Yesterday Pinball Brothers (PB) teased a special announcement by the Company for "Alien Day" April 26th. After much speculation on what the announcement might be, minutes ago we found out that the Company has decided to provide a limited-time discount of $426 on Alien LV units sold between now and May 15th.
Specifically, PB's statement reads "We are celebrating this with a special Alien Day discount of –426$ on the LVs while stocks last. Get in touch with your personal distributor to claim it!" which to me implies that the discount is only available on Alien LVs, however I just saw a distributor in Australia applying the sale to Alien SV aka Special Version aka the base game as well.
As a close follower of the automotive industry, I am intimately familiar with the use of incentives to entice buyers to purchase products there. Automakers have used cash back, special financing rates and special leases to push metal for years. This is the first usage of that sort of consumer-facing incentive that I recall ever seeing in pinball. I'm sure that this sort of thing happened all the time with dealer cash i.e. non-consumer-facing discounts back in pinball's Bally / Williams heyday. I've heard all sorts of stories of blowout prices provided to distributors on older or slow-selling games back then.
I wouldn't exactly call this a large discount though. $426 off of a machine that retails for $10,695 in the United States amounts to a discount of just under 4%. That's not exactly a fire sale. All this indicates to me that inventory of Alien machines is solid, so Pinball Brothers must be doing a good gob at manufacturing machines at its new subsidiary's factory, Euro Pinball Corp.
In other news, Pinball Brothers has founded another new subsidiary, PB USA LLC. In their statement, the Company said that this new entity will help it "to be able to better cater to the needs of all US customers." They hope to further improve the shipment of parts and games to U.S. distributors going forward.
