How long does it take for a arcade game to pay for itself?

[Collector_Gaming]

When I read through the thread about super hard arcade games.

I wonder now from a business stand point. How many times would a arcade cabinet have to get played a day to be self sufficient with the costs of the electricity it gobbles up a average day for a arcade (say 9am-9pm 12 hours to make it simple for you math gurus) and then tack on the average maintenance bill (nothing breaking down and this and that but more so what it takes just to make sure the machine makes it through day in day out day after day)


Now I know the idea of a arcade was the load up the place with a ton of different machines so they all kinda pool in with the money together since different people have different tastes in games.

But just say theres only game in your arcade say for example a timeless classic. Dig Dug. a quarter a game.

Say the average game lasts 5 minutes (no super high score kinda people)
and say theres a line for this game around the block so when one guys done the next steps in

thats 12 quarters (or 3 bucks) a hour
144 quarters (36 bucks) a working day
now that i think about that figure is it even possible for a game like dig dug to be self sufficient these days with inflation since its release?

[portnoyd]

http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?t=156295

DreamTR breaks it down realistically.

[Flack]

You couldn't make $36 a day off a Dig Dug cabinet at a Dig Dug tournament.

In Oklahoma, it costs $150/year per coin-operated machine. Most route operators split their incoming 50/50 with the location. One of my friends has a new Ms. Pac-Man machine at a local Pizza Hut. On the month he e-mailed me, he said the machine brought in $26 total, which means $13 for him. Take out the $12.50/month ($150/12) and last month, he made 50 cents off that machine.

If you want to make $36 a day off a machine, you'll need something like a SF4 in a hot location. Keep in mind those machines are (or were) $20k.

[Collector_Gaming]

You couldn't make $36 a day off a Dig Dug cabinet at a Dig Dug tournament.

In Oklahoma, it costs $150/year per coin-operated machine. Most route operators split their incoming 50/50 with the location. One of my friends has a new Ms. Pac-Man machine at a local Pizza Hut. On the month he e-mailed me, he said the machine brought in $26 total, which means $13 for him. Take out the $12.50/month ($150/12) and last month, he made 50 cents off that machine.

If you want to make $36 a day off a machine, you'll need something like a SF4 in a hot location. Keep in mind those machines are (or were) $20k.

well no i was putting the statistic in as a what if scenario. I don't think any arcade game in history has ever had a statistic that i gave it.. But just for conversation purposes lets just say it did.

Would it pay for itself. After paying for the cabinet
Paying for its routine maintenance
Paying for the electric bill to run it

[WesternNYCollector]

On Auction Hunters they said Pac Man cabinets could make $600 a week back then they were first released, so it must be true!

[Collector_Gaming]

On Auction Hunters they said Pac Man cabinets could make $600 a week back then they were first released, so it must be true!

actually you may laugh now about that but they might not be far off with that.

Think about what time period that game came out in

the era....... the early 80s

People were rocking mullets, jamming to van halen, and driving trans ams and camaros like they were going out of style.

Things to do back then were malls (if you lived in a area fortunate enough to have a shopping mall in that era), Bowling Ally's, Beaches (if you lived on a coastal area. Thanks hawaii 5-0), hanging out at the local diner/dive ect ect ect.

What did all those places pretty much have? Arcade machines. And when arcades as we knew it started taking in this new craze called the Video Game a name that got passed around alot was pac man. People would show up by the hordes in your more populated areas to play this magical device displaying a yellow circle eating dots and ghosts around a maze setting.

and when you think about it a quarter at a time
4 quarters = $1
40 = $10
400 =$100
therefore 2400 = $600

and in the heart of a very populated city like in their case Atlanta home to probably in the early 80s probably around 400k or so maybe a lil less. does that sound so odd?

[Gapporin]

^^

And Space Invaders actually did cause a yen shortage in Japan, don'tcha know.

[WesternNYCollector]

The "exception that proves the rule", etc. etc.

I wasn't dismissing it outright, but it's obviously an extreme case.

[Collector_Gaming]

The only thing with PAC man though when you think about it. Going with my "best case scenario" meaning 36 dollars a day x 7 days in a week.
252 dollars. It's physically impossible for 1 machine to reach 600 bucks at one quarter at a time.
Even if you allowed that endless line of customers access to the game 24/7
That still equals 504 dollars.

[Leo_A]

The only thing with PAC man though when you think about it. Going with my "best case scenario" meaning 36 dollars a day x 7 days in a week.
252 dollars. It's physically impossible for 1 machine to reach 600 bucks at one quarter at a time.
Even if you allowed that endless line of customers access to the game 24/7
That still equals 504 dollars.

I don't know what you're going on about. Where did you come up with all of these figures?

600 dollars would've equated to 2400 plays. Assuming an average of 90 seconds per play, the game would've been occupied for 3600 minutes. And each week has over 10,000 minutes.

Doesn't seem outlandish to think that a Pac-Man cabinet in a popular location could've done such numbers back in 1981 and been busy 1/3 of each day. It certainly isn't physically impossible.

[Collector_Gaming]

I don't know what you're going on about. Where did you come up with all of these figures?

600 dollars would've equated to 2400 plays. Assuming an average of 90 seconds per play, the game would've been occupied for 3600 minutes. And each week has over 10,000 minutes.

Doesn't seem outlandish to think that a Pac-Man cabinet in a popular location could've done such numbers back in 1981 and been busy 1/3 of each day. It certainly isn't physically impossible.

bolded doesn't seem right unless we are talking people who are incapable of playing pac man lol. 90 seconds aka a minute and half would be a pretty damn quick game imo.


