The arcade version of Injustice has been on the market for a little over a year now, and by all of the reports I’ve been hearing, it’s been a success. But there is always room for improvement, so Raw Thrills is trying out something new to boost sales of the game even further.
As a note, this news is a little more “inside baseball” compared to what we usually report – something of immediate interest to arcade operators.
This past week I was contacted by a rep at Betson about an interesting change in the business model regarding how Raw Thrills handles Injustice. Compared to “a jukebox model,” the base price for the game cabinets is being significantly reduced to the point that it becomes quite a bit more appealing to street locations. I’ll not post the price I was quoted here as it will vary from distributor to distributor, and salespeople do tend to get upset when prices are published; let’s just say it’s quite a bit lower than the $7500 or so than they had been selling for – even below where Big Buck Wild units were selling without a monitor.
Operating a location myself, I do find the new price to be quite appealing. With so many games starting to land in the $20-30,000 range, it’s been pushing the average cost of new games higher & higher(I used to quote $7500 average per game to people, now it’s probably closer to $9000). While many of those games are spectacles, it is not easy for small locations like mine to afford them. As such, I’ve always advocated for having new games in the $3000-$6000 range. While we’ve had a few of those, like Golden Tee, Big Buck or Pac-Man Battle Royale, those have increasingly become exceptions to the “rule” as opposed to the standard.
To answer the next question you might be asking yourself, no I’m not jumping on a unit right away, but there’s a good reason for it. I’ve been spending a lot of cash over the past few weeks in prepping for the opening of my first route location (all used equipment, but that stuff adds up quickly when you are trying to fulfill specific requests, such as pinball machines). But once we recover from that, I am seriously considering jumping on-board this Injustice train. In that regard, if anyone is looking for a motion simulator tank game, I am looking to sell my Allied Tank Attack so I can make some space. 😉
I have heard through the grapevine that many locations are moving a lot of cards, with those cards also becoming hot items on the eBay trading market. While I do not know if this means that the prices of cards themselves will increase, I did speak with a rep at Raw Thrills who said that they have extensive plans for new card series that will go beyond the “Series 2” card set that will launch in 2019, helping keep interest high in the game for some time to come.
One can also imagine that if this is successful, that we’ll see the card system expand to other titles. Raw Thrills did test such a thing out with Cruis’n Blast; it was too bad that it was abandoned in that case, but maybe it will make a comeback the next time they release a car racer. What do you think about the new model for Injustice games?
Are the cost of materials vs huge sales markups worth drawing red flags over?