I just believe that there's multiple ways to do everything. And I just think like, that's why I like talking to operators in different regions and hearing what works for them and their location and why and how it's done for them. My personal take the short version before we get to the end of this episode is when I put a new Stern game out, The reason why it valuable to me as an operator is that I can put it out You fuckers are going to come in and play it no matter what We have insiders set up on all of our stuff so if you coming in to collect your badges or your weekly badges or whatever it's there, you know what I mean? Yeah. But to me, I'm trying to get you to come in and play Mystic, that we just put a new play field into, that we completely restored. Those games, I feel like I have to sell you as like, this game's rad, and here's why. I have no problem with people playing our Dungeons & Dragons from stern so like why am i pushing it at all if anything i need to take some people that were going to play dungeons and dragons yeah you get them to play mystic you're trying to distribute them but you also are in like a pinball city where people are seeking out the new stuff naturally because we already are but like marcus is doing the same thing he's operating games of all eras so i'm going like he has a sing-along we have a sing-along our sing-along is to the point where we only bring it out during the holidays and when we fucking take that game off the floor I fucking hear about it dude people are like why did you pull sing-along out and I was like dude it'll be back in the winter dude you know like yeah especially like that's a that's a small two-inch flipper em yeah you know think about how crazy that is to like other operators that listen to the show think about how crazy that is that like I could put a wedge head in a single player Gottlieb short flipper em and like people are pissed that it's gone you know and why do I get that it's because i focus on being like sing-alongs rad yeah if you don't think so you can come into wedgehead and you'd be like what game do you like i was like let's go play some games on it by the end of us playing games on world beauties or any of our solar like any solar city or any of our ems i guarantee you you're going to leave with a different impression of what an em can be and how much fun it can be or any classic solid state or whatever and so that's how i view it as my role i'm trying to be like hey yeah yeah the new stuff's good this old stuff is pure dope though you know what i mean like i'm gonna show you why this is dope and we're gonna play together we're gonna have a good time i do the same thing with league because every league night we play four games one em one early solid state one dmd and then a modern so the and i love that's how our players get fall in love with the older stuff 100 you gotta get people they don't draw people in naturally anymore for a variety of reasons and so it's like you have to sell years old you have to sell the old stuff but then it's like people get it once they start playing them that's the hard part and speaking of speaking of like we kind of have been hopping around here on the order or whatever but getting back to having all eras of games represented your games on coin drop what kind of earnings do you see across eras of games is it very clearly like newer makes more money and it just is a linear scale back or how's that how's that do for you because sometimes you get surprising results yeah it is it's it is stern because the modern sterns because and i have a toy story four out but they're they're a buck a play six plays for five bucks kind of a deal you know they have the highest sticker price and they also make the most i have all my dmds on 50 cents i might bump them to 75 yeah and then uh after that it's 50 cents for early solid state and then a quarter for ems i don't know how to make it more than a quarter on em do you you can't i mean it two inch flipper two inch flipper game is a quarter i wouldn't i mean i think it's like part of it to me if i was going to do anything sometimes ems especially really hard ems sometimes you know it's going back to getting them like three plays for a dollar or three plays for a quarter or something if they're really brutal and can play fast that's the one nice part about wedge well there's we've done a whole thing about payment options or whatever right but a really nice part about wedgehead being entry fee is that it's like you don't even have to worry about it and people just kind of like play what they're drawn to and they don't even think about what it's costing them which is nice i had a quick question for you in 30 you had 30 of in of sales comes from your arcade now is i think what you said on a podcast once from pinball pinball revenue it's like 28 to like 30 depending on the month a lot how did that change when you went from coin drop to cover Oh, it more than doubled. Okay. So cover more than doubled revenue. Yeah. See, I'm thinking about moving that direction myself, honestly. It more than doubled. I think we were looking at basically when we were on Coindrop, we had the same kind of pinball room. And so the same number of machines and it was basically like 14% of our revenue before we moved to FreePlay. And now it can be like 28 to 30%. So it has like basically doubled it. It's cool. It's really interesting seeing who's enthused about like an entry fee free play arcade versus who complains about it. Oh, yeah. And we did that whole episode talking about kind of like the pros and cons to every payment method. but it's just especially for like being in a small town and trying to grow the scene it seems like a really strong contender to me for at least trying free play it's it sucks because it's a pain in the ass to switch all your games over to free play so you can't really just flip a switch and do it one day a week i mean you can but damn that's a lot of work oh yeah it's a lot of work like you yeah trying to switch 20 games over to free play and you're like dealing with ems and shit oh that would suck honestly the ems are sometimes easier because it's just like a yeah it's like a jones plug yeah if you have access to the back of the game i know i know because it's