# Stern Tech School: Setting New Custom Pricing on Stern Pinball Machines **Source:** Stern Pinball **Type:** video **Published:** 2025-10-24 **Duration:** 3m 45s **Beat:** Pinball **URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRwUhHYMr10 --- ## Analysis Stern Pinball released an educational tech school video demonstrating the new graphical service menu for setting custom pricing on pinball machines. The video walks through the custom pricing adjustment feature, which allows operators to set flexible pricing schemes using dollars, tokens, or swipes, with examples like $1 for one credit or $5 for eight credits. The system preserves legacy custom pricing settings when operators upgrade to the new graphical menu interface. ### Key Claims - [HIGH] Stern has released a new graphical service menu with enhanced custom pricing capabilities — _Video demonstration of the interface by Kyle and Mark Pinacho, Stern Pinball employees_ - [HIGH] Custom pricing system supports dollars, tokens, and swipes as pricing units — _Direct demonstration showing toggle between these three options in the menu_ - [HIGH] The new system preserves legacy custom pricing settings from previous versions — _Explicit statement by Kyle: 'We preserve your settings when you switch to the new graphic menu'_ - [HIGH] Operators can create custom pricing tiers that don't exist in preset options — _Example given: setting $1 for one credit and $5 for eight credits, demonstrating flexibility beyond standard presets_ ### Notable Quotes > "We can make pricings that don't exist in any of our preset pricings. Suppose we wanted to make the game cost $1 for one credit, but if the person puts in $5, they get eight credits. It's very simple to do now." > — **Kyle, Stern Pinball**, ~1:30 > _Explains the core value proposition of the new custom pricing system for operators seeking flexible revenue models_ > "We preserve your settings when you switch to the new graphic menu." > — **Kyle, Stern Pinball**, ~6:50 > _Addresses backward compatibility and operator concerns about data loss during system upgrades_ ### Entities | Name | Type | Context | |------|------|---------| | Stern Pinball | company | Manufacturer releasing educational tech school content for operator education | | Kyle | person | Stern Pinball representative hosting the tech school video | | Mark Pinacho | person | Stern Pinball programmer who worked on the new graphical service menu | | Stern Tech School | organization | Stern Pinball's educational video series for operators and owners | ### Topics - **Primary:** Custom pricing system design, Operator education and support, Service menu interface improvements - **Secondary:** Revenue model flexibility, Backward compatibility ### Sentiment **Positive** (0.85) — Educational, professional tone demonstrating new capability clearly. No criticism or negative sentiment present. Focused on operator enablement and feature benefits. ### Signals - **[community_signal]** Stern Pinball producing educational tech school content demonstrates ongoing commitment to operator and owner education/support (confidence: high) — Video is part of 'Stern Tech School' series with professional production showing detailed walkthrough of new operator features --- ## Transcript Hi, I'm Kyle with Stern Pinball and I am here today with one of our programmers, Mark Panacho, who worked on the new graphical service menu and he is going to walk us through setting our new custom pricing adjustments. So, let's go into our service menu with a couple button pushes and let's go down to our adjustments submen. And here we see a pricing submen. Let's go into that. And if we go down here, we can see game pricing. This is where you set the different game pricings that you have. And so you see USA 12, USA 13. If we go to custom pricing, this is the new part. So this we can do things like changing whether we're showing dollars or tokens or swipes. We can also make pricings that um don't exist in any of our preset pricings. Suppose we wanted to make the game cost $1 for one credit, but if the person puts in $5, they get eight credits. It's very simple to do now. So, you can see we already have the first credit set at a dollar. I could set this to 75 cents.50, but I'm going to leave it at a dollar. Um, and now I want to add a pricing. And I want this to be eight credits for $5. So, if I click here and add a pricing, I can move this up to highlight the two. Hit enter. And now I'm going to move that up to eight. Now, we don't want eight credits to be $2. We want it to be $5. So, I'm going to go over here. I'm going to hit this two. And I'm going to raise this up to $5. And I'm going to hit enter. And then I'm going to go down here and save the settings. So, when I save the settings, it now will show me that I've got one for a dollar, two for $2, three for $3, all the way up to eight for $5. So, now we've got the game set to be one game for $1, and eight games for $5. But suppose we want to do a little bit different pricing. Let's go in and change that. So, if I go into the pricing menu, and I go into the custom pricing menu, and hit it again, let's say I don't want to show dollars. Let's say I want to show swipes. So if I move up to the monetary symbol, I can change this to be swipes. And you can see how it changed all the pricings here. But I want to get rid of all of these. So let's move this and get rid of it. Let's get rid of it. We're going to make one game for one swipe and three games for two swipes. So, we're going to do one game for one swipe, and we're going to add another pricing and do three games for two swipes. Save the pricing. And now we've got it set to be one game for one swipe, three games for two swipes. If we go back out to the screen in the attract mode, you can see when it shows the pricing, it now says in the bottom left corner one for one and three for two. If you have a game already that you've set a previous custom pricing for, those custom pricings will work with the new system. We preserve your settings when you switch to the new graphic menu. We hope you enjoyed this example on how to set custom pricing. And thanks for watching another video from Stern Tech School. _(Acquisition: youtube_auto_sub, Enrichment: v1)_ --- *Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 335a7459-1978-4f2a-aeaf-d5772a339c5d*