When you frame your question as having someone who knows and trusts you "route" their game to you, I think it makes a lot of sense. In order for an op to net $100 a month on a routed game, he'd need to pay the local vending tax...in Atlanta it is $400 or $500 a year...so he'd have to have have $240 dropped into the game every month. Further, if he was an upstanding citizen, he'd have to pay another $10 a month or so for income tax, so that makes the drop have to be $260 on location to net $100. Add in that he will not have to spend a minute to free a stuck ball, avoids 99% of the abuse the game would take on location, doesn't have to pay insurance, and can sleep knowing that the game isn't going to walk away.

Put another way, if an AFM costs, say, $6000, getting $1200 a year is a 20% return. Heck, if you were close to me, I'd buy an AFM and put it on your location

Of course, the lender would have to approach objectively it as an investment, and I think the average collector is anything but an objective investor...to an op, a game is a tool to make money. To a collector, a game is a notch below his wife and kids, if he really loves his wife