Pinball: a Resurgence In Retro Gaming From an Unlikely Place 107
woohoodonuts writes "The Professional & Amateur Pinball Association is creating a webchannel that will livestream content from their national circuit of tournaments ranging from Southern California to New York City. The most recent circuit tournament in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania sold out of all 400 tournament openings in less than three weeks, months in advance of the event. With several new companies in the process of creating machines and hundreds of new competitive events springing up worldwide at a record pace, is the retro silverball rising to prominence once again?"
Re:will machines be more common? (Score:5, Informative)
Pinball started dying out in the 80s and 90s because video games were cheaper and more reliable, and more importantly, smaller. Pinball machines required a lot of space and tons of maintenance.
The problem is, a pinball machine's purpose is to make money. The money goes to the operator (the person responsible for buying and maintaining the machines) and the site owner (the guy offering up space for the machine). So whenever it gets broken or goes down, it stops making money and the operator has to spend money to fix it. Video games and other machines last a lot longer so less money is paid out ot maintain them and more money goes to the site owner and the operator. Plus, since a machine consumes more space, you could often fit two video games in the space of one.
Plus, good pins are hard to get - Williams was the #1 pinball manufacturer - their machines were high quality, had good feel, and had various compensation mechanisms to allow for it to be in quite a bad state of disrepair and still be playable. As a result, even the worst DMD Williams machine is now horrendously expensive (maybe even more $$$ than new - $5000+). Some of the more popular machines command even more - prices of $15K+ aren't exactly unheard of.
So now it's even a worse proposition for operators and owners.
The only manufacturer left, Stern, evolved out of Data East/Sega, well known for very cheap crappy pins. However, they survived purely because Williams' factories are designed to pump up 10,000's worth of machines (pinball, slot machines, etc) and are very unprofitable building thousands or less, while Stern's can build hundreds and still be profitable. The latest WPC pins only sold between 2-5000 units (Pin2K was one of the first to reverse the unprofitability of the pinball division).
Williams in the end stopped pinball in 1999, but they wanted to hold it in their back pocket just in case it was a bad decision. Unfortunately, even doing something like reviving old hit machines wasn't ever an option because the sales wouldn't be enough to make money (again, when you're geared to build tens of thousands, building sub-10K is very inefficient and expensive).
Pinball machines will remain a niche these days because the economics aren't there. The problem is the machines have to make money, so it's a balance between ball time and difficulty - too difficult, and people don't play, but too long a ball and the machine doesn't make money because it's in use all the time. And what happened was pro pinball players started demanding more complex pins, which ended up excluding newbies and bringing fresh blood and new money to the industry.
It's changing, slowly, thanks to video pins - for those of us wanting recreations of the old machines, The Pinball Arcade [pinballarcade.com] is one of the premier video pinball simulators that feature many licensed recreations (many fully emulated a la PinMAME) on every platform (iOS, Android (including Android clones like Ouya, Kindle), PS3, Xbox360 (currently on hold because Crave (publisher) went bankrupt and is holding the contract hostage), and OS X). PC was just greenlit a few weeks ago on Steam, so the PC version is coming out soon. And of course it has a fan site with forums [pinballarcadefans.com].
There are many others as well, which have the advantage that if you're not making money per play, they can concentrate on fun more than balancing fun with the need to make money.
Re:will machines be more common? (Score:2, Informative)
You should look on http://pinballmap.com/ if you want to find machines...
Re:will machines be more common? (Score:5, Informative)
I worked at Williams in the 90s. You're pretty much spot on but I do have a few other comments. The fact that games broke more than videogames is true, but what really choked the industry - and I'm counting arcade videogames in this too - was that all the games wound up getting more and more expensive, yet earning less and less money.
Back in the day, if a game didn't pay for itself in 8 weeks, it was a dog. Really good games could do that in 3 weeks. Once they'd done that, the rest was profit. After a while the original location would sell the game and a lesser location would pick it up. Cheaper price, lower earning but still the game paid for itself in a few weeks. Repeat 2 or 3 more times and you have a game in a pizza joint, not earning much but doing well enough to be worth the effort. When the time-to-profit stretched out it choked this whole 'food chain' to the point that distributors were telling the manufacturers that they didn't want to buy any more games, even if they'd signed a contract for exclusivity in return for minimum orders, even if the game was incredible, because they already had a warehouse full of stuff they couldn't sell to the top-tier operators and thus just taking up space and (more importantly) non-cash illiquid assets.
There was also bloody-mindedness on the part of the locations, operators, distributors and manufacturers. Manufacturers kept jacking up prices without enough effort in R&D (Pin2k was an exception and I have so many heroic stories of our effort on that!) and without coming up with enough other ways to add value. Distributors cut back all the services they used to offer (e.g. board repair, big parts catalogs), operators were no longer willing to spend time fixing and cleaning games (easier to put in a Golden Tee Golf instead) and locations didn't want to deal with the space or the noise.
Pinball and slots at WMS were separate business units with their own assembly lines. Spinning reel slot design was briefly under Larry DeMar who was the head of engineering for pinball (and a legend in his own right thanks to Robotron, Defender, Black Knight, High Speed, Funhouse...) but that didn't really affect things and was before Pin2k got going. The fixed cost of the production line was a big drag on profit and we were barely hitting the minimum run rate most of the time, but it wasn't in the tens of thousands. 5000 a year was about where it was at, if I remember rightly. Revenge From Mars perked that up considerably but then the CEO decided to pump up the price for Star Wars Ep 1 and orders, which had been higher, dropped below its sales. That's when they pulled the plug.
After that, a bunch of the WMS pinball people went to Stern and some others went with Pat Lawlor who founded his own design company, manufacturing through Stern. That's why Stern's games improved in quality and play appeal. You can thank Dwight, Keith and Lyman in particular, plus Louis, Greg and John K along with Pat at PLD. George Gomez (Tron, Spy Hunter and the Monster Bash pinball, among others) now runs Stern.