Fruit Machine Chat

Ok so a Paragon is about £3k ish to buy...

If a pub is lucky, it might take £30-£50 a week in profit, so they obviously won't be paying much rent on it at all.

So how does the distributor make money on them?? Surely this is a terrible business proposition!

if they get emptied a couple of times, thhey're gonna feel the crunch

but so long as there not gettin dun then they will make money


eventually....

Sure the tt's cost around 3k, but the more you buy the cheaper they get. Plus you still have the residual value of the unit when it comes to trading it in for an upgrade. The unit being done means fuck all to the operator or the place it is in. Its all a longterm prospect.

Scrotes plugging them til they go empty may dent them for a week or 2, but is a small dent in the financial calendar overall.

I'm still not really sure of the maths here tho...let's say a pub gets charged £30 a week for a paragon (very plausible). This takes 2 years for the operator to get a full return on their £3k outlay, and all they have then is the residual value of the machine as their 'profit'.

However, you can buy a fruit for £1k-£2k and get a lot more back with a split deal, this outlay will be covered in no time.

I'm just very confused as to why an operator would shell out big money on a quiz machine which doesn't take very much...surely they would be better off buying old itboxes and gamesnets for much cheaper and no one would really know the difference.

I for one don't even think the paragons look any newer/better than the other quiz machines on the market (with the possible exception of the bright blue one), so it's a mystery to me why they are so popular.

No duty to pay.
Lots don't take as little as £60. Some take up to £150.
If you operate 100 machines, taking an average of £100 per week, thats £520,000 per year in takings. Assuming you receive £30 per machine, per week, you are still getting £1560 per year in rental. The landlord is getting £3640 per year in takings.
Buying in bulk, you would be unlucky to pay more than probably £2k per paragon, so in little over 12 months, you would make your money back. As the average site life of a machine would be around 3 to 4 years, your total payback would be around £5460 per machine over the life of it. You would make £546000 from 100 machines in 3.5 years.

I'm guessing at a lot of these figures, but they do add up. And i doubt rental is as low as £30.

Dave

I have often thought the same as the original poster here, i.e. I don't really see that quiz machines make much sense financially for a pub when as far as I can tell fruit machines take in a lot more money for the same physical space.

However I've always thought that while they must make some money for the pubs, they are more importantly seen as a social facility, i.e. groups of friends like to play them, and hence they are seen as encouraging people to go to the pub in the first place and, once there, to stay for longer. The same would apply to things like dartboards and (in some locations at least) pool tables, which take up a lot of space and often don't see much throughput.

OK time for school. SWP's are put in a pub on a share of cash box in general. I know of no operator, he is the guy or company that own the Paragon or whatever. Now AWP's fruities are only on rent, the Gambling act 2005 allows now for an operator to share in the cash box of an AWP, but as all the pubs have had all the money in the cash box after the rent, typically £30 per week, you can now see the commercials. A typical SWP will have a weekly cash box of less than £100, and split is 50/50 with lcation so you can see that it makes sense for thre operator to but SWP's. One last thing a distributor is the comany which buys form a manufacturer and then sell them to an operator. Typical distributors, Crown , MDM, FML etc.
Operators, Sceptre, Gamestec, SE Automatics etc.
They all make loads of maoney well they say they do, thats why Gamestec have lost £500 million in past five years, public record,!!

Nil Satis wrote:
However I've always thought that while they must make some money for the pubs, they are more importantly seen as a social facility, i.e. groups of friends like to play them, and hence they are seen as encouraging people to go to the pub in the first place and, once there, to stay for longer. The same would apply to things like dartboards and (in some locations at least) pool tables, which take up a lot of space and often don't see much throughput.

There have been occasions where we've chosen to go into one pub over another because of quiz machine availability. So they do play a part in getting people through the door.

I operate a few swp machines, it's based on a 50/50 profit share, it works well and that is why most operators use this basis.