Save your own money from Own Your Own Arcade Game
Unfortunately, despite asking for as detailed reviews as possible, these sites never give enough space to do so, so this review has been abbreviated. We met Matt at a fair. He told us that all cabinets ordered at the fair would be built and shipped to their local warehouse and would ship as soon as payment was complete. He said that custom graphics would be made to our specifications so the only shipping delay would be if they had yet to meet our expectations. After the fair we emailed follow up questions and the first red flag was when the response read that shipping would take 4-6 weeks to “arrange” after payment. We ignored it, as the email itself seemed like a stock reply that perhaps was not edited. We started the design process with Maya and it was going well, save for a few minor issues and unanswered questions. As the issues and questions stacked up, she became more defensive and cagey, claiming that the issues were a result of “miscommunication,” but the implication was that it was my fault, even though she was the one refusing to answer questions or explain why mistakes were made. Most of these issues were resolved, but then there was one more minor text issue, to which she responded once again by blaming miscommunication and sending me the entire design again, but this time on a different template. So I told her the original designs were fine except for the text issue, but if they had been using the wrong template, then the new template meant changing the designs again. Then Matt called me and asked what the problem was, as if no one had explained it, or more likely that they explained it in a way that eschewed their own responsibility. He complained to me that we were taking too long and costing him too much on designers. He complained about it being the holidays and having fully paid cabinets to ship and that we shouldn’t be in such a hurry because it was going to take us five years to pay it off. Well, the holiday part was understandable, but his designers were the ones making mistakes and their cost was not my problem. In reality all they did was take designs from the internet or use their own stock images and put them on their templates, which they still managed to screw up. They probably designed the text themselves, but even the font could have been prefabricated. They just seemed unable to follow directions or admit their mistakes, let alone explain them productively. And we weren’t in a hurry, but the designs were almost done before they changed the template. I also reminded him that we would be paying it off in a matter of months. He pressured us to approve the designs and I said no because of the change in templates. He also said things that contradicted what Maya said. I emailed them again following the phone call and got no response. I emailed them twice more after the holidays and got no response. At that point we decided to cut our losses. We’d read the Yelp reviews and figured losing a few hundred on our deposit and payments rendered was better than several thousand and ending up with a nonfunctional machine or no machine at all. I emailed them again to cancel the order and literally within a minute got a call from Matt which I obviously ignored. His vociemail said I couldn’t cancel the order because they had started working on the graphics, said that if I wanted to finalize them I would have to pay them off in full, and confirmed that they had not in fact built the cabinet after the fair as promised because they were waiting for me to pay them in full. As we already established, the designs were never printed because they were never finalized. Furthermore, we didn’t ask for a refund, so between the deposit we paid and the months of payments we did make, that should more than cover the few hours of actual design work that was done. The fact is we put down a deposit and promised to make payments for a cabinet that should have been built and customized by the time we paid it off. They made it clear they were not delivering on their end of the contract, so I called the bank to cancel future payments and as an extra precaution cancelled the card number and had a new one reissued. Like I said, due to character limitations, this isn’t even the entirety of the issues we experienced and includes nothing of the research we did on the company and its owners. But why does a company that has existed for 40 years have little such web presence? Plus, should they ever come across these reviews, giving scammers too much information helps them cover their tracks better in the future. You can see by their responses on Yelp they still try to shift responsibility to the customer by telling them to call back, despite the complaints being centered around the company refusing to answer calls. If you have any doubts about this company, don’t wait to act on them. Trust your instincts.