But anyways we are losing the main part of this topic..
How long does it take for a cabinet to pay for itself in the long haul

thats after paying for the machine itself, the electric bill and the routine maintenance and if you were to own a arcade.. take the rent of the area you have your arcade in.. grid it out to where each game takes up its own space/spaces and divide it by the rent so each arcade cabinet has its own cost of rental space i guess you could put it as.


A machine i thought about this morning was discs of tron which i would imagine is a power hog with all the lights and such.

[Leo_A]

It was just a reasonable number I used for my example. Maybe it's a bit conservative in this particular case, but it doesn't change much even if we raised it to 120 seconds or whatever the amount is that someone detirmined to be the average for the typical player back then.

Still very doable back in the glory years of arcade gaming for a major hit at a popular location (Although I'm sure 340 plays or so on one game in a single 24 hour period was just a dream for most operators even back in 1981). And it's certainly physically possible.

[Flack]

From my blog, last year:

For those that missed my post last week, I got a Kill-A-Watt for Christmas, a device that tells you exactly how many Kilowatt hours a device uses. Last Saturday I plugged the Kill-A-Watt into the wall, plugged my Centipede cabinet into the device, and let it run for almost 24 hours.

The cabinet actually drew much less electricity than most modern home computers do. Over 768 minutes, my Centipede only used only 1.46 kWh of electricity, an average of 0.11 kWh. That means this particular cabinet costs me 18 cents a day, $5.53 a month, and $67.27 a year if I were to keep it turned on 24/7. Since I only turn my machines on to play them, these things cost me essentially nothing to run. Even if I were to fire up all 25 games at the same time, I’m still looking at using only $4.50 a day in electricity. I have a few machines that have larger monitors, so I’ll probably run another test in the near future to see if that makes a noticeable difference.

In Oklahoma, a machine costs you $12.50 a month (the tax stamp I mentioned). The electricity of an average machine (like Centipede) costs me $5.53/month. That's $18 a month, so you would need to make at least $18 (72 plays) to break even.

After that you would need to know (a) how much a game costs and (b) how many times it gets played to have it pay for itself.

Then just cross your fingers and hope the monitor doesn't go out and set you back a couple hundred bucks.

[Baloo]

Really, today it's just not profitable to have a full-sized arcade and make money off of it through 25 or 50 cents a credit gameplay, ESPECIALLY if you want to run classics, as DreamTR's arcade has noted. Unless you're in some really high traffic area i.e a Boardwalk or popular mall, and you better have the moneymakers. Inflation has killed arcades, as you see the cost of a game hasn't gone up from a quarter or 50 cents from 1981. Not to mention that the biggest moneymakers like the newest Street Fighter, or DDR, or racing games are seriously expensive games to purchase.

While there are some arcades who fill that niche market of course, for the most part if you want to run arcades now you have to go with the flat rate per hour really. $10 a person an hour nets you a lot of money compared to that cheapskate player who comes in with two bucks and is able to play pinball or Ms. Pac-Man or Galaga for half-an-hour and then leaves. And if you've got all classics, you'll tap into that market of people like us who are willing to pay $10 an hour to play those classic games that we can't play at home in a nice environment. And with the advent of Craigslist, it's a bit easier to get arcade games now for fairly cheap prices. In today's market you can buy a Centipede cab for $200-300 if you look.

[Leo_A]

Charging 10$ an hour would likely kill much of your business. Not many people would be willing to pay such a rate, I bet.

[Gapporin]

Charging 10$ an hour would likely kill much of your business. Not many people would be willing to pay such a rate, I bet.

The 1984 Arcade in Springfield, MO charges their customers $5 to play as much as they want all night. They've managed to stay in business for six years running now.

[kafa111]

if you really want to earn money
get a highly valued arcade cabinet, play the demo. Disable the coin doors and make sure the refund button doesnt work.
never put a paper that says the machine doesnt work, if someone asks you for their money back call them liars

[Leo_A]

The 1984 Arcade in Springfield, MO charges their customers $5 to play as much as they want all night. They've managed to stay in business for six years running now.

And I was talking about a rate twice that, which I think would drive away more revenue than you'd be gaining.

I don't think the general idea is a bad strategy, I just don't think you'd get many takers at $10 an hour. It's a more than fair price, especially if the arcade has a large number of modern games. But you also have to keep in mind the mindset of the consumer with your pricing scheme.

Perhaps 10$ for 90 minutes or two hours would work well. I suspect many people wouldn't take advantage of the full allotment of time, yet you still get your $10 and the consumers feel like they were getting a better deal even though they probably didn't take advantage of the entire length of time.

[goatdan]

http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?t=156295

DreamTR breaks it down realistically.

To be fair, he noted that the games would make the same if they had 60 or if they had 125. And that's the thing, people only have so much money, and especially with classics it is more likely you're going to play Galaga than Galaxian. If you pull Galaga, maybe the Galaxian goes up a bit.

And that's the thing, at the end of the day the factors that go into it are SO BIG that you cant even really guess. Where the machine is located, how many machines are around, what the machine is, how the machine is maintained, how long the machine has been there, and a bunch of other factors go into it. I've worked at three different places with arcades in the last 10 years. One of them had a machine that turned over $500 / week. It all depends.

[otaku]

local operator here says even the well loved games (like big buck hunter in a bar) which can run 3-4k I believe he said can take years to pay off. Doesn't seem like a very good biz to be in unless your in a big city with good locations