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If you were involved in starting a brand new pinball manufacturing company.......

AlanJ

AlanJ

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Leeds, West Yorkshire
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Alan
How would you plan it?
How would you execute it?
What tech would you use / avoid?
Where would you base it?
How long would it take to get to reliable production?
Learning from others' successes an failures, what would you do, and would you, what not do?
Would you pay to licence a theme (band,movie,book,etc.) or not?
What would you contribute, what is your area of expertise?
Dare you even think about making it a reality?
 
P-ROC is a good place to be tech wise, as its off the shelf and a known quantity, works very nicely in CCC too....

Maybe outsourcing the build would be a plan

Personally I don't think the licence matters to people you'd find on here as much as it would on site, here people are interested in the gameplay over the theme, but if you're aiming to sell into ops then I suspect a licence might get more coins in the box
(Dunno though thinking about it I bet Dialled In takes decent money?)

However the big one would be money, you need lots and lots of money to do it, and it needs to be the company's money - If you need to live hand to mouth on pre-orders and promises then its only ever going to end one way......
 
Start Off With £3 million
Plan for having 10%of that in a year!!
Not ask for preorder payments
Get a passionate team
Listen to the relevant experts - eg lead programmer,production engineer,designers - comeup with a budget set from finance
License theme
Employ a good original sound man - a la TNA, Robo War, TX Sector etc
Ensure a good production engineer is employed and thus has a simple ish to use production line allowing for contract staff - not pinall expert - production expert
I know a bit - add input here n there
Base it on giving out manuals,and making it fixable
Adding fuses even thogh it prob aint needed nowadays - back up protection
Use standard size cabs - people are OCD
Base it in Wales and have plenty of easter egg sheep in there!!
Would have stern size lcd
Have speaker upgrades avail as option - at a cost plus 15% bbsis - but we fit em
All pins would have main features a la JJP
Dont' bull**** customers - be honest - if there's a major delay/change tell em why
Aim for £6k base point
Have adverts in the attract sequence
Have how to start game vids in attract mode, and basic shot map in attract mode
Offer cab button area protection as standard
Aim for 1500 units sold,after design is finalised on first unit - with £1k profit per machine
After 3 successfull releases do ramones and Misfits pinballs !!
Allow a £100k budget to travel to three main worldwide pinball shows showing off finished protos
Try and build up a small dealership based on 8 companies worldwide with good reps
NOT having grequency or whatever region protection
Bring back team scoring
Offer 2 year factory warranty
 
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Then in second year realise you have only made £1.5million but need £2 million to continue!!
 
I can't even begin to comment on the manufacturing side of things. But from my experiences over the last 20 years in AAA video games;
Get a good producer
Aim for sub £5k price point
Employ a full-time PR group moderator
Add network highscoring
Aquire a licence (preferably a well known video game licence e.g. Far Cry, Doom)
Attempt Kickstarter campaign - if only for free publicity
What could I contribute? Game logic, DMD animations, game design, art direction, potentially final artwork.
I'd say keep it simple, concentrate on feel and feedback. The most important thing is does the game feel rewarding to play? During the 90's scoring increased massively year on year so games like AFM that shout out to everyone in the room how awesome you are with huge scores in the billions feels very satisfying. Whereas, you play a modern Stern game and score under 10m it feels bad. Very bad.
But the main thing is stick to your milestones. You made promises? Keep them.
 
If you happen to have £3 million to lose fine. Otherwise I'd say before you think big, think small.

Start with a PC and Future Pinball and create your own virtual pinball. Don't worry about the art work (unless you're a great artist), just try to make a game that's genuinely fun to play. Zero cost.

Then get into the garage or spare room and try building it. No idea what that would cost but guessing £2K.

Maybe the pin you create is good enough to be the basis for a 'real' pin - didn't Total Nuclear Annihilation start something like this?

But even if it's a total dog you will have learnt lots about building a pinball, and probably made a few useful contacts.
 
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Don't announce a machine saying it'll be out in 6 months when it's really only a sketch on a napkin at that point.
 
JWG9999 said:
If you happen to have £3 million to lose fine. Otherwise I'd say before you think big, think small.

Start with a PC and Future Pinball and create your own virtual pinball. Don't worry about the art work (unless you're a great artist), just try to make a game that's genuinely fun to play. Zero cost.

Then get into the garage or spare room and try building it. No idea what that would cost but guessing £2K.

Maybe the pin you create is good enough to be the basis for a 'real' pin - didn't Total Nuclear Annihilation start something like this?

