Just got paid today, got me a packet full of change. Said I just got paid today, got me a packet full of change. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast. I am Alan, host of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast, one of the owners of Wedgehead, a pinball Bar in Portland, Oregon, for which this podcast is named. Joined in the basement studio with my co-host, Alex the Waterboy. Hey, how's it going? I'm Alex. I'm one of the owners of this house in which we're recording the podcast. Yeah, so today we're talking about something that Alan and I have gotten in fights about with other people in the past. We've had to explain to random people on our favorite pinball subreddit. Just something that's kind of a topic near and dear to both of our hearts both as a operator owner in Alan's shoes and just as a pinball player in my own shoes and that is pinball payment systems and how you're paying for games why operators do the things they do and you know the pros and cons of each system just kind of giving you guys an idea of why you run into this different shit yeah I think with a lot of players they have a preference there's two main splits but we're going to talk about kind of four different payment styles describe the pros and cons of each but some people like they like the a la carte pay per play only that i hate pre-play models whatever and then there's the reverse i'm not any good pay per play i go broke right makes me want to play less people like me it's like honestly i truly don't care as like the consumer right it's just like whatever you put in front of me i mean i have preferences i have things i mean we'll kind of get into them in here a bit but it's like i have feelings on this stuff but it will never dissuade me from playing pinball and i think that's the biggest thing is that it's like yeah as we'll as we'll talk about there's a reason operators do everything they do or the owners of these games arcades whatever do what they do it's not just to confuse you sometimes it's a little nefarious sometimes it's not it's just like yeah there's pros and cons pros and cons in each i think the first one we got to talk about is just straight cash quarters dollars right like i think some of the pros of this is no currency exchange needed if you have quarters you can just take those quarters throw them right in if you have a dollar bill it has a dollar bill acceptor you could throw it right in right yep pro for the customer no wasted money left in unspent tokens or cards yep there's a pro for the customer right yeah yeah i just like putting that disclaimer for the customer it's good pros for both people kind of yeah from the consumer and from the operator side so the next pro in this one's actually for the operator it's the easiest way to set up a game on route. There's no system needed to install. Like if you're putting two pinball machines into a bar, they come from the factory set up from quarters. You drop them off. The bartender can give the person quarters. You don't even need a quarter machine. You know, it's just currency. Like it's something that's been around for all of time. It's not confusing and it really is kind of the easiest for both sides of the party. Yeah, the players expect that too yes for sure and then uh next thing on the list is the nostalgia or the romanticizing of quarter coin drop which is definitely a thing i mean i've seen guys keep games in their house on quarter drop because they just love that feeling of dropping a quarter into the game every time and then they have to empty their own bucket and do it again they keep a little like dime jar you know a jar of quarters there i've seen it okay you're shaking your head because No, I mean, I believe you. I believe people are mentally ill, but I don't. I just, I know it exists. I was just like, I don't care. And then the last pro, which is a pro of every kind of payment model in here, other than free play, is that you can win free games for, you can get replays by playing well, or you can get a match. And people like that. People like the feeling of winning something. It makes you feel good, especially when you start getting into pinball and you start earning replays. That's the best feeling. Yeah. And that's one of the biggest pros, I think, to paying for games is chasing replays before you get to like chasing GCs is such a good benchmark. And it's something I still chase replay scores even when games are on free play. But it's it doesn't hit the same. It hits different when you're actually saving money. Yeah, because it's like, of course, as you get better with pinball, your money goes further. You're playing longer. But it's like that feeling of getting a free game because you're so goddamn good at pinball. like the first time your friends see you do that that don't play pinball they're like holy shit you can play more because you're better well they they say holy shit once you go out of your way to be like did you hear that loud knock sound uh do you know what that means they're like i don't care and you're like hold on let me tell you it's because it's because i hit a really good score and now it rewarded a free game and then they're looking at you like okay and you're like you should be impressed like this is very like this is very impressive you're not showing me the proper respect i've had people impressed yeah i'm sure megan's always impressed like megan's probably more impressed if i don't get a replay because she's like oh damn alex is sucking today what's going on here the last thing i want to say about straight cash is it's great for playing a game or two that's the best part and that's why i like seeing it if i if i'm just stopping by somewhere if you're just swinging through a place to play a couple games or whatever and then move to the next bar you don't want to have to deal with any other bullshit you want to just like you don't want to have to load a card you don't even really want to have to make tokens usually yeah you don't want to deal with anything straight cash that's the nicest part now the downsides i think this one's obvious we live in an increasingly cashless society it's the way it is you know having cash I mean, I'm sure there are old people that still like carrying cash and maybe some strippers or something. I don't know. But like service workers usually have cash. Yeah, we usually have cash. But for the most part, like I only carry cash because of pinball. Because of pinball, right? She doesn't. She has one of the little Apple wallets or whatever. So she has like a card and her ID and that's it. And it's like I carry cash because we play pinball. And so it's like I'm basically just carrying around pinball cash at any given point. even when I got into the hobby like 15 years ago, it already felt like that. Even when games cost less to play. At no point in my life had I, have I not just had a debit card that was accepted literally everywhere. I know it's barely young, but it's like, yeah, that's just when I was getting into pinball, I used to go to the bank every week and get $40 out, four rolls of quarters. And that would play that over the week. I was like the way I used to do that, but it was annoying. Cause I had to go bank, go on the bank sucks. Like, like, I just like annoy other. I don't know. I just always have to do, dude. Yeah. Carrying quarters round. Those are heavy, dude. You can see why people just