like okay pull the game away from the wall i know i know take the panel oh it's a no i i mean i've seen arcades that that do that the old school way ground control used to do that they used to do i mean they still do now but now they're on a card system so it's easy for them to switch from free play to back or whatever back in the day when they were only on coin drop they used to like once and then it became twice a month where they would do free play nights and that seems like a nightmare because They have 40-something pinball machines, and then they have probably 100 arcade cabinets or more. And I was like, that seems like a nightmare, dude. My buddy in South Dakota that had an arcade, he would always have people before he had a payment system or whatever, when it was just all physical quarters, and he would have people be like, oh, can you do private events? Can you put the games on free plays? Like, I don't want to. Part of it is, like, we realized that, like, we had so many people that wanted to have events and have parties. and the number one thing always always always was we want to provide as the party host gaming we want to provide free gaming and we're like well we can sell you quarters nobody liked it same like nobody like the same as just being like it's free go up play as much as you want yep yep and so that has helped us book parties for sure it's just really interesting so that's one thing that just since you're asking about it i if you do end up switching in the future i'd be very curious how what goes for you. I really, to me, as someone that got into pinball, I would just would have been like a game changer. I would have been so excited to have a free play pinball spot when I was getting into pinball. It allows you to be a junkie about it for sure. It allows you to just go out there and just like practice. Yeah. Yeah. It's basically you're changing Marcus. The way it is, is like you're changing it from being like, here's my set margin price per game is this. I have to split it with the location. My split is this. So the price has to be this so it makes it worth my time to put these games buy these games put them out maintain them all that kind of stuff yeah and it changes it to me like i don't care if you get while you're at wedgehead your your pay per play down to 25 cents go wild what i'm doing is i'm i'm raising the floor of what you were going to spend you can no longer come in and spend two dollars and then leave you you now have to spend twelve dollars you could play all day and buy nothing else but then also maybe if you're there maybe now you're hungry you get a burger which we offer yeah maybe you get a beer pokemon booster packs yeah which we don't offer that's funny because our game zone does offer the pokemon well there you go i saw they had cards i was looking at people would be buying those cards okay we should move on though we got to keep this moving so we already talked about the location and the business and that partnership we talked about your game lineup and setup and everything. Your next big thing on here is starting a league. Why are you such a big fan of league? League builds community. Tournaments creates winners and losers. I think that's a very good takeaway, honestly. Yeah. So our league runs six weeks, kind of like I think another one of your guys did. I think a similar way. We run six weeks, once every two weeks, not a huge commitment of time, easy to be consistently engaged because you only have to go once every two weeks. You got to come to four out of the six weeks and you're automatically in the playoff, but everybody just shows up. You play the same four games. You get one point for every person you beat that night. So the scores are kept and then league points are sent out. I keep an email list of everybody. And then we have a recap the next day or two of how it went. We kind of just throw in some fun jibes at some, you know, a really good player had a bad game. You know, he threw him a little ribbing. Make it fun. Everybody has a good time, right? It's not super competitive. It's a league. We're just hanging out, having fun, playing pinball with, you know, groups of four, having a good time, encouraging each other, giving each other advice, screaming in each other's ear. You know, it's not tournament, right it's just fun i think there's a really big shift anytime you're playing competitive pinball there's a very big difference between playing in competitive pinball where people are rooting for you versus against you and that's like the biggest reason that howdy partner at wedgehead is the format that it is is because trying to you know actually be helping each other and when you have the community where you're like you're trying to explain the games you want the people you're playing with to do better that's such a big distinction and it makes it so much nicer when you're new oh yeah and that's the big reason league i i 100 agree league is the way to go for competitive pinball over just straight up tournaments at least the way to start for sure like you should probably do both once the scene's established but also just realize that they're different things in scope and in focus and that one is way better at bringing new people into the fold than the other one yep you know like an ifpa tournament is a different thing even if your league is ifpa rated it's a different thing entirely than you know a big match play or a big strikes tournament or whatever whatever format it is it's just a different thing altogether yep yeah you wrote minor on competition major on fun i agree with that and then you put emphasis on player development this is what i want to ask you about you say give a lineup with tutorial links. I think that's great. I think it's fantastic. Yeah. So on our email reminders before league, like the day before I send out a list of the games that we're going to play that week and try to put a nice Bowen tutorial with it or something, a nice YouTube tutorial with it, if there is one. And just so people can have a chance to like, whoa, really start learning about strategies for games, game specific strategies, just to encourage them like, whoa, I'm going to go try that you know work on work on learning that game more yeah it's very smart yeah