from Hacker News

The Economics of Pinball (2009)

by saadalem on 12/8/21, 1:31 PM with 31 comments

• by buzzert on 12/9/21, 8:09 PM

  > All pinball machines offer a replay to a player who beats some specified score. Pre-1986, the replay score was hard wired into the game unless the operator manually re-programmed the software. High Speed changed all that. It was pre-loaded with an algorithm that adjusted the replay score according to the distribution of scores on the specified machine over a specific time interval.

  If you’re ever at a pinball arcade and you hear a loud wooden CLONK sound, that’s the “replay knocker”. It’s literally a solenoid that drives a piston into the case of the machine, and it’s intention is to let the entire arcade know “this guy/gal is really good”. Very satisfying sound! And no equivalent in video games.

• by dasil003 on 12/8/21, 7:41 PM

  This article is very misleading. Pinball has gone through many eras, and it is true that Addams Family in 1992 was the high water mark, but there's an equivalent peak in late 70s for the EM (Electromechanical, think gas-station price cylinders scoreboard). The article mostly talks about the SS era (Solid State, think 7-segment display scoreboard) which dipped a bit from the late 70s but ended in the late 80s early 90s. Addams Family itself is roughly a dividing line to the DMD era (Dot-Matrix Display), which many players consider the golden era of pinball where game design also became more precise and more "flow" was added to the game as well as more sophisticated modes and rules. Williams created many of the most beloved games during this period through steadily declining sales which did hit a wall and they tried to generate new excitement with their "Pinball 2000" form factor where there was a screen inset under the glass instead of a DMD. They only released a couple of these games and they basically killed the company they were so bad. However after that, Stern remained, and the 2000s were kind of a wilderness era where they sort of picked up the torch of the DMD era, and developed their own modern style. Sales were not high during this time, but they were surviving. This was the state of the world in 2009 when the article was written, so it's understandable they didn't know what was coming. In the early 2010s there started a resurgence of pinball both with hobbyists and competitive play. Stern found a new stride with a series of games with deeper rules and more strategic play with layers of much more complexity and stacking of multipliers such that top players can achieve scores that would take hours or even days of grinding (eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdIArp3BW2g). Over the last 5-6 years they've switched to full video displays, and a culmination of deeper rules and more creative and dense playfield layouts being created by luminary new designers such as Keith Elwin (the Michael Jordan of competitive pinball). I'm not sure if sales have reached Addams Family level yet as I don't think Stern publishes units sold, but I'm sure they are within spitting distance. Additionally several new companies (Jersey Jack, Spooky, Pinball Brothers, etc) have emerged designing and manufacturing new machines, none of them the market power of Stern, but they are bringing a lot of interesting new ideas and super fun games in their own right.

  There's never been a better time for pinball.

• by dang on 12/8/21, 8:08 PM

  Discussed at the time:

  How Pinball Ate itself: The Economics of Pinball - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=947417 - Nov 2009 (27 comments)

• by mansilladev on 12/9/21, 10:28 PM

  Black Knight was also a machine that had a grand canyon of a gap between the flippers. It was sure to lighten your pocket of quarters faster than any other game in the arcade.

• by jareklupinski on 12/9/21, 10:29 PM

  > Later designs would allow the threshold to rise quickly to combat the wizard-goes-to-the-cinema problem

  wizard-goes-to-the-cinema problem?

• by 1cvmask on 12/8/21, 5:12 PM

  The Japanese Pachinko (pinball) market is bigger than the casinos of Las Vegas, Singapore and Macau combined and is dominated by ethnic Koreans like Masayoshi Son of Softbank whose dad was in the pachinko parlor business. This might explain the "gambling" tendencies of Masayoshi Son and Softbank with investments in WeWork and Better.com

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachinko

  https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/CEO-in-the-news/SoftBank-Ma...

• by StillBored on 12/9/21, 8:28 PM

  This whole thing sounds like a case of chasing the wrong market killed it.

  When I walk up to a pinball machine and put a buck in (or thereabout at my local pinball place) and the game is over in 15 seconds because I suck, I don't put another buck in. So the minimum skill level is too high to attract new players.

  I'm pretty sure that they can make pinball incrementally more difficult simply by raising/lowering bumpers in critical places, but I only vaguely remember seeing that at some point in the past.