leave them behind. Too heavy, dude. It's too heavy. I'm just a little guy. There's also like sometimes like if you don't have cash, right, they're always like, oh, well, we've got an ATM here. And you're like, cool, I'm going to pull out ten dollars to play pinball. And it's like, well, there's a three dollar charge from your bank for using a non-wells fargo atm and there's a five dollar charge on the atm it's you're like fuck i guess i'll pull out 80 to make this fee feel worth it yeah exactly god i hate yeah anytime i have to use an atm i'm so i'm immediately angry and then there's uh coin jams which is the worst yeah and games eating money it's funny because coin jams are such a regular part of the arcade the traditional like that nostalgia romantic arcade experience a lot of people don't even get mad like you'll see casuals just put quarters in and they'll be like oh it's just not working and they just start pumping quarters in the next one at the same time i'm kind of with them like it's not worth my 25 cents or 50 cents to go walk across a busy arcade like if it's don't find somebody yeah saturday night i'm not gonna go bother an employee about a coin i'm pretty good at smacking the shit out of a game and creating a scene to unjam a coin In short of that, you're like, I'm not going to bother someone for 50 cents. So as the consumer coin jams suck, as the operator, they're like the bane of your existence. They're kind of the bane, but also exactly what you just said. It's a really old kind of slimy operator thing. But there's a lot of operators that are just kind of like, I don't see what the problem is. They're like, well, sometimes the right slot eats coins. They're like, OK, right. Like, oh, because it's kind of in their favor. Right. Like they're kind of like, I think it's going to work out, which is shitty. It is shitty. It's shitty all around. Nobody likes coin jams. Nobody should like coin jams. Yeah. The next one on the list, some places don't have change machines. So you either need to go get quarters from the bank like Alan's talking about or go bug an employee and hope they have enough quarters for you, which small dive bars fucking love it when you go ask them for quarters in the middle of a Friday rush. Yeah. That's like the best way to make bartenders fucking hate you is when you're like, oh, can I get five more dollars in quarters? I do it once a week. Yeah, exactly. You still have to do it. Because there's some places it's like I go to Yukon Tavern, great little place like in Selwood here in Portland. They have four pinball machines. So it's like a decent little lineup. And they're aware they don't have a quarter machine because from the operator side of things, quarter machines are expensive. They're expensive. We'll talk about that. As much. Oh, yeah. It's the next one on your list. It's another piece of equipment that both has mechanical like errors. It's like a thing you have to maintain. And they cost about as much as a pinball machine. yeah which is insane they can cost low end you know like 1500 two grand yeah for some ratty shitty one six grand yep obviously you can buy these used okay operators do buy these things used you can pick them up whatever but i'm just saying like you want to get a new one you know there's a pretty big range atms cost about the same right like another two to six grand to get an atm if you want to get a dollar bill acceptor to put on your games people are more likely to have dollars on them than quarters dollars are easy to carry dollar bill acceptors on games cost 150 to 250 again unless per game unless you can find them you know used you can get them a little bit cheaper but not a lot cheaper usually yeah it's kind of just i don't know pain in the ass on that side of things just the whole exchange of getting into quarters is expensive for operators and it can be a pain for users it also makes you uh cash makes you target for theft and burglary you know like i suppose i'll give it to you oh yeah no 100 dude John Youssi that guy like approaching the bar they're asking for five dollars and quarters and you're like oh mr money bags over no not him no i mean from people from people breaking into the business to steal because they know you have lots of cash okay that is a thing that happens no that's 100 that half i'm telling you that happens dude people have been prying coin doors open off of pinball machines for decades dude i thought you meant like i was gonna get mugged for no not you not the consumer dude from the elementary school bully shaking me down no this is from the operator's perspective why you don't want to have lots and lots and lots of cash yeah your business right yep you gotta do a lot more runs to the bank i already said that if anyone here likes going to the bank be fucking fascinated to find that out i can't do an episode just on you yeah you'd be a fascinating human, you know, and lots of people will raid your change machine and they'll use it to avoid a trip to the bank themselves and use those quarters for their laundry machines. Yeah. Yeah. That's the annoying part. If you do have just a change machine, it's just going to get used for everything. Yeah. Parking meters, all the weird stuff that like people, people like, what? I need quarters. I'm not going to go all the way to the bank. Oh, there's that arcade. I'll just go grab a bunch of quarters out of it. Yep. And there's absolutely, you're providing a service for absolutely nothing. I think the end of the day, even for your own customers, you're like, you're not gaining anything from this you're just providing an expensive thing for them to use to hopefully support your actual business that's it i mean it's it's quarters like you guys have all used them you know how it goes for you on your side but it's like the operator side kind of sucks for quarters well here's the thing if you're running a route the only option it's the only option yeah really i mean you can run tokens if you can get with other i mean but tokens are essentially just quarters you need a difference with tokens it has all of the yeah so i guess we'll get into tokens yeah that's similar to cash but so why was an arcade go through the process of you're like well if they're already coins and quarters are coins and you're taking you're taking my cash to turn into these coins why do operators do it there's two big pieces to it is it's sunk cost immediately as soon as a person buys five dollars of tokens from you you're already making money even if they walk out of the place and they forget that they ever came there and they throw the $5 of tokens away, you're already up. People buy the tokens for whatever, 15, like half the price of a quarter. So it like you immediately up in that situation You not providing a service for free anymore Like you don want to just come there and get your tokens And i think the other big appeal of tokens to operators is that it will you you able to upsell people they might grab more tokens than they would have if they were just getting quarters i've seen some places do where it's like you're gonna get 21 worth of tokens for 20 and that's funny because it's like to me i'm like oh yeah for sure i'll do that and then i've definitely walked away from places that did that kind of shit with tokens in a foreign like in a different city and I'm like, fuck, they got me. They got me. Worked. Like, they got more of my money than I would