Agreed
Said it 100 times pinball doesn’t make enough money to be a viable business
Tilt has always and will be a craft beer bar first and pinball as a side hustle
Biggest compliment I ever got was when Martin said Tilt had brought pinball back into mainstream in the UK
We are still the only public pinball bar in the UK, open every day to the public!
You have some amazing private club driven places but they are subsidised by their owners and members.
And other venues like Retriods and Level that are a mix of pinballs and videos games.
NIB makes it impossible without a massive backer to open this type of business. I was lucky to have had
@philpalmer to support me from day one and still supports me now!
You got to be a little bit tapped to want to do this for a living
Yes, but I’m not talking about dedicated pinball bars. Or the UK market.
I’m talking about whether Stern is competing in a capped/fixed-size market.
During the pandemic, people switched their purchasing habits from services to goods - they couldn’t go out. Demand for pinball soared in the States because people with games rooms bought pinball machines. We bought our first pin, Fish Tales, at the end of the lockdown. Lockdown finished, and people slowly went back to spending money on dining, holidays, etc.
Some people got into pinball during the pandemic, such as
@MadMonzer and I, and bought additional pins, including two NIB Sterns. But, we now have a pretty mature collection, and - in order for us to buy a new pin - we pretty much have to sell an existing one. We are no longer an active market for Stern UNLESS they can convince us that a new title is better than JP2 or Godzilla (or our vintage/boutique pins).
The question is whether the average buyer is more like us (a collector who has to sell to buy) or whether there is an untapped market among retro-themed bars/entertainment centres capitalising on 80s nostalgia and ‘analogue renaissance’ in the States (and elsewhere) who might want a pin (or two) to go with their arcade cabs/neon Pac-Man’s/board games/jukebox.
I’m talking about a venue that has a small shelf of board games, a jukebox, a vintage arcade cab or a row of neon Pac-Man lights. That includes the minority of venues who already have a pin, but it’s an EM or a battered Addam’s Family, which is becoming costly and annoying to repair.
If I was targeting that market as Stern, I’d cut the price by $2k, at least, for each title. And go for retro themes…
The problem is, if most of the new sales were to people like
@MadMonzer and I, then it’s unclear where Stern’s four titles a year are going to go. Or why you’d expect to sell a huge number of JW pins outside die-hard film fans.