# Spacies Fireside Chat

**Source:** BlahCade Pinball Podcast  
**Type:** podcast_episode  
**Published:** 2018-07-04  
**Duration:** 72m 10s  
**Beat:** Pinball

**URL:** https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/blahcade-pinball-podcast/episodes/Spacies-Fireside-Chat-e1bkfrr

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## Analysis

Chris Frebus and Jared Morgan of Blockade Pinball Podcast interview Greg Holden (Spacey's Arcade YouTube channel) about his custom virtual pinball cabinet and experiences with Arcuda software. The discussion focuses on the final days of Williams/Bally table availability in Pinball Arcade before licensing expiration, Arcuda's last-minute announcement that cabinet mode unlock will remain available post-June 30th, and critiques of Farsight's aging engine and communication strategy versus Visual Pinball's superior capabilities.

### Key Claims

- [HIGH] Arcuda bought a bulk purchase of Arcuda software licenses to pre-load into cabinets for future sales after June 30th licensing cutoff — _Chris explains Arcuda's strategy to pre-purchase bulk licenses so future cabinet sales can include the software without advertising Williams tables as a feature_
- [HIGH] Cabinet mode unlock will remain available for purchase after June 30th if customers own the Williams/Bally table packs — _Chris and Greg discuss Farsight/Arcuda's negotiation with Scientific Games resulting in ongoing unlock availability post-cutoff_
- [HIGH] Farsight's Pinball Arcade engine is approximately 8 years old and has not been substantially updated since launch — _Chris states 'it's probably an eight-year-old engine' built originally for mobile and console markets, not arcade cabinets_
- [HIGH] Pinball Arcade was built on an engine designed for mobile and console, not arcade cabinet/simulator use — _Chris explains Farsight developed the engine for console market (Pinball Hall of Fame era), then adapted for mobile, never intended for arcade simulation_
- [HIGH] Farsight did not make Pinball Arcade available on Steam for the first two years due to uncertainty about platform expansion — _Chris notes Farsight initially hesitated on Steam and only pursued it via Greenlight, primarily interested in improved lighting capabilities_
- [HIGH] Greg Holden's YouTube channel 'Spacey's Arcade' has approximately 700 subscribers and earned roughly $60-70 from YouTube monetization over two years of content — _Greg states he has '700 odd subscribers' and 'earned probably over two years enough to buy, I think, a coffee and a muffin' from ~60 videos at 2-3 hours each_
- [HIGH] Greg built his virtual pinball cabinet using a gutted original World Cup arcade cabinet with custom PC, dual screens, pinDMD hardware, force feedback, and Cree LED lighting — _Greg describes cabinet construction including pinDMD hardware, shaker motor/wiper motor from Zed Boards, analog plunger via Noah Fence, and DOF-triggered Cree LEDs_

### Notable Quotes

> "It's really about documenting my journey of putting together my own arcade... It's a little bit of a selfish channel. It's not a commercial venture. It's not about facts. It's about my opinions, my journey, and just sharing what I'm doing on a week-to-week basis."
> — **Greg Holden (Spacey's Arcade)**, ~7:30
> _Establishes Greg's channel philosophy as personal documentation rather than commercial venture, setting context for his credibility as a pinball enthusiast rather than industry player_

> "I feel like I'm running an arcade I feel like I'm an arcade operator and I'm not actually playing the damn things because I guess I'm all bloody working problems and software issues"
> — **Greg Holden**, ~12:45
> _Highlights the labor-intensive nature of maintaining and repairing vintage arcade machines versus playing them, illustrating arcade collector burden_

> "It's the timing and the way that it comes out... Without that insight, it's easy for people like myself to go, wow, you know, massive cash grab, last two days, oh, we can still get it."
> — **Greg Holden**, ~27:15
> _Identifies poor communication timing as root cause of 'cash grab' narrative—Arcuda's last-minute clarification created perception problem despite legitimate licensing resolution_

> "They're recreating real tables. They're not doing pinball effects... You're going to capture... the attention of real pinball enthusiasts... and it's those people that really get frustrated because they're like, why are you doing the key things that make this an awesome experience?"
> — **Greg Holden**, ~30:00
> _Identifies core tension between Farsight's arcade simulation positioning and lack of enthusiast-level features (physics, force feedback), explaining why licensed product underperforms vs. free VP alternative_

> "The product that it has not changed its engine this entire time... Whereas Visual Pinball was... You're talking about a product that has not changed its engine this entire time."
> — **Chris Frebus**, ~38:30
> _Emphasizes 8-year stagnation of Pinball Arcade engine, reinforcing technological gap with actively developed VP platform_

> "You initially weren't ever going to be able to buy these table packs. It was going to be exclusively for the Arcuda cabinet... And so it's kind of funny how the narrative should have been oh hey isn't this great that arcuda is opening the software up for everybody"
> — **Chris Frebus**, ~24:00
> _Attempts to reframe Arcuda's move from 'cash grab' to 'generous licensing expansion' for community benefit—highlights narrative management challenge_

