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I listen to a pod with some ex Midway video game guys (Team GFB Radio). They worked with George Gomez when he was making video games like NBA Ballers. Anyhow, on one episode they randomly mentioned Gomez hooking a friend up with a Simpsons Pinball Party at direct cost which was about $3,300 at the time.
So a $4,000 BOM on a Stern premium including the game development, parts, labor, overhead, inflation, etc... seems like reasonable guess
Star Wars Pin is probably more like a $2,500 BOM
Quoted from ForceFlow:The world was quite different 15-20 years ago. You're forgetting about 15-20 years of inflation and the increase in expenses, taxes, insurance, utilities, wages, etc.
And also just how much Stern has been staffing up. Now they have multiple creative teams making a lot of content that they used to not do. So much more music and the LCD is a massive increase in resources to make it look good.
Quoted from desiArnez:Let’s pretend those are ball parks. $1500 a game? How many do they sell? 100k?
1.5 mil profit. That seems like very little.
Your math is off by a factor of 100
But Stern makes maybe 12,000 units a year. If it was a $1,500 profit per unit then that is $18m profit per year. But I don't know if they're really making that much per unit. Some of their toppers and accessories have huge markups. That's where they are really lining their pockets.
Quoted from Tomass:I remember some controversy when a guest released a number on Kaneda. Must have been accurate as they made him pull the episode and/or delete that part. I wanna say it was a Stern employee maybe? I didn't hear it but I do remember the drama around it. I also vaguely remember 2 or 3 thousand being mentioned, but I could be wrong.
I'm pretty sure it was the Nic Parks (The Pinball Company) interview where he was talking about getting Spooky to build Jetsons at a certain BOM. He mentioned a Stern Pro cost like ~$4,200 to him as a distributor. But I have no idea if Stern charges a standard rate or cuts deals with bigger movers.
Quoted from JY64:The person was a distributor and he said they "distributors" paid $4,300 to $4,400 that gave them a $1,000 profit at the time
Also I was reminded of seeing a random Todd Tuckey video where he threw shade to distributors that only sell new in box games. "The game sells itself, needs no work, and you make an easy thousand dollars". He might have just rounded to an even thousand dollars, but it's probably not that far off.
Quoted from MrMikeman:I seriously doubt they are producing 60 pins/day. That would be 1 pin every 8 mins. This is not an automated assembly line or 10,000 employees. I don't think they could even load them up on trucks fast enough to keep up with production - remember most distribs don't buy them 60 at a time.. which means many trucks with smaller loads. Shipping is an important consideration given the size of these things. Storing hundreds of machines would not be not smart business. I think that ~20 machines per line per day is more likely. They have 2 assembly lines and they don't always have both up and running. At 20/day it would take about 4.5 weeks (25 business days) to produce 500 LEs. Seems about right.
Nah, Stern does average like 50 a day and has a capacity of 100 a day if everything is running perfect. They have around 300 people building and packing those games (pre-covid at least). Stern is very proud of how many games they can make when things are moving smoothly. Just go on the Stern Factory tour or watch a video of it. You can see the area where they store built games as they wait for demand to fill shipping containers, because smaller shipments are so expensive.
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