have given them because they gave this slight discount. That's, I think, from the operator side, that's why John Youssi tokens. Oh, yeah. There's not... Because it's basically... I don't want to speak ill of tokens because I like tokens. I think they're cool. I think when people get custom tokens made for their arcade, that makes me, like, happy. Like, for me, that's more nostalgic than quarters. It's like seeing a token from an arcade that has a stamp of the arcade on it. I like seeing that. I always, when I visit arcades that I don't, like that aren't in my town or whatever, I always keep tokens from them. I have a whole bunch on my desk. So I kind of like tokens. It's like a souvenir. That being said, there's not any actual advantage to tokens from a consumer perspective. If you were going to go in and you were going to pay quarters for a game, but you come into my arcade and we're running tokens, I'm selling you four tokens for a dollar, just like I would give you four quarters for a dollar. so do you really not that different i mean you have to exchange currency that's the only difference yeah but me as the operator i'm like cool well i'm making 10 cents per token on the exchange rate because i'm buying them for 15 cents a piece instead of buying them from the bank for 25 cents a piece so i make money on the transaction then you're just it doesn't change anything for you as the customer i think it's only if someone walks away with the tokens then that comes into play Yeah, and people walk out of tokens all the time. People walk out of tokens all the time. And they walk out of quarters all the time. The beginning is it's already a sunk cost. Yeah. And so it's like I think that's the big appeal. You're going to make up for it with all of the money of tokens that walk out of the arcade and are never spent. Yeah, that's what I mean. It's like money that leaves because money leaves in a cash system. Yeah. Right? Like what I'm saying is if you give people cash, you're providing a free service for nothing. Yeah. If you change that to your own currency, a token, all of a sudden when somebody leaves, it's like a gift card. When somebody buys a gift card to Target, somebody doesn't spend all of the gift card. They spend $9. It was a $10 gift card. They never bother to spend the other dollar. You've made that without having to give them the service that they paid for. They paid in advance. But I guess what it would mean to the operator is the wear and tear on your machine is less. Yeah. Incrementally. It's only like profit. That's what I'm saying. It's like you're no longer providing. I get that. You're not providing a free service where you're exchanging currency freely. Just providing a bank service for free. Yeah. Yeah. That's why people do it. That's why operators do it. Yeah. Like that's why it makes more sense. It also means that you have to have less cash on hand. You still have to have cash because you're turning cash into tokens, but you can have less of it. Way less because you can just keep cycling them. Yeah. But it is a big upfront cost. You have to buy a lot of tokens. Yep. You know, and they're harder to get more. And you still have to maintain. It's like you have to have a quarter machine, but for tokens now. For tokens. You still have all the things with cash, but. But you have like that. You have people buying in essentially. Yeah. Yeah. Which I guess we kind of covered everything on our pros and cons list. The next one I think would be cards, which is the virtual version of tokens now. and it's something we're seeing more and more especially as you get into big barcades right was there anything else you want to talk about on tokens before we move on oh yeah the last thing i want to talk about tokens is they still in cash too and quarters a big part of this that we didn't cover when we're talking about cash was it's a lot of fucking labor like a lot of labor in an arcade yeah man there's a lot of fucking like not only are clearing coin jams every coin box has to be emptied counted yeah the change machines have to be refilled they have to be serviced and cleaned you have to have an atm you have to make sure those bills are filled then your bartender or a staff member if you have like a counter has to take 20s from the atm turn them into fives and ones the customer takes those fives and ones puts them into the change machine which turns them into quarters then they deposit their little johnny apple seed quarters or tokens in every machine around and it takes a lot of fucking time and labor like a lot of labor and when you have a big arcade it just multiplies that we just had to clarify that because there is one last thing and i think it's labor we used to do that at wedge rodsey still does it on his route i had to go help him with his route a few weeks back when he was on vacation it's a lot of fucking work doing doing coins man it's a lot of work it's just like a lot of like lugging shit around and it always it feels funny with me with the tokens because it's like this cycle like it's just like quarters into tokens and then you go fill up the token machine with the i mean you do it with cash too you take the quarters from the games just put them back in like god you're just spending so much time just changing shit around like moving this shit around yeah moving it around it's feeling very arbitrary it feels like a shell game yeah it used to drive me nuts that it drove me crazy that's why i pushed so hard for the free play system i was either talking about but we were going to go from coins to tokens at least or we were going to do free play we changed the model four years ago it was going to be one or the other because it wasn't going to be cash anymore i was like we got to do something we got to do something where we make a little bit more yeah there needs to be a way to adjust this we also had a neighborhood where we had a lot of people coming in training our change machine to go use for laundry or whatever would drive me nuts if i'm giving you tokens you can't use these yep right yep or yeah they probably could but you don't want to tell them that like it's probably if you use the token mechs they're the same size as the quarter mechs right but if you want to change them that's the other downside of tokens for the operator is having to change every mech now well you can keep the same mech but what happens and you'll hear operators that that run an arcade like that their biggest gripe when they run tokens is finding tokens from another arcade in their machines because that's stealing from them right like you paid a different arcade for those tokens and now you're using them but those tokens you didn't buy them for me yep so you're essentially stealing free games that sucks for the operator right like that sucks i think some customers are not really thinking yeah i don't think about it like that why does it matter it's a quarter it's i just bought it they don't the token is worthless as soon as you have it it's like the money that you gave for it is the only exchange of actual value totally and so some customers do it you know non-nefariously but it still sucks for the operator because it's basically stealing you can get around that because you can choose to put in different size token mechs yeah that aren't the most common size which come with the games which are basically quarter sized the mechs that take both that's why you