But even if it's a total dog you will have learnt lots about building a pinball, and probably made a few useful contacts.
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ironically alien was this origin
 
go stealth, have more than one (three at least ) machine in the oven, don't do anything different that can't differentiate you (i.e. cabinet etc). Game play is everything... (see TNA for example). Raise money so you get the advantage of making three at the same time. Be based in Chicago.

Neil.
 
Absolutely do not consider - even for ONE SECOND - starting a pinball manufacturing company!!! EVER!!!

Homepin is a little lucky in that we make many other products so we haven't relied on pinball to survive. If we had, we would be long gone.

I can say that the pinball side of the business has sucked every single spare sheckle from our operations. We could have designed and built three other arcade machines in the same time frame and for about the same money we have spent developing Thunderbirds.

Building a pinball machine will take 10 times any budget you come up with. If your sums suggest $1M - count on that actually costing $10M - and time, if you think something will take six months to make or develop, make that two years - I'm not exaggerating here but speaking from hard experience.

You will have barriers and setbacks thrown in front of you that you simply cannot predict nor believe when they pop up. Also, there will be plenty of naysayers and trolls very keen to take you down and bag you, your efforts, your product, your choice of theme, your way of doing business, the colour of your hair and every single other thing you can imagine and then some!

Just don't - nice thought but best to keep it that way IMO.
 
TNA is a good example of how things can work. There are many examples of how things can go wrong.

From a technical point of view i would keep the boardset in the backbox with a traditional mosfet driver board, something similar to the whitestar/sam driver. Avoid SMD boards and boards mounted under playfields! A P-ROC or other similar IO board design is a good idea, as cheap computer power continues to move forward (i.e raspberry pi) Most cheap computers can now drive an io board, run game code, drive an hdmi based lcd screen, output stereo sound, without too much issue. Therefore the 3 level stack works well

Computer - Game Code, Sound, LCD screen
IO Board - 'Subconcious' Control of Drivers and Switches
Driver Board - Handling the Drive control work

From a game design point of view, sharing knowledge and expertise across the design group is key. Never silo members of the team, or keep members from talking to each other. Dont introduce bottlenecks or force everyone to communicate through a single medium.

Use the experts you gather in the field they have expertise in, dont expect them to be experts in everything, but listen carefully to what they have to say in their given field.

Dont promote things unnecessarily or take preorders. Work on stuff until there's something decent to show, then sell them when they are ready. Use the model, if you like it buy one, if you don't buy something else. Expect things to take longer than planned and have resources in place for unforeseen issues.

Based on my experiences :)
 
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Homepin said:
Absolutely do not consider - even for ONE SECOND - starting a pinball manufacturing company!!! EVER!!!

Homepin is a little lucky in that we make many other products so we haven't relied on pinball to survive. If we had, we would be long gone.

I can say that the pinball side of the business has sucked every single spare sheckle from our operations. We could have designed and built three other arcade machines in the same time frame and for about the same money we have spent developing Thunderbirds.

Building a pinball machine will take 10 times any budget you come up with. If your sums suggest $1M - count on that actually costing $10M - and time, if you think something will take six months to make or develop, make that two years - I'm not exaggerating here but speaking from hard experience.

You will have barriers and setbacks thrown in front of you that you simply cannot predict nor believe when they pop up. Also, there will be plenty of naysayers and trolls very keen to take you down and bag you, your efforts, your product, your choice of theme, your way of doing business, the colour of your hair and every single other thing you can imagine and then some!

Just don't - nice thought but best to keep it that way IMO.
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I heed the words @Homepin, but that leaves me with one question - why did you?
 
If pins are being made here in the UK. I would at least price it the same price you are selling them elsewhere and try not to go over the 6k stern pro price. Heighway could have flooded the uk with Alien pins.
 
Adajam4 said:
So @Homepin - given the choice again, you would run a mile?
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If it was an option - go back in time etc - I would never even dream about doing it again. Bit late now though.......

There is just so much more to it than I can even describe. I guess we have bitten off a lot more than many others starting as we make every single part ourselves (and there are valid reasons for this).

Stern, Williams, Bally etc all had many years to add to their designs and their machines grew in complexity and gameplay. They were able to start with EM's (in some cases) and move up to early SS and so on to create today's complex machines. We have to hit the decks running at full speed with a modern machine that ticks all (or most) boxes as a "modern pinball machine".

We can't, for example, say "our first model is going to be a Solid State machine and we will add features to future models" - that wouldn't cut it.