even if you're not able to kind of like get that together in time for league it'll kind of be like okay this is what i gotta work on with this game in the future yep that's one thing that i haven't seen too much firsthand recently i was i went on a trip to japan and or whatever and so i was kind of like diving into the whole like is there a pinball scene in japan and stuff into a lot of those places it's a very new scene right it's not a popular thing there all of the places that have any kind of pinball events have like tutorials i'm like this is how you do everything and like if they get a new game they'll make a big post on like twitter and be like this is where you start modes this is where you start multiballs and i'm like man i wish we saw more of that here i know a lot of us in the hobby it's like we know what we're doing we know how to find those tools if we want to figure out something but like when you're new you need somebody to explain just like yeah Like this is how you start multiball, man. Because that's huge. It'll make the difference between liking a game or hating it. Absolutely. So tell us about you have Sunday school in quotation marks. What does that mean? Yeah, we'll do like a silver ball Sunday school where we'll just have it open to anyone who'd like to come in and learn, work on techniques. And so we just go over trapping, dead pass, you know, a live catch. and we'll just walk everybody through one skill at a time on a different machine and just say, okay, these are some of the flipper skills that you're seeing other players use and you can learn them today. That's pretty cool. And so coming in practice. That's awesome, man. Yeah. So just as a way for free. This is awesome. This is what being a good operator is. Like you can make pinball work anywhere. You got to work it to make it work. Yeah, you're like putting the work in. You're putting the work in here to grow a legitimate, like growing a scene, which is possible anywhere. I just love, you know, you also write about celebrating growth. I think you mean like players as their skills improve and celebrating those milestones. Yeah. It's like, it's amazing. Like an hour or a rookie to a, you know, first season player, all of a sudden they, a couple of seasons into it, they get top dog on a game for a week. You know, they got the highest score out of, on one of the four games that we played in league. It's like hey how about this give me the air horn right so just celebrating that's always the funnest thing right when you see new players come in and all of a sudden they blow up put up 192,000 on space mission oh you know it's like dude they know the game now and they are hitting it i love that too uh i'm gonna run through some of these last points a little bit quickly because I know our episode's getting a little bit long here, but you also write about managing the over-imbibed, including pinball, you know, encouraging pinball performance and avoiding 86ing if possible. I understand, like, if you're in a place and people like to drink a little too much, you know, like it could cause them to be rowdy and you always want to make sure that people are having fun first and foremost, you know, and getting to run tournaments and all that kind of stuff. You have a, I want to focus on this one opinion here where you have a match play over head-to-head. You want to explain that in an IFPA tournament? What's a match play versus head to head and why you feel a certain way about it? Just real quick on that is like in a bigger city, you can 86 people a lot easier because you have more people. Yeah. Whereas in rural, you kind of have to work with people where they're at. And sometimes you have to work a little harder. Right. You might find somebody who really into pinball but they getting a little too hammered and they just getting sloppy It like you know you want to be able to try to coach them up and say look you know you not playing well when you get when you have too much and it like you just encourage them like look you're going to play a lot better if you just wait you know or just have less and wait till playing your last game for the night then maybe start drinking right so you just kind of like help them see the lies like hey we're all here to like the focus is good pinball we're all trying to improve our skills we're all trying to get better together we're trying to have fun on pinball you know some of these other things they they take away from good play so anyway but for tournaments on running match play works way better for tournaments to me it's similar to the whole thing with league of it being more fun and more social i mean that's why our big tournament every year is a pinberg style tournament because i love hanging out with a group of four people and playing four machines all together you get to know somebody you talk to right you you're in the same group you actually get to know people and you have funny it's like uh i don't know what maybe i just won't get last you know maybe i'll shoot for a third right if i get third on this game i'm happy it's like you know so that's a lot better than a head-to-head right i understand that so alex was saying you have a good example of a rural location yeah i wanted to just bring up just so anybody listening isn't like oh well like this couldn't work you know a different way or you got to exactly replicate this formula. I came, so the city I got into pinball, I was living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota at the time. Really shortly after I left, the dedicated pinball spot there ended up shutting down or going to really limited hours or whatever. And it was kind of like a blow for the local community because that's where league happened and everything. And so one of the local enthusiasts, a guy named Casey, ended up seeking out a new place to play games. And he found a pizza spot that had two dining rooms, one of which had been unused for a long time and it was like like you said it's like finding the right location where it's like a symbiotic thing because they already had the staff they already had like a bureau license and they had just an empty room so they kind of were like eager to have something fill that it ended up being like very much a group of