get arcades that do that and then you can use them across them because it's the easiest and it's the cheapest you can get a different size token mech but then you got to buy two token mechs for every single machine you have and again those all cost money it's more money yeah 15 to 45 for a token maybe you can find an old operator sale or some ebay for a bunch of old ones right used but at the end of the day a lot of money a lot of time it's just a lot tokens are a hard one for me because it's like i as a consumer i like i said i kind of like them i don't really have anything against them they're not hard they're not complicated but it's just like man that sure seems like i'm not i don't know i see the advantages for the operator it's just like i'm always surprised it's worth like the juice is worth the squeeze on it oh it's 100 worth it but yeah i would do it if that's what we were going to do if we didn't do free play for sure yeah that makes sense the next one we're going to talk about is a card system which is kind of this what i started getting into is it's kind of updated take on the tokens it has basically all of the advantages of the tokens without all of the disadvantages of coin drop like no more coin jams no more labor of moving all this shit around it's another one of these systems you can only really implement at an actual dedicated arcade or somewhere large because you need to have it this is a huge investment from the operators huge the individual card scanners on have to go into every machine you need the kiosk where people can get these cards or you can sell pre-loaded ones at the bar or whatever but regardless any way you go about it it's a huge upfront cost but it's a very nice system for operators i can 100 understand why operators do this it's also by far well no we'll get into one option that i like less but it's the thing i really don't like using cards as a consumer explain it so you go up it's like it's like going on a token like right if you go to a token machine generally a token is worth one quarter it's very easy you drop in 10 bucks and you get back 40 tokens or whatever and every game is set up three tokens four tokens you know this is a quarter this is 75 cents a buck when you go to card systems most of them you spend 20 and it'll assign you any arbitrary credit number they can set it up they could the operator can configure it however they want and my biggest gripe with the cards is that they intentionally make it difficult to track those numbers in your head you might be thinking like well alex is dumb and can't do simple division in his head these are at barcades you're drinking you're paying attention to shit you go spend twenty dollars it gives you forty five hundred credits or some shit you walk up to a pinball machine and it says it's 135 credits for a play what the fuck is that that's not dollars it's not like none of this yeah they turn the money into an arbitrary system where you have no idea what you're paying in in my opinion this is obviously intentional you can talk to operators they're like oh no that's just the way it came bullshit this is an intentional thing that you do to confuse your poor drunk alex patrons it just makes it really really hard to tell what's what what you're paying for things you aren't paying attention you just load the card you go play games have fun and honestly like there's one place in town that if you're from Portland, you know which place uses these. I don't really care there because their games are cheap enough. I'm not worried about it at all. They're not like scalping me. It's just confusing. I have no idea what their games cost. Yeah, you can say it's ground control switched over to a card system. Everyone knows. I have no fucking idea what I get. And it's funny because it's like, I assumed the first time I went in there, I'm like, well, they must be doing this so they can charge over a buck a game, right? That's why I'm so confused right now. And then we talked to an employee and they're like, oh no, the games are actually mostly 66 cents um which is cheap some of them are like 80 cents some of them are a dollar and i was like what the hell man like this should be a feature this is a selling thing if you're if you're only charging 60 cents you should make sure people know yeah people should know that you hear alex is very impassioned here's the thing is he's not the only one to me yeah i really don't care i will agree with the sense that i don't like when they do that i don't like when they change it to credits quote-unquote credits and some weird number especially when they make it a really high number like you put in ten dollars and you get yeah 4,500 credits you're like why are you doing this yeah it's not just pennies because if it was pennies I'd be like okay easy yeah if you put in 20 bucks and you got like 2,000 credits or whatever and then you walk up to a game and it's 80 or 800 credits and you're well that would be eight dollars I guess you know what I'm saying It would be easy to follow then, but that's not how I've experienced these cards ever. I think that it's got to be a thing where the people that make these card reader systems, the salespeople, they're trying to sell the business who just dumped tens, tens of tens of tens of thousands of dollars to move your whole fleet over. In some cases, over $100,000. If you have a large arcade with lots of machines, they're trying to be like, oh, but this is going to make you so much more money. And here's one of the ways to do it is don't let them know that one dollar and you get four credits. Like, don't let them know that it's to the quarter. Right. Step one is immediately remove any idea of what people are paying. And that's what John Youssi at the big box arcades. Dave and Buster's. Right. You go to there's a big Al's up here in Vancouver. But any family entertainment center that uses cards, they're guilty of doing that because they don't want the kids to know. They don't want the parents to know. And that part kind of sucks. The rest of them, I will... I think it's actually a good system. It allows for... Okay, first of all, it's not... It's very easy to carry a card around, like just on a user base. It's so much nicer than carrying around 20 bucks of tokens or quarters in your pocket. The card's pretty slick. 