Are things really so bad?

[paragoon]

The current Gamesnet menu is a slight improvement on the last one and the Paragon menu isn't so bad. Things have been a lot worse imho.

[cool]

yes less machines, poor content, non payouts and filling up more slowly. Have you been treated to a gw headquarters visit
or are you deliberately being provocative?

[Nil Satis]

Things have been a lot worse imho.

Things have been worse, I agree, but I would say that the business has without doubt peaked and hence is on the decline.

I realise it all depends on your perspective - how often you play, what games you play, how far (if at all) you travel with the specific purpose of playing - but two key points for me are:

1. The numbers of machines

Here I can give a pretty good answer in terms of the reasonably wide area I cover and the picture is not at all good. I have seen a net loss of about 3 to 5 machines a week for the last year or so (i.e. taking into account the new machines that you do occasionally find where there wasn't one before, and ignoring the pubs that have closed for good). I actually found a good example of this point today when I looked at an old copy of my pubs list - between October 2010 and now the city centre nearest to me has gone from 14 pubs with a machine to 7. Two of the pubs themselves have gone but another 8 are still running but have removed their machine, with 3 'new' machines making up the difference. That's a 50% loss in just over two years in a city that is, compared to most others, just about immune from the general reduction in pubgoers.

2. The level of play

How often do you see punters playing the machines in the locations you visit? How long do you have to wait to play a machine if that is the sole/main reason for your visit? How much play do you witness the more recent games receiving?

Here I can say that the old occupational hazard of having to wait long periods for punters to get off a machine, or choosing to go elsewhere instead, has all but disappeared in the areas that I cover. Similarly I can think of several newer games where I have never witnessed a single example of punters playing them, and that is across many hundreds of pubs. Million Pound Drop would be just about the only newish game where this isn't true.


Something unexpected may come along to revive the industry but, as I and others have noted, a lot of the issues are outside the direct control of the SWP companies - the general reduction in the numbers of people going to the pub, the change in the nature of many pubs to concentrate their efforts on a different customer base and becoming more like restaurants, the vast range of games of all kinds available for people to play on their phones, tablets and PCs (many of which are free), and so on.

In my personal view there is only company left (i.e. GWHL) that has any idea at all of how to create interesting and worthwhile content but for me even they have spent far too long worrying about how to make games more difficult for the tiny number of top players at the expense of trying to make things more attractive to the ordinary player. As for the other companies, to me they seem beyond saving.

[cool]

games media appear to have taken on board one of the forums suggestions by only having one page of games removing duplication and the odd game.

[amazing]

Pmsl

games media appear to have taken on board one of the forums suggestions by only having one page of games removing duplication and the odd game.

[cool]

probably the real factor in the demise of the pro is the lack of games with a decent jackpot.in the eighties jackpots were often twenty pound now they are mainly ten.certain games are as as good as they were such as million pound drop but as far as i know its one jackpot and thats it.nibbling except at the highest level and with specialists has all but been eliminated.

[tonkarentino]

The demise of the pro is inextricably linked to the fact that multi-game machines replaced "stand alone" games where the money taken by the machine only had to go into one winning pot. This meant that you could find the same machine "ready" often in consecutive days. Now you can win £10.00 on "Million Pound Drop" and know that it won't be ready again until two months on Thursday. This in turn meant that players routes had to get longer, meaning more spent on fuel etc. etc. It simply isn't a sound economic proposition unless you are able to hammer one of the very few games that still perform like the old days.

[paragoon]

The demise of the pro is inextricably linked to the fact that multi-game machines replaced "stand alone" games where the money taken by the machine only had to go into one winning pot. This meant that you could find the same machine "ready" often in consecutive days. Now you can win £10.00 on "Million Pound Drop" and know that it won't be ready again until two months on Thursday. This in turn meant that players routes had to get longer, meaning more spent on fuel etc. etc. It simply isn't a sound economic proposition unless you are able to hammer one of the very few games that still perform like the old days.

This is pretty true. Nowadays I find machines are either ultra-playable or practically impossible if someone's got there before you. Has Nuts been chipped or something? Was acting very strange today with almost double the amount of questions!

[tonkarentino]

This is pretty true. Nowadays I find machines are either ultra-playable or practically impossible if someone's got there before you. Has Nuts been chipped or something? Was acting very strange today with almost double the amount of questions!

I could be wrong but I think the extended trail is one of NUTS defence mechanisms. Like a lot of other games unless you are super human you can expect at the very most (and only rarely) a crisp tenner before the aforementioned practically impossible mode kicks in....

[donttellhimpike]

probably the real factor in the demise of the pro is the lack of games with a decent jackpot.in the eighties jackpots were often twenty pound now they are mainly ten.certain games are as as good as they were such as million pound drop but as far as i know its one jackpot and thats it.nibbling except at the highest level and with specialists has all but been eliminated.

I know this will make me seem like an incredible pedant but anyway..... There were no machines, in general circulation, that offered a £20 jackpot during the 1980s. The first time I ever played (and won) on a cabinet that offered a £20 top prize was a 'Beeline' in a pub round the back of Holborn in the early summer of 1991. Jackpot values had only risen from £10 to £12 in the summer of the previous year, 1990, with the emergence of 'Every Second Counts'.

Naturally, though, the 1980s seem like a golden halcyon age for SWPs, certainly to those of us who were lucky enough to be there at the dawn of time :-) however there were not any cabinets offering over £10 until August 1990.

Glad to see you are mostly all still about and posting on here, been a while for me, those who know why will understand why :-))

Keep fighting. PIke.

[grecian]

I've been down to about an hour's play a week since the birth of my son in late 2012. Sad to see a hobby I used to take a fairly obsessive interest in dwindle away to zero but it has been increasingly difficult for non-full-timers to make any money at all off machines over the past year or so. I played for about 90 minutes the other weekend when I had some rare free time - I lost about £7 (i.e. over ten straight games) before a fortuitous £7 on 'The Chase' recouped my losses. Thought the new-style GWHL menu looked really poor, to put it bluntly. No point playing these things without a decent stream of winnings, which is why I'd rather eat my lunch in the work canteen and read a newspaper than go out and play SWPs. Unless things change remarkably I can't really see myself getting back into SWPs now. In a selfish sense the downturn in SWP play has timed itself well with changes in my life - but I am in no doubt how tough the going must be for professional players nowadays.

[cool]

true pike but if you could achieve multiple ten pound jackpots from a ten pound machine then effectively it wasnt a ten pound machine.now a ten pound jackpot generally means ten pound and thats it.
A one hundred pound quizmaster was produced during the 80's in small numbers it didnt last long.

[cool]

and a 225 pound quizmaster exists today somewhere in the midlands...........

[Nil Satis]

... unless he has been on a diet.

This does prompt me to wonder however - what is the oldest quiz machine still out there (functioning in public as opposed to being in someone's front room, for example)? I know of a GameBox (Hangman, Winning Lines, Pepsi etc) which must be from about 2004 and there is a Ind:e/Fatbox of some description - I was never very clear of the branding terminology at that time, but it's the one where the games load onto two square grids of eight games with the central square being used to access the other screen - in the bowling alley in Woking that must be nearly as old (although it has a faulty payout mechanism so isn't worth a visit).