### Entities

| Name | Type | Context |
|------|------|---------|
| Greg Holden | person | Content creator/YouTuber running Spacey's Arcade channel; Australian-based arcade enthusiast with IT and software background; built custom virtual pinball cabinet; interviewed on Blockade Podcast about Arcuda software experience |
| Spacey's Arcade | organization | YouTube channel documenting Greg Holden's journey building personal arcade collection; ~700 subscribers; focuses on arcade restoration, repair troubleshooting, and emulation/VP cabinet building; posted hour-long video showing Arcuda software in cabinet form running side-by-side with Visual Pinball |
| Arcuda | company | Virtual pinball cabinet software company; released cabinet mode unlock for Pinball Arcade; negotiated with Farsight/Scientific Games to maintain cabinet unlock availability post-June 30th licensing cutoff; announced bulk pre-purchase of software licenses for future cabinet sales |
| Farsight Studios | company | Developer of Pinball Arcade; licensed Williams/Bally tables; original engine built for mobile/console markets; has not substantially updated core engine in ~8 years; faced communication challenges regarding licensing terms and cabinet mode availability |
| Scientific Games | company | IP rights holder for Williams/Bally pinball tables; licensor controlling Williams table availability in Pinball Arcade; negotiated cutoff date of June 30th for table pack sales; involved in determining cabinet unlock availability post-cutoff |
| Visual Pinball | product | Free open-source virtual pinball platform with superior physics, force feedback, and customization capabilities compared to Pinball Arcade; increasingly preferred by enthusiasts and cabinet builders; runs on VP cabinet hardware like pinDMD and Zed Boards |
| Pinball Arcade | product | Licensed virtual pinball simulation featuring Williams/Bally tables; originally mobile/console focused; available on Steam, PlayStation; Williams table packs become unavailable June 30th; cabinet mode unlock remains available post-cutoff for existing table owners |
| Chris Frebus | person | Co-host of Blockade Pinball Podcast (alias 'Shut Your Trap'); based in US West Coast (likely California based on Lakers reference); conducts interviews and discusses pinball arcade/emulation topics; knowledgeable on Arcuda/Farsight licensing negotiations |
| Jared Morgan | person | Co-host of Blockade Pinball Podcast; based in Australia (timezone ahead of Northern Hemisphere); participates in technical and policy discussions; provides Australian market perspective |
| Blockade Pinball Podcast | organization | Pinball-focused podcast hosted by Chris Frebus and Jared Morgan; conducts interviews with community figures; covers pinball arcade software, emulation, and industry topics |
| Zed Boards | company | Hardware supplier for virtual pinball cabinets; provides force feedback components including shaker motor and wiper motor for VP cabinet builds |
| Theatre of Magic | product | Classic pinball game; Greg's YouTube channel originally named after this title; decals applied to his custom cabinet exterior despite hardware mismatch (non-DMD cabinet) |
| World Cup | product | Original arcade cabinet that Greg gutted and repurposed as base for his custom virtual pinball cabinet; original playfield now mounted on wall |
| Noah Fence | person | VP forums community member; supplied analog plunger and tilt sensor hardware for Greg's custom VP cabinet build |
| DOF (Direct Output Framework) | product | Software framework integrating Visual Pinball with external lighting/effects hardware; triggers high-intensity Cree LEDs in Greg's cabinet via VP table events |
| pinDMD | product | Hardware for emulating DMD (dot-matrix display) screens in virtual pinball cabinets; used in Greg's build alongside traditional monitor for main playfield display |

### Topics

- **Primary:** Williams/Bally Pinball Arcade licensing sunset (June 30th cutoff), Arcuda cabinet software unlock availability post-licensing cutoff, Farsight Studios' aging engine and lack of enthusiast features versus Visual Pinball
- **Secondary:** Custom virtual pinball cabinet hardware and construction, Community communication challenges and narrative management around licensing deals, Arcade restoration and board repair as hobby versus commercial operation
- **Mentioned:** YouTube content creation in niche communities (low monetization, high effort), Physics simulation and force feedback in virtual pinball platforms

### Sentiment

**Mixed** (0.35) — Hosts express frustration with Farsight's communication strategy, licensing uncertainty, and engine stagnation (negative), while appreciating Arcuda's effort to negotiate extended software availability and Greg's transparent troubleshooting approach (positive). Greg balances criticism of Pinball Arcade's limitations with respect for Farsight's licensing investments. Overall tone is critical of corporate decision-making but appreciative of community workarounds.

