Cost of machines, and revenue made.

camperjohn

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Does anyone know how much these original machines cost? And about on average, how much money they made over their lifetimes?

I have a Williams Robotron. How much did it cost new? About how much did such a machine earn over it's lifetime? How about my High Speed Pinball?

Does anyone have stats on these kinds of things?
 
I know some old price listings have been floating around out there. I always like to look at my machines coin counters to see how much it made.
 
Probably in the 1,500 to 2,000 range. And look at the coin counter in the coin door, if it has one.

IIRC Williams machines did the counts in memory, and could be reset. Back when I worked at Odyssey, we didn't balance the quarters vs the coin counters, as the machines were in plain sight of the front counter. The "on location" machines, Junior and I didn't mess with during the settle, so I don't know if Senior did that there or not.

I can tell you that in good weeks, they could draw $3-400 in the pool hall per week. I don't know about the remote locations.
 
Are you looking to see if the machine made back its purchase cost through the number of plays that it received, or if it was actually profitable once it was put on location?

For the former, the coin counters will give you that as others have mentioned.

For the latter, you'd need to factor in downtime and associated repair costs, cost per square foot occupied, cost of the electricity it used, and other things I'm probably not thinking of right now.
 
from watching todd's video they never seem to break even.

Once you factor in all of the hidden costs of owner-operatorship, that's pretty much true.

From the standpoint of an operator with a game out on a route, the overheads at the location are less of a concern - but each quarter still has to be split with the location owner, and the operator has to try to make a profit out of the 12.5c collected on each play while covering their own overheads on the back end.

This is why barcades can afford to put games on free play and still stay in business: the $8 someone pays for a drink that contains $1.50 in booze, labour, and other costs has more margin than 25c/play.
 
If you look at Playmeter magazines from the 80s, there were ads from distributors with prices. Both new and used games were available and prices fluctuated depending on what was "hot".

Once most games were a few years old and undesirable, the prices could hit rock bottom. AFAIK there were no "collectors" of these things. I have heard more than one story of the golden era games we love going for about 75.00 a pop in the early to mid 90s.
 
Once most games were a few years old and undesirable, the prices could hit rock bottom. AFAIK there were no "collectors" of these things. I have heard more than one story of the golden era games we love going for about 75.00 a pop in the early to mid 90s.

Yes, this is how much I got my Tron for back in 1998.

And my first machine and Asteroids that had picked up back in 1986 or 87 was $50. Complete with ops custom hand painted control panel since the original was so worn.
 
from watching todd's video they never seem to break even.

Dragon's Lair cost 4000 it looks like, but made 1000-2000 a week at its peak: https://news.google.com/newspapers?...q=cost of pacman arcade games&pg=6873,4217065

So it would've turned a profit in a month and quickly doubled the investment.

Pac Man was 2800 new:
https://news.google.com/newspapers?...q=cost of pacman arcade games&pg=5696,6401260

Thanks to this thread I found for the links heh http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?t=7365
 
Here's how much R-Type cost new...

9RnL6yl.jpg


My minty survivor (probably best condition original/non-restored R-Type on the planet) had about 15,000 plays on it when I got it and my second R-Type cab had a littler over 113,000 plays so cab 1 made say about $3,750 and cab 2 made $28,250 if going by the coin counters in which my second cab with the much higher play count the counter wasn't even hooked up when I received it (it was completely missing the coin mechs and had a free play button). Did cab 2 really make that much and get played 100,000+ times? Well it sure had the wear and tear of being used that much, lol. Had to do some mucho restoring on that one! ;)
 
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Well the coin counter on my tempest is at 29331. So at 25 cents a play, that works out to $7332.75. Pretty sure that payed for the game.
BTW, is there a way to reset the coin counters? I don't see any switches on it.
 
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The operator in Medford Oregon in the day would pull a game that didn't make a $1,000 per week. That is how CJ ended up with some rare mint machines when he cleaned the operator out at $75.00 per game.
 
Most games cost roughly between $2k-$3k new (with most of them being on the lower end of that range). Here is an old post from Vectorlist with Atari info (that was taken from an Atari memo, which is also on the web somewhere: )

http://www.vectorlist.org/Vectorlist/2000/02/0258.html


Most typical Atari games I've owned and/or worked on, which have seen normal operation, tend to have on the order of 50-75k plays on the counters, but there are usually two counters per game. So call that 100k plays combined (as a rough figure), which would be $25k in lifetime earnings.

However keep in mind, that is over the life of the machine. Most ops did not own the cab for that entire time. I suspect in most cases, games likely earned their cost back, then made another 1x-3x their cost before they were sold off to the next op (who maybe made another 1-2x the original cost, before selling, etc, and it decreased from there.)


Again, these are rough order-of-magnitude figures, but are just based on the numbers I've seen, and my own inferences.
 
I think similar to Atari numbers in last post, but here is a PDF of an actual Atari document with different prices:

http://www.atarigames.com/atarinumbers90s.pdf



Spot checking the games in the list I posted, they look the same, but it looks like that's a later (and more complete) list, and they dropped the prices in the 'price changes' column for some of the games. The dates make sense, as that's when the crash was starting.
 
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