1,000%. That's what I like about them. It allows incremental increases in price, which kind of sucks from a consumer perspective, but it's certainly better than going 75 cents to a buck if they go 75 cents to 80 cents. Or, you know, it allows for different pricing options. It also allows for really easily implemented promotions where they can make, oh, this game, like, these games are half price, half price pinball on Wednesdays. Yeah. Because they can just go through software and do that, which is sick rather than going through the menus. That's so cool. Like it allows for very nice stuff but it just the implementation is always a little intentionally confusing And that why I hate it That the only reason It's just it's really because it's like, I don't know what the fuck I'm paying for stuff. And that drives me nuts. Overall, though, it's actually pretty nice. It's the same as tokens where you put $20 on and you might walk out of there. And if you're in a different city, you might never get the $5 you didn't spend back. When you're a regular pinball player, anyone listening to this podcast is. You're going to get it back. You're going to get it back. Yeah. It's like, I guess I probably have a couple Ground Control cards. Eh, I don't know. I usually make sure, I usually run them out and then toss them, or I will make sure I'm actually pretty good about grabbing them when I go there or whatever, and so I bring them back. Ground Control is a sick arcade that everyone who visits Portland probably already knows about, should definitely go. Ground Control is, like, the good example of a proper barcade. Yeah, they were the first ones to do it, even though somebody else trademarked the name and will sue everyone for saying that. but they invented it before the people that named themselves Barcade. Ground Control was the first. They're probably still one of the best, if not the best. So if you're in Portland, you should stop by. Yep, go get yourself a card. But yeah, I think it allows you to, you can do bulk buy discounts on these, like Alex was saying, that you can do with tokens. Yeah, some of the same advantages. It's good when stuff goes unredeemed, just like tokens for the operator. It also acts as like an advertisement. you have this card that's in your wallet, you open up your wallet to pay for something else, and you're like, oh yeah, I got this card. In the same way that you have tokens, right? Unspent tokens are like, oh, I should go back to that place because I already paid for it, it's essentially free now, right? But then you're going to pay more when you get there, right? So it allows people to come back in in a way that straight cash doesn't. Yes. Some of the downsides, we already talked about it. The most expensive option, you get stuck with a contract to do ongoing service. It's different depending on the service, but they get you roped in yeah they get you as the operator you have to use it i think i'm surprised you didn't mention this one but i know this is your biggest one is that they're usually ugly as fuck like yeah i don't want to be like mean bad aesthetics right look like the card scanners are almost always like rgb strobing full rainbows it's amazing because they're rgb so you think it would be like configurable and maybe they are but people like them strobing rainbows just to get attention but they also have a screen they have an lcd screen on them to tell you how many fucking flurbos it's gonna cost every mark larks yeah just some made-up currency what it's gonna cost so they have an lcd screen which is already bright and stands out vividly against any good looking arcade game as a blight and then they put a rainbow rgb strobing around it like a rope light they look like ass they stick out like four inches from the yeah we're always they're so fucking ugly and that's my honestly that is the biggest gripe about them and it's like goddamn like you made this thing they cost like hundreds of dollars per machine or whatever to put it on you're like man you couldn't have made it not look like shit some old games you have to like cut a hole in your coin door to make them work right where the dollar bill acceptor goes so if it's not a coin door with the dollar bill acceptor you're like good luck man it's a shame because it's like i know ground control they for example like have some ems or whatever that were specifically pulled from the floor because it's like we don't want to cut these up to put a card yeah and you're like that sucks yeah because now they're not gonna they used to usually always have like 1 em on the floor uh now they don't and i get it like if it was my game i wouldn't be cutting it yeah i wouldn't cut into it either that's you're like that's the worst part yeah it's funny that i didn't even think about i was just thinking so hard about the currency shit but it's like yeah they are very very ugly yeah in the last con we talked about it but this is the most hated system oh yeah i don't know why it's the one people bitch about people bitch about which i don't get because i actually really from a consumer when i'm playing i love the card system yeah like i think it's rad to have one card i just have it in my wall like i'm just like this is sick like it's so much better than coins to me but i think people because they're not carrying it around physically like like uh tokens they will coin up a card way more they're more inclined to you're like you go up to the kiosk you're like fuck it i'll pull it through 40 right yeah totally the end of the night and you've gone through 25 you got 15 left on your card and you're like fuck i got 15 bucks left on this thing still that's when people get mad at it i think you're right could do the same thing with tokens you could get yourself in that same situation with tokens but no one's carrying 40 tokens around in your pockets would be absurd and so i think that's where the disdain comes from again i use my shit up so i those those don't bug me but that's also a huge part of the appeal of these like tokens is that you get that sunk cost a ton of people i would love to know how many unused dollars there are floating on ground control cards in the world because it's like if you have a you know errol told you that there's a lot you don't have to say the number yeah but you it's significant significant sums of money at the end of the year that never got redeemed yep right yeah yeah i'm not i don't want to give away other people's earnings but i will just say it's like that just never got spent yes it's a lot of money a lot of money to buy you know pinball machines yeah to buy pinball machines yes yes okay we'll leave it at that so that's the big pro i think that's the biggest pro for the operators is the unutilized money flowing out there oh yeah no it's good it's it's good and bad for the operator yeah like like all of these they all have pros and cons like in the last one we're going to talk about which is the setup at wedge the free play model also has pros and cons but i would say the only thing that i bothers me about cards i hate when i go to tap it and it's like the lag yeah you're like the lag feels bad to me i just wish it could just be like i wish there was something like i wish you like scanned it like or something the scans used to work better when they used to have the scans you're right yeah it's like and you will see that at like ground control you'll see games coined way up where it's like there will be a game sitting there with like five credits on it and you're like someone didn't realize that it was working because they were probably waiting for the ball you know if it's a casual they probably hit the tap they don't see a ball eject they hit the tap again they don't see a ball eject they just keep trying it and now there's five credits on black the other thing that happens is if you if you put the card in your front pocket and you're standing up to play a game it will start coining up games yeah there's a bling bling bling right like and that's a little bit insidious too i think it's like i think that's an intent like it's obviously not it's not unintentional right like they could fit they could they went back to magnetic strip scanners like it would probably yeah i guess you have to clean those and shit yeah i don't know anyway frozen cons to everything cards and yeah they're definitely the most contested so last option what you have running a wedge head is the free play model which is where you pay entry fee and then games are free yeah it's a flat fee for a specified time limit it's essentially the buffet model, right? Everything we talked about before was sort of an a la carte model. When you start getting into bulk buys, like loading a card, that sort of blurs the line a little bit. You're still paying. But you're still paying per play. Yeah. Free plays, all you can plunge. Some people do it by the hour. It's most commonly done by the day. Yes. And that's what we do. We do it by the day. So ours is $12, all you can play all day, every day of the week. We do that. A lot of the biggest locations in the country, the super locations, places that have a hundred or more machines, they run free play. It's becoming, I think, the most common and we'll discuss it now, but it's like, it makes sense. It makes a lot of sense when you're going to a big museum, like we have Next Level out in Hillsborough, they're on free play. What are they adding out? 22 bucks. 