### Signals

- **[community_signal]** June 30th licensing cutoff triggering expected wave of community complaints from players who wait until final moment to purchase Williams table packs; hosts predict and dismiss anticipated complaints as self-inflicted (players had 2+ months notice) (confidence: high) — Chris states 'I can't wrap my head around it... I also think these people are kind of hoping that they get denied it so that then they have something to complain about' and predicts 'tomorrow there's going to be posts going, I'm so angry that this is gone that I wasn't able to get it. You had two months.'
- **[community_signal]** Custom virtual pinball cabinet builder (Greg) actively troubleshoots and documents arcade restoration/repair via YouTube to help community members; demonstrates peer-to-peer knowledge sharing compensating for corporate education gaps (confidence: medium) — Greg notes 'I've learned so much off other people's channels... I feel it's good to give back where I can' and Chris acknowledges 'you can actually help probably other people who are having the same problem' with board repair and software configuration
- **[market_signal]** Growing divergence between licensed 'simulation' products (Pinball Arcade) and open-source enthusiast platforms (Visual Pinball) due to licensing constraints limiting technical innovation; IP licensing may be limiting innovation in virtual pinball industry (confidence: medium) — Greg contrasts Pinball Arcade's static engine with VP's active development: 'I personally would like to support companies doing the right thing and getting the licenses... but if they can't deliver the same features that you know the free software can do it... as a pinball enthusiast i want to just play the best experience'
- **[licensing_signal]** Scientific Games licensing restrictions on Williams/Bally tables created complex negotiation with Arcuda/Farsight regarding post-June 30th cabinet unlock availability; licensing constraints required bulk pre-purchase of software keys for future cabinet sales (confidence: high) — Chris explains 'Arcuda went ahead and basically bought a block' of licenses because 'Arcuda is paying Farsight for all three of these versions' and had to negotiate with Scientific Games to maintain unlock availability indefinitely
- **[market_signal]** Bulk pre-purchase strategy suggests Arcuda expects continued cabinet demand post-licensing cutoff despite inability to advertise Williams tables as feature; indicates confidence in software's standalone value proposition (confidence: medium) — Chris explains 'they went ahead and bought a block... they bought a bulk purchase of the Arcuda software version to put into their cabinets so that farther down the line, if people purchase the cabinets... they'll still be able to sell the cabinet'
- **[market_signal]** Arcuda's final-day cabinet unlock announcement created 'cash grab' narrative among community despite legitimate licensing negotiation; poor communication timing damaged goodwill despite positive licensing outcome (confidence: high) — Greg states 'without that insight, it's easy for people like myself to go, wow, you know, massive cash grab, last two days' despite Arcuda actually securing indefinite unlock availability post-cutoff. Chris acknowledges timing/communication failure despite good outcome.
- **[product_concern]** Pinball Arcade's positioning as 'painstakingly recreated' simulation misleads enthusiasts expecting simulator-level physics/force feedback when product is actually casual video pinball on aging mobile-focused engine (confidence: high) — Greg explains mismatch: 'They advertise it as a real pinball simulator... They're recreating real tables... you're going to capture... the attention of real pinball enthusiasts... and it's those people that really get frustrated because they're like, why are you doing the key things that make this an awesome experience?'
- **[product_strategy]** Arcuda clarified that cabinet mode unlock will remain available for purchase indefinitely post-June 30th (only Williams table packs become unavailable), adjusting previous perception of hard cutoff on all Pinball Arcade features (confidence: high) — Chris explains negotiation outcome: 'Farsight went ahead and basically bought a block... they went ahead and basically bought a bulk purchase of the Arcuda software version to put into their cabinets so that farther down the line, if people purchase the cabinets... they'll still be able to sell the cabinet'
- **[technology_signal]** Farsight's Pinball Arcade engine is ~8 years old, originally built for mobile/console markets, and has not been substantially updated; physics and force feedback capabilities significantly lag behind open-source Visual Pinball platform (confidence: high) — Chris states 'it's probably an eight-year-old engine' that 'has not changed its engine this entire time,' originally built for mobile and console, never designed for arcade simulation. Greg notes VP offers superior physics, force feedback, and customization.

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## Transcript

 this is a blockade podcast with your hosts chris and jared you are listening to the BlahCade Pinball Podcast i am your host chris frebus aka shut your trap So, joining me as always, halfway across the world, Jared Morgan. Hello and good morning still? Yes, it is morning still here. It's a bit later than normal, isn't it though? It is. It's a little bit evening-ish for me. A little bit, yes. We've done this schedule before, once or twice. We have. Yeah, it seems to work. Usually when I was at work and we couldn't fit it on the weekend, we usually do a lunchtime recording. And it tends to work out pretty well. Right. And at least now you're not having to be sipping on some coffee to wake up. I don't have a problem with sipping on coffee at all like no problem but it was nice not to have to rush shovel the food in and then sort of rush into here and start recording right so yeah that was nice the women folk are off at Disney on ice today Zachary and I are at home Zachary's on his iPad programming things with his Sphero so he's having a great time out there Great. Keep them busy. Yeah. So, Jared, the doomsday day is here. It's finally arrived. It is. Yes, NBA free agency. Yeah, right. I got to honestly say, though, it's been funny because obviously, well, okay, so this is going to