Everything, and I mean EVERY SINGLE THING, takes much longer than you can anticipate and costs many times more than you can ever budget for. I'm not surprised one little bit that some others have had problems getting pinball manufacture off the ground. As I have said before, Homepin is very lucky that we have a strong manufacturing base that has existed for years making game tables, replacement pinball boards and assembly work for several other businesses.

We had a very healthy budget to work with for pinball but blew that out four times over, and we already had a strong presence in China and had a pretty strong grip on what this job would entail. It isn't only about the money either, it's the daily dramas and stress that take a toll on you personally. Add to that, it doesn't matter who you are or what you do, there is a certain element of person out there that seem to take great delight in trying their very best to tear you down and denigrate you, your product, your approach and everything else they possibly can to cause trouble and grief.

I would just never do it a second time around it simply isn't worth the grief as "romantic" as it might sound.
 
You paint a very grim picture there.. almost to the point where it is essentially an impossible business model. One wonders how the likes of Stern, JJP etc stay in business?

As a complete naive end user, the machines don't look that expensive in raw materials terms. You've got a wooden cabinet, a wooden playfield, a load of wiring, some plastic, some metal and a load of coils and in some cases mechs. Not diminishing anything at all, but when you look at the sort of money charged for NIB machines - a significant proportion of that cost must be going on manufacturer sunk costs & R&D from what you're saying.
 
Durzel said:
You paint a very grim picture there.. almost to the point where it is essentially an impossible business model. One wonders how the likes of Stern, JJP etc stay in business?

As a complete naive end user, the machines don't look that expensive in raw materials terms. You've got a wooden cabinet, a wooden playfield, a load of wiring, some plastic, some metal and a load of coils and in some cases mechs. Not diminishing anything at all, but when you look at the sort of money charged for NIB machines - a significant proportion of that cost must be going on manufacturer sunk costs & R&D from what you're saying.
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the raw materials are a minor cost imho it’s the cost of the effort that goes into design prototype assembly sales marketing admin hr. management. legal. license fees travel and shipping costs testing support qa finance costs. rent rates taxes etc etc

you’d spend £100,000s if not £1m just getting to the point of being able to start production.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
I guess my point was - which you've confirmed in a roundabout way - is that the costs are all front loaded. Therefore if you started a pinball company and made a good enough machine that it sold thousands, then you'd get to a point where each new machine sale was virtually pure profit? Or am I looking at it too simplistically?

Is there even a market nowadays for pinball sales in the tens of thousands ala the glory days of TAF?
 
It's an exciting idea and for most on here the perfect thing to do in life (other than those who would pay professionally all day).

BUT it's madness. MADNESS!
 
Agree. I love the idea of making my own homebew pin but it would stay just that.

The other option that I have floated in the past is maybe as a community (for those really interested) with vast knowledge collectively design build and make the 'perfect' game. The sell it to Stern, CGC, Spooky or anyone that will entertain the idea of a small production run.
 
Factor in the new brexit custom changes and any pin made for £6 in UK will add Uk vat plus euro/us vat and import duties of 5-8% and shipping would make it too expensive for anyone outside buying these toys unless its for business and you can claim it back.
for me buying a pro i assume could be wrong 6000+ 15% = 6900 plus stg/euro change 7852 euro plus 23% =9657 euro plus import @5% = 10140 plus shipping 90 euro for me 10230 euro or 8993 for pounds .
Thats my take on anyone mad enough to start a biz in uk.
example i wanna buy phills alice cooper order @6600 but would cost me 11000k euro ish but buy direct from spooky 8k ish who would get my biz?
Again only after brexit hits next year but i could be wrong and be way off.
 
Tucks said:
Agree. I love the idea of making my own homebew pin but it would stay just that.

The other option that I have floated in the past is maybe as a community (for those really interested) with vast knowledge collectively design build and make the 'perfect' game. The sell it to Stern, CGC, Spooky or anyone that will entertain the idea of a small production run.
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Yep - that's the way to do it - sweat equity effectively - a small group conceive, design and build a prototype machine on a tight budget - i.e. no labour costs, only spend is on parts, printing etc. If it looks promising then figure out how to put it into production. There are A LOT of components in a pinball machine, but most can be sourced or made in small production runs initially.

UK is however a difficult place to do it with relatively high labour costs compared to USA and obviously the Far East.

I did a business plan on this, but assuming everyone was employed full time, and it adds up to a few £100,000's if you tried to do it that way - JUST TO GET YOUR FINISHED PROTOTYPE!
 
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