I disagree with this attitude intensely. Customers should NOT be content to be railroaded into spending $8k just because that's "normal" now. Competition needs to work harder on bringing down prices while delivering a 'traditional' pinball experience (Spooky) or focus on delivering something wildly innovative that can justify a premium pricetag (multimorphic P3).

Just my 2 cents.

I'm all for people making profits, and I actually have no problem with $8k machines in general as clearly the market can support them in some capacity. What I completely disagree with is the argument that "$8k is fair for WOOLY since that's what Stern/JJP/DP charge for their machines now".

IMO the price of a machine is fair when a customer decides it is, not when it's priced identically to a successful competitor. At $5-6k I (and many others) would have considered WOOLY; at $8k I didn't even consider it.

If they can't make profit at $5-6k and 100-200 machines, and they can't get enough buyers at $8k, then they don't make WOOLY. Tough, but simple

I would say the LCD easily adds the $1500 (or whatever random number we're cooking up for the argument) in COST in materials and time to develop colorizing, animation, etc... especially on a small run machine.

And I agree with your assessment of the lack of $1500 VALUE the LCD brings.

Honestly, if I could shave $1500 off the cost of WoZ or TH and remove the LCD in favor of a simple DMD, I would be much more compelled to pull the trigger on those machines (or would have pre-CDN dollar bed-crapping )

*shrug* so be it. Without knowing what true build costs are it impossible to know if it's manufacturing cost or profitability level that are the issue.

For the record I do have an opinion on WOOLY cost/pricing based on conversations I had with Riot folks at Expo 2013. I won't discuss any specifics as it's not my place and I'm sure things have changed somewhat, so all I will say is: based on my knowledge, imo I believe it's priced too high.

Also a great point of major note and it ties right in with the price.

I think in late 2013-early 2014 you could have MAYBE pulled off the $8k WOOLY price point with 100 pre-orders.

I think with JPop, SkitB, DP, and even JJP somewhat at times, it's now too late for any of that high-priced preorder stuff to work well anymore

Saves space and time for folks reading, and it was the topic sentence from your post to which I desired to respond to. Pretty standard forum etiquette as I certainly didn't change the context of your statement, nor did I reword anything on your part. Your second paragraph about Spooky buying into Riot or whatever has nothing to do with your $8k comment nor my response to it, so I excluded it from my post as I have no opinion or thought on it.

But since you're a bit grumpy about it:

I disagree with this attitude intensely. Customers should NOT be content to be railroaded into spending $8k just because that's "normal" now. Competition needs to work harder on bringing down prices while delivering a 'traditional' pinball experience (Spooky) or focus on delivering something wildly innovative that can justify a premium pricetag (multimorphic P3).

Just my 2 cents.

...happier now?