22. Yep. Yeah. Which is, this is another thing you'll hear a lot of pinball players bitch and whine about free play because they're such a good player they could play all day for five bucks before and now they have to pay 12 or 22 or whatever it is such a good deal when you look at like the lineup that like next level has and when i think of how many games i play out there when i go out there for three or four hours you're like i'm getting my 22 bucks worth absolutely it's just from the user perspective it's like the downside is that if you want to stop in for a game or two you're not going to want to pay 20 bucks you're not going to want to pay 12 bucks or whatever but it's like if you're hanging out for any amount of time which like if you're there to play pinball and the places doing this are generally pinball destinations right yeah and that's i'm kind of skipping around here i'm kind of maybe yeah you're jumping around points but i think a big part of the appeal to owners or to operators is that it does make your place a location or like a destination yeah it's like people anchors the customer too yes so when you get when you're running on cash people can go I only want to spend $5. So they can only spend $5. They can take $5, turn it into tokens. When they run out of money, they just leave. Or they loiter or whatever. When you have a free play model, they can't do that. They can't just loiter and not spend money. And you're basically price setting. So when somebody pays you an entrance fee, they're going in their head, they're going, well, I got to make this worth it. So then they got to play. Yeah. Again, if you're going to a place to play, it shouldn't be that hard. but for some people they really struggle with it and they don't like it we said cards are the most hated free play i think is the second most hated yeah right because i think most people prefer cash if they had to choose one and then tokens i think most people are like yeah it's basically cash whatever right and then cars jump down but there's also a whole segment of people that like free play a lot right yes it's one of those things that people will like people will whine in the portland area we have wedgehead we have next level i guess we got star tropics now like so we have free play options ground control does free play days twice a month yeah and so we have it here and people take it for granted here and then you'll see elsewhere online where people are like when you get into the hobby and i will say this from personal experience it's like when you get into the hobby and you're burning through 20 in like an hour you would kill for any kind of play option Well, we can just talk quickly about our trip. Alex and I just went on a cross-country trip, and we went to Ohio, and we went to Indiana, and we'll do an episode about that trip later. We went to a great arcade called Pastimes in Girard, Ohio. Amazing. Absolutely stunning collection of rare old games. Their entrance, their free play arcade, $20. 400 pins. Unbelievable. Yep. right we played two full days there for 40 for 40 we went to another incredible incredible location that was coin operated called wizard world in fort wayne indiana fort wayne pinball wizard's world they they there's some confusion about the naming there yeah we go there we spent 40 in probably five hours of playing now granted we're not playing like you you can get more for your money i understand and that's some people's argument is like well i would only play godzilla where i can have a 30-minute game for one dollar and we were playing flight 2000 where we were to get the shit kicked out of us over and over and over yes what we want to play like when we i mean alan and i both put our money where our mouth is and when we were there we probably played the meanest games only yeah then yes and no we played because for after a while i started once we started blowing through cash then we started going to the new stern so we could stack replays and and be like no we still got some money left we still got some money left yeah no totally and about that we both look over we see each other on the bank of new sterns and it's like oh yeah i ran out of quarters too yeah i'm like i'm gonna stack a bunch of bond replays right now as soon as you get down to your last dollar you start thinking about that shit yeah yeah it's kind of nuts because it's like 40 hours over the course of a few hour five hours or whatever that was yeah versus $40 for two 12-hour days. Yeah. We got our money. Obviously, like, we flew across country. We were going to go to these spots anyway. So, like, it was a destination. I understand that you could go to a spot like Fort Wayne Pinball and just go there and just go, I'm only going to spend $5 today, and then walk out and then leave. Yeah, if I live down the street from Fort Wayne, I might do that. First of all, both of those locations are rad, which is my point of this whole episode is, I don't fucking care how you take my money as long as the pins are great yeah if the pinball is great i don't care i really don't because even at a free play model if i had to spend 20 25 to get in doesn't matter to me i will absolutely pay play 25 to 50 to 75 games of pinball while i'm there yeah and it'll be totally fine that's the pinball on location specifically is a cheap hobby and none of these options operators don't do any of this to like get one over on the customer you might see some ways where they're kind of padding their margins a little tight but it's like we're talking about like like a 10 percent difference it's not like someone's like oh i'm gonna switch to token so i can charge people two dollars a game instead of one and they'll never know like no people will know yeah you're playing within like the same rule book here so any which way as long as the consumer is not completely brain dead about things and leaving a hundred dollars on a card that they only use ten dollars of or whatever it's like there's not really a bad way about it no i mean they're just different strokes like when you only have time for a couple games having a machine on coin play or tokens is easier or better if you have more time unlimited absolutely especially if you get an entrance for the whole day man you can really get that price down to 10 cents a game it insane if i really want to start bringing a clicker with when we hit up big spots for full days and count how many games Oh play yeah we should because i would be very curious it like when we were at past times