out. Not making any commentary on those who bought. We each have our reasons, and I’m glad they found it worth paying for. I fully accept that if this is the new entry price point, Pinball as a feature point for my arcade will be on the downslope unfortunately.

I am an operator. I’ll leave it to the on location operators to chime in (beyond what they already have). Most arcade venues these days are single fee entry, everything on free play. A few are on free play except for the newest machines (Pacific Pinball Museum and Asheville is one example where Wonka is on 0.50 to $1 a play). For me the basic problem is this: I can pay $12K for this or for something else. I keep around 40 pins out of 120 games on the floor. Reality is that the pins should actually occupy less space than they do given the main attractions are skee ball, basketball, air hockey, boxing, etc to most customers. On an economic basis pins really didn’t ever make sense, but I like them so I have kept them. But my new pin costs have gone in the space of 3 years from $4500 (Star Trek - used though) $5300 (Metallica/ Star Wars) to $6300 (Mandalorian) to $7500 (Godzilla) to now a proposed $12K. That’s simply put ridiculous. It’s also unsustainable. I admire operators who have found a way to make this work. I can’t do it anymore. And it’s not that I can’t do it as in I can’t afford it, it’s I can’t do it when considering the panoply of things I could spend that $12K capital on and the marginal return on investment. And I say this even realizing that it can probably be traded in for say $10-11K in a year. It’s still tied up capital. And in order to afford it at no marginal capital cost I’d have to get rid of two other pins. Not worth it. I don’t begrudge JJP, this is focused at high end collectors, not those who are evaluating capital cost expenditures for their business versus do they have enough play money to afford this great toy. I have to be more sober about this choice because it’s a business not a hobby (well it’s still a hobby but I have to put a business hat on somewhat). When your revenue is $3-4K a week I look at it thru simple economics, as in is this worth a month of receipts to purchase. My personal evaluation is it is not. I respect others who feel otherwise

My kids eat what my wife puts on the table or they don’t eat.

Those guys aren’t rocket scientists…and yet they keep doing it. I wonder why?
And don’t they get to depreciate everything over time and probably write shit off too? Then sell it for what they paid!
Again, maybe it’s not the way to get rich, but there must be advantages, or no one would do it.

Hmm so have your considered that most of us do this because we have a passion for the hobby that transcends getting rich or doing much better than breaking even ? Capitalism isn’t everything ya know.

And I don’t know about you but if I capital depreciate a machine to zero and then later sell it, that’s called a capital gain on that revenue and the government expects me to pay taxes on that gain. There is no free lunch here despite what one might otherwise imagine.

What I and others are clearly saying is that if you jack up the price of the machine greater than 2X in the space of 4 years, and there is not similarly a corresponding greater than 2X increase in revenue then you are going to have a very hard time recouping your additional expenses here. I don’t think any of my customers would tolerate a 200% increase in the cost of admission. Adding on top of that, and returning to 4 years ago, I don’t seem to recall many threads from operators talking about how they were making bank in those “good ol days.” This is what we refer to as pricing operators (not all but clearly many) out of the market.

I’m not smart enough to answer that question in general. I might expect it would help a pin centric place like PPM or Asheville to have the latest and greatest even on coin play. Obviously PHOF is gonna have everything but it’s all coin play for them. For us, it’s just IMHO not that big a draw. For sure we can get some to drive from out of town to come play the latest and greatest. We had an amazing turnout from all over the state for a memorial/charity pin tournament a couple of months back. That said, and no offense is intended to the pinaholics like myself that come to my arcade, pin players aren’t what generates the majority of the revenue for us. They are an important part for sure, but not the major part. I’m gonna say pin draw is 20% of the audience. Kids bday or private parties in general is 35%. General public just coming to the arcade for whatever is in it is the other 45%. That’s the reason 2/3 of the collection is not pins. If we were in DC or somewhere big, a pin only place would have that kinda draw with every new pin under the sun creating a splash. But we aren’t, we are Charlottesville population 47000. So for us no. But for many pin centric barcades, especially in larger cities, I can see what always having the latest and greatest is a huge magnet to their audience.

These are all important points you make. It would be nice to add to these kind of polls “I was in before release but now out” and I suppose “I was out before release but now in”. Two years ago I had named this as my next purchase for my arcade. And at predominant prices of the time I would have purchased it. I have no hate for JJP and am going to instead likely go get a Wonka when one shows up local. Similarly, having just bought Mando, I was out on Godzilla. Wasn’t a theme I was really all that interested in either. And then the gameplay and commentary showed up and I was in.

What should concern JJP and others is not how many were in and out, probably a lot of games have that 20/80 split. What they want to know is marginally how many are out that were in now that they jacked the prices and does that make up for the extra cash from each sale. If they sell out the run it’s a good move (for now). If the volume ends up significantly below say GNR or Wonka, then it’s not a very good move at all.

I’m gonna make a (likely wrong in full disclosure since I have no particular insight into much) prediction here: Pinflation is gonna take a breather. And I don’t say this just on some philosophical level. Looking at the market just anecdotally there are more pins that seem reasonably priced. Now maybe that is just me adjusting to a new norm and saying -huh that seems like a decent deal. But I don’t think so. I think people are reacting in a way that says “I probably can’t get as much as I could 6 months ago with what I see going on financially everywhere”. As I said probably wrong, but time will tell.

Other than POTC and WOZ, I don’t believe JJP is particularly known for holding high resale value. Hobbits price dumped, so did Dialed In, even GNR looks affected here. That’s probably anecdotal on my part. We know there have been some turkeys from Stern that struggled to get back the dollars invested. I’m a little worried that Spooky might be following suit given what we’ve seen happen with Ultraman/Halloween.

Gonna quote myself here. A lot of people say if you don’t Jack the price and flippers are selling for more then you are leaving meat on the bone. I think that’s a wrong way of looking at it. As much as “flipper” is a dirty word, creating FOMO can be good business for your product. You want your distributors too to make a decent buck to promote your product to their own financial reward. When other people profit that helps promote what you make. These threads do not help out JJP or even Sterns cause. Now Stern has largely buffeted the bad publicity from price increases and perhaps JJP will weather it as well. Limited market/ unique product helps in that regard. But every once in a while threads like these ate the sign that years later gets looked back upon in hindsight as “the beginning of the end”. That probably going too far here. Let’s just say as a company it’s a very tricky business to just keep increasing your prices and not necessarily providing a superior product in the process.