I've seen this banded around as if its common knowledge but i've seen huge variations on what people are guessing the cost of "raw materials" that goes into a new machine.
I've seen some saying "retail price is 3 times", others that its only like 20%.
It would be interesting to know how close to the mark that actually is.
I've always heard "pro's are the best value", for what you physically get in a box are they?
Note: I'm not talking about costs to develop and manufacture a machine as there are tons of other costs such as staff, dev, ordering, paying to have a factory etc. This is just strictly parts.
Example.
Quoted from WillSmuz8999:The manufacturers wish they only cost $1000 - $1500 to build. That number is so far off. Our BOM at Williams in the 90s was $2000. Labor was $250, and you had all the tooling, and development costs -- Design, Programming, Sound, Art, etc. The games were being sold for low $3000 - $3500 range. Fortunately, in our hay-day, we were making 70K games annually. The margins are not near as profitable as you think. Decent volume, low overhead, and/or cost cutting measures is the difference between losing or making money in pinball.
So thats a BOM of 66% on the low side vs retail price during a time in which they were making tons of machines so margins could afford to be lower.
Let's take that as the low margin, call it the "williams bom" for lack of a better term.
So ball parks for new Avengers
Retail price - bom
Stern $6.2k pro (aka ~$4092 williams bom)
Stern $7.8 premium (aka ~$5148 williams bom)
Stern $9.2 LE (aka ~$6072 williams bom).
(MSRP taken from https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/sterns-game-release-history/page/4#post-5832945).
Not entirely fair as williams didnt have premium's and le's.
And you'd probably classify a normal williams as atleast a stern premium.
Has anyone done an accurate analysis of what a machine would cost in terms of just parts?
Even at "retail" (ie. purchasing replacements from macros and build a machine) vs how stern would get parts in bulk.
Various members have quoted other manufactures about the costs of large components (playfields, cabinets, ramps etc) so it should be fairly easy to get an accurate cost ... or is it?