it like hundreds and hundreds of games because we were playing ems and i would just love to know what we paid per game because it'd be pennies oh yeah we will next time i guess i should go from the operator's perspective why did we change right i get asked this all the time why did we change to free play well we were going to go out of business if we didn't that's it really like we we were open we were still running games at like 50 cents a play like dumb stuff right like we were trying to be like hey it's cool because it's cheap that was stupid chasing okay yeah we were racing to the bottom and that's a whole thing for another episode that i think operators still do they think they're like oh but they're not gonna like me they're gonna because you will hear squeaky wheels in the pinball the pinball player base can be some of the cheapest motherfuckers you'll ever meet and they're they're convinced that you're making a shitload of money as an operator and you're fucking not like, I can tell you that right now, but the reason why we switched, it's the cheapest way to do it, right? Like we sell wristbands. Those wristbands cost us like two cents to make. There's no investment upfront, no investment upfront. I don't need change machines. I don't need ATMs. I don't need to empty cash boxes, no labor for it. I'm saving in a wristband on way more labor. Yeah. I'm saving dozens of hours of, you know, I'm saving probably, I think at Wedge with our 24 games, I think, you know, probably saving about, you know, 10 to 15 hours a week of labor just in moving money around, like not doing anything, just moving money around, which is labor I did. Right. So I'm not really paying myself more to do it, but it used to piss me off. And it takes that those took hours away from other stuff I could be doing. The other thing is that, you know, we can no more coin jams, no more games, eating money, No more like having to go get a bartender because like the quarters aren't working and something. You already have to do that with ball sticks, right? Like machines break, right? Like I hate it freeing coin jams. It's one less like, yeah, one less moving piece on a pinball machine. Yeah. It also, it flattens kind of the cash flow peaks and valleys to make the revenue more reliable and easy to predict. It's basically the buffet model. again if you look at the room and there's 50 people there you know that 50 people spent a baseline level of money rather than there could be 50 people in there but there could be 20 of them that are just loitering just watching their friends play there could be some sharks in there that are just stacking replays or they're waiting for casuals to walk away they get a match it cracks they don't know what the fuck that is and they go oh check it out no looks like another free game for me right yeah which has always been a thing with operators you know like sometimes you're the best players pay the least yeah which is always always the best players will play the pay the least per game that's the problem with pinball is like it's really hard for new players to get into it because it's extremely expensive when you're bad at it and that's what i was going to say is probably the biggest pro to me as someone that it's like you know i'm a i'm a decent pinball player i can get i can stretch my money pretty far if i want to or whatever especially like we said if you start playing modern sterns and stuff but the biggest pro about playing at wedgehead or anywhere on free play is that it's like i can show up and there's no anybody else there play a game with me it's not costing i'm not talking them into spending another dollar they wouldn't have spent otherwise if someone's there they can play as much pinball as they want like guilt free and i i just love that like it's like oh yeah i can show up with megan and it's like we can sit there and play a solid state the whole day and like not think twice about like putting money in. Whereas like if we show up somewhere else and we're playing like a Flash Gordon or something just kicking our ass, you're going to play like three games on and then you're going to be like, yeah, maybe we should move back to, you know, the Deadpool or wherever where we'll play for the next hour and a half. It just really opens up like the opportunities to play. And I really like just playing with other people, especially like in those kind of situations. It opens up a new market. Yeah. Actual players like it. New players like it. If you're honest with yourself and you play pinball, the hardest thing is to get new players in. play is much easier to get new players in because they go oh okay that's twelve dollars i just spent twenty five dollars to go see dune to go see a movie and i right like i go see the new spider man movie yeah like this is cheap like i could play all these games all day right so that's good it opens up the potential market and that breeds new pinheads i think it's it's easier especially when you're first getting into it this pinball is very difficult and it's a skill-based game it's hard for new players but even as an experienced player like we said we just went on that trip every time i go out to next level i fucking play and if i don't if i don't like if i'm only there for an hour and i don't spend you know i don't play 22 dollars worth of games i go so what the average for me like on those on it over time it's so well worth i don't know i always it's up to you to make it worth it if you don't have enough time all of these things like if you're complaining about any one of the payment methods in particular, you kind of just need to like look at why. And you're like, well, just don't be dumb about it then. Like, don't stop and like, of course you're not going to go to a free place if you've got 20 minutes to kill before work. Like, yeah, there's plenty of bars you can go play a game. It's not good if you don't have a lot of time. If you only want to play two or three games, that's not good. You know, from the business perspective, you do need an active employee to sell access. Yes. And then you have to police the room. Yep. So that sucks. Obviously you can't do this like on route. again on route is not that feasible and and that's a big con too is like your staff always has to tell people the same thing over and over again you have to constantly explain to everyone like even if it's the first thing on your social media your website your front door you have a giant hanging sign for your pinball room it's the first thing to post on every menu speaking from experience people still go who what like people are still confused people who what you can sell you can tell people over and over like yeah it's 12 and then it's free all you can play and they'll walk up there and start trying to put quarters into a game yeah it's exactly insane yeah so you do have to deal with that if you're a free play place the last thing we got to talk about because people bring it up is it makes replays meaningless and some players call this there's no stakes there's no stakes when you're playing a free play yeah which is true kind of i mean depends on how you get it we've talked about this kind of because it's like i can definitely see that side and like i like i mentioned when you're getting for replay or when you're getting replays when you first get of the hobby that's like a great feeling and I do enjoy chasing that and I do think it