After a whole lotta work we introduce a new feature in the site's Top 100 section. The "Bang for your Buck" list! Go on, take a look!

So what is this list all about?  How does it come to be? Read on!

About our machine prices calculation

Ever since we've been monitoring all Ebay auction results (as part of our whole Ebay linking thing) in our own local database, we've had some ideas involving clever querying on this data. When you have the auction results of, for instance, 25 Twilight Zones  sold in the last couple of months you can do quite a nice estimate of the current market price for that machine.

But this is not so easy. First of all you need to be sure you're only using auction results form actual machines. You don't want part sales and such included in your machine price calculation. So we first have to filter out the playfields, parts and other stuff (which actually shouldn't be posted in Ebay's 'pinball machines' category in the first place).

once you have a clever mechanism in place to make sure you only have machines and nothing else, determining the price becomes easier. But now sometimes there are still problems. For instance: there are two machine called "indiana Jones". So here we need to include the manufacturer and year in our query. I won't bore you with the details but we nailed it all down quite nicely.

"But wait", I here you say, "What about the state of a machine? How do you calculate that? To be honest: we don't take that into consideration. it would be to time consuming to do this manually and since the price is only an indication of an estimate over dozens of machines sold we don't think it's really important in the end figure.

And so,about two weeks ago, we started displaying the price estimates on the site.

Price

vs rating

Taking this concept a step further we decided to do a little math where we take the machine rating, its estimated price and an extra weighting of the 'lastability' factor (since the best bang for buck is aimed at home owners where replayability is more important than in an arcade).

This results in a listing of machines which have a high ratings for a reasonable price: the bang for your buck list.

Two lists

Actually there are two lists. We decided to split the results into two sections: a pre- and post-1991 list. Why? Well first of all there are big price differences around this point. But the games are quite different in their gameplay and features as well. 

Well there you have it!

Yep, we hope this list is a welcome addition when deciding which machine to buy. Comments and suggestions on this system are welcome in the comments below!