Part of the problem is lack of volume, which you need to bring costs down. I can buy a brand-new small car for the price of a brand-new pinball machine (or near enough). Yet, the car is infinitely more high-tech, contains ultra-high precision parts that need to perform under extreme environmental conditions and, just putting a car and a pinball machine on scales, the car contains about ten times as much material, pretty much all of it way more sophisticated than anything in a pinball machine.
If we were to manufacture pinball machines on the same scale, they wouldnât cost more than $2,000 a pop, probably less.
I donât know whether deeproot will be able to find some sweet spot between ultra-cheap mass-produced and expensive hand-built. But it seems possible, especially if they can do most of the manufacturing in China. The idea of making pinball machines in the US or UK is ludicrous from a cost perspective. I would expect 30â50% of the manufacturing cost to be labor.
I also work in the private equity world so Iâm going to respectfully disagree.
Financial people donât necessarily know how to run companies. Lots of great investors are shitty managers.
PE Fund⌠Size matters: His fund is tiny. 15M is nothing in the PE world. Hell, 100M is small in that world. Iâm not saying he isnât successful, but if the world of Private Equity was retail stores with Walmart and Target he is running a bodega.
The language that he has done the impossible in other industries⌠boy, that just wreaks of overconfidence. The dude is a lawyer who went into wealth management. I donât see any industry disruption in his bio. https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-mueller-43b5b113/
Anyway, Iâll end on a positive note. I think industry outsiders can sometimes do great things because they arenât afraid to try new things. I wish him the best.
I welcome a new pinball company to the business. Competition promotes growth and helps take pinball to its next level.
This post has been edited. I jumped to conclusions on my first post and deleted all of that subjective content. We should never âAssumeâ and pre-judge anything or anyone.
I look forward to learning more about Deeproot Pinball.
The reasoning to leave off the P3 games was my ignorance of the platform. I had initially included LL-EE, along with Lexy Lightspeed - Secret Agent Showdown, Barnyard, ROCs, and Cannon Lagoon. I came up with the TWIPY awards idea Saturday night, and made the poll Sunday morning before starting on the Monday This Week in Pinball post. I pulled them because I didnât understand the depth and scale of the games and wasnât sure how they fit into the poll. Obviously I shouldâve spent more time researching it.
I PMed Gerry this morning after his post to apologize for leaving them off. It wasnât meant to belittle their efforts at all. Iâd like to do a full post highlighting the P3 platform and the games so I can get educated on it and share that info with others.
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