can be problematic when you kind of get into that mindset on free play where you're just like restarting after a bad ball one every time because you're like well it's free I'm gonna just restart I'm just shooting for the GC I'm not gonna waste my time after a bad ball one like we've talked about this previously and I think for us the big the stake isn't the money once you've been playing pinball for a while the stake isn't the 50 cents it's like your time and I want to play like if I'm playing pinball by myself if i'm there bullshitting with friends that's one thing but if it's like if i'm playing by myself i want that game to be like a gc game i'm not ever just playing half-heartedly if i'm by myself yeah and i think that's why to us this argument never makes sense because it's like well what the fuck are you even doing standing at the pinball machine what do you mean there's no stakes like there's always stakes until you're the gc and yeah you and i are like that yeah so I can understand that argument. I disagree. I think if you think about it that way, you need to create the stakes for yourself. Maybe I don't have like a good way to win you over to my side, I guess. It's just to me, it's like some people romanticize it. it again everyone has their preferences like you don't like cards some people are like it has to be coin drop only i they're like offended by the idea of free play that's their own thing to me i think you're missing out on some of the best locations on the planet uh i'm not i'm not putting ourselves in that category but like all of i mean at this point it's like what are you going to have like a stand against free play and you're not going to go to like some people do that you're not going to go to past times that's what i mean go to like all the spots you're not going to go to the pacific pinball museum you're not going to go to district 82 in wisconsin like You're not going to go to these meccas of pinball where people put these crazy rare games out and spend all this time and energy and make sure they work. I've heard multiple people go, and they must have terrible free play joints near them, and I feel bad for them. Because I've heard this, they go, well, usually if it's on coin drop, it's an incentive for the operator to fix their games. If you're getting their money at free play, they can just let them rot. I've heard that specifically because of one place in Florida. Sure. I've like traced it down a few times on Reddit where people are like, oh, every time I've played coin or free play, the machines are just abandoned because they already got your money. Like exactly what you said. They don't they don't care anymore. They don't need to win you over. So it's like always like, oh, they got like a Shrek that's half working. And it's like one place in Florida. I have never experienced a place on free play with shitty playing games. Yeah, I'm sure it 100 percent happens. I have no doubt because people say that all the places that I've been where where I played free play. have been pinball meccas that are wonderfully maintained games i will say that it's funny to hear that argument come out because and there's a prevailing notion that pinball machines are shitty and broken and left to rot by operators running a route where they're on coin play people act like it's on coin play that you can't play broken shitty fucking games like you absolutely can like i've had such yeah it doesn't matter it's about who's running the joint and who's taking care of it because there are great locations that do every one of these every one of these payment systems there's some great location somewhere that's utilizing it and doing it well and at the end of the day to me as a pinball player i really don't care the reason why we do it i think we said it's easier for us cuts down on labor gets more casual players in gets new blood in we make more money it's more consistent we don't end up with those days where the pinball room is full there's not really the money associated with it right because now it's like an inch you're like everyone that walks through the door if you want to play pinball it's twelve dollars so we know we're getting twelve dollars from everybody now twelve dollars you're not a good player you can play that you can lose twelve dollars in less than an hour right like 30 minutes if you're a good player the only thing i will say is there's lots of players out there that they're think that there's some high level player and they're really mid-level at best and they're thinking about playing these broken shitty games with factory scores that they can exploit or follow kids around and snipe their match credits if you're playing good proper working games set up hard you can't fucking play all night on five dollars you can loiter all night for five dollars yeah you can't play all night here's the thing is like i know alex and i we're both very good players we talked about going to wizard world we each spend forty dollars being there five hours i gc'd multiple games there yeah multiple games like at a place where they host a lot of tournaments left multiple GCs there. We're good players. That's. And we can still get through our money and a free play. You know what I mean? I'm saying it's like, yeah. Yeah. It's all about mindset, right? It is. And I think a lot of people are just biased against shit without thinking it through. So. Well, if you have a bad experience at one, if you have a bad card reader experience, I can see how that sours you on card readers. If you have a bad. Well, we always come back to like one bad experience. Like if you play one bad copy of a game, you might hate that game for the rest of your life. And it's like, don't think like that. Be open-minded, try stuff, play games when they play good, and just, I don't know, go play more pinball and quit whining, quit trying to blacklist places because of choices the operator made. Choices the operator made just so they can keep offering you the best quality pinball for you to play on location. At the end of the day, it's a pretty good deal no matter how they charge you for it. Yeah. Really. I will always support a good operator and so should you. No matter what it is near you, coins, tokens, cards, free play, pay range if you have to. Oh, God. Which we didn't bring up, but we're not going to. So until next time, everyone, go out, play some pinball on location, have a good time. Pay for it however you can. Pay for it however you can, however they're asking. Hopefully this was illuminating to you for some of the pros and cons. If you're ever confused, I hear lots of people all the time always seem to be confused, always speculating. Why do they do it like this? It should be like that. Why don't they do that? They should do this. There's pros and cons to each of them. I hope we covered each of them pretty well. And until next time, good luck. Don't suck. Bitch, give me your money Who y'all think y'all frontin' on? Like, blah, blah, blah Louis 13 and it's all on me Nigga, you just bought a shot Kamikaze, if you think that you gon' knock me off the top Shit, your wife in the backseat of my brand new foreign car Don't act like you forgot I call a shot, shot, shot Like, blah, blah, blah Pay me what you want Don't act like you forgot Bitch better have my money Bitch better have my money Pay me what you want Bitch better have my Bitch better have my Bitch better have my money