hobbyist operators nobody there was doing it as a full-time job but it's a whole variety of guys because Sioux Falls is pretty fairly big City, I think it's a couple hundred thousand, but it didn't have a dedicated pinball spot, but it had a pinball scene. And it was just kind of an interesting thing to see. I wasn't there firsthand to see it, but it's been, from what I can tell, a very big success. And now the scene is getting bigger than it ever was when I was living there. So it's just kind of cool to see these kind of like grassroots efforts from guys that aren't necessarily doing this as a full-time job. But if you put in the work, you can see results and you can really build that community. a lot of that a lot of similarities with what you did you were in a much i'm shocked that you were able to build such like an actual like scene in a city as small as you're in well even like todd we talked to out in astoria astoria is like a town of 10 000 yeah that's true and it's just it's like when you guys put in the work like you get results it's it's really cool to see and i just i like seeing the different ways that everybody kind of goes about it and what's worked for you versus is what hasn't in kind of like what your takeaways were yeah no we've had we've got guys they're playing lots of tournaments and stuff now down in reno i had one guy from up here in susanville playing the nevada state champions this year oh that's awesome and uh a few other because they play in reno so they get nevada points yeah so and and other guys another guy just won a local weekly down there at a bar a really nice bar in uh sparks called elbow room Shout out to Ted. Love you, Teddy. But he has great stuff, beautiful games, beautiful lineup. But he runs a weekly and one of our guys won that, you know, so it's like it's amazing how the skill improves over time. Absolutely. With guys who are committed. I mean, we were in our fifth year now of league. Man, it's it's just so much fun. It's just so much fun to see people come together playing pinball and they weren't there before. like there was no scene like yeah they are they are out there they're out there you just don't see them you haven't met them yet and some of those people don't even know that they're gonna be a part of the scene you know what i mean like exactly there's so many people walking this earth right now that haven't realized that they love pinball yet and that's where the opportunity is true so i just like to end this with i got i got some closing thoughts here because I thought this was a great episode to highlight a lot of these things that I think about and haven't really placed in a certain episode yet, but it sort of jives with why we do the operator series in the first place. But I want to say to the listener, when you're listening to anyone speak, whether it's myself or Alex on this podcast, somebody else on a different social media platform, somebody from a pinball company, whatever, we're all just stating our sometimes variable points of view. And I think sometimes it's easy to get lost in like a dogmatic approach to solving any problem and talk as if there's like one single path or one playbook on how to be successful when that's really not the case. Like all of us are humans and we're susceptible to common like reasoning heuristics. But the two I think that apply most commonly when we talk about operating pinball machines are confirmation bias and survivorship bias. Confirmation bias is something that we as humans all do regularly. Like when we feel like something is true or we've witnessed an event happen, we will then look to find more evidence of that same said thing occurring. Like has traffic in Portland gotten worse? I will then search for information through that lens and not the opposite, which is has traffic in Portland gotten better? So example, like I was doing this the other day. I might listen to an album by a band and really, really love it. In my mind, I might go, you know what? Painkiller is actually the best album that Judas Priest ever made. I might Google best Judas Priest albums, and I'll find a bunch of lists that also say Painkiller is the best. This is confirmation bias-seeking behavior. I will use any evidence I find that supports my own personal theory that Painkiller is the best Priest album and use it to validate that experience, right? I will bolster my confidence that what I believed in the first place was right i will also subconsciously dismiss the other inputs that i'm receiving where other folks might be like it's defenders of the faith or it's screaming for vengeance or staying class that's the best album right stuff is subjective and it's different things are true for different people yeah and so just the way that you can search for information could lead to various results if i were looking at is judas priest painkiller the best judas priest album i'm going to find different versions of information than if i go is british steal their best album I'm going to get different results and you can always support that's the thing with insider connected with me or with why I believe in having old games or games of all eras that's part of the basis of when we talk about these things and you're one thing that works for somebody might not necessarily work for everybody like I had somebody recently that bought a Sopranos and then told me uh you said that this thing earns like a new game well uh you know my Dungeons and Dragons is out earning the Sopranos that I went and hunted down I go yeah I mean it earns like a new game for us in Portland. Yeah. So you know what I mean? Like what's true for somebody might not be true for somebody else. It doesn't mean that it's still not true. Yeah, there's not a formula that you can just, there's too many factors. Confirmation bias in pinball could be something like, is Godzilla the greatest pinball machine of all time? Well, you can certainly find a lot of evidence if you look at it through that lens, but you can also readily find evidence that would say Medieval Madness is actually the best game of all time or any other game, whatever game you want, You can find evidence for that, right? I mean, we've recorded an episode about how Raven's the best game of all time. Exactly, you know.