Quoted from Richthofen:That's interesting to me, mostly because the expensive part of pinball machines these days are not the parts, it's the labor. Paying workers by the hour to hand-solder components, manually hammer in t-nuts, and build complicated wiring looms (now with more wire so you can cantilever out the playfield 5 feet!) is the big cost.
No it's not for machines built in a proper factory building at scale. Labor is the part that is most difficult to ramp up initially and is expensive if you are not Sustaining volume. It's the factor you can control and drive down with efficiencies and processes... so that's why it's such a focus. Because unlike a component cost you source, it's something you can actually influence and optimize quite significantly.
Labor is high operating overhead... it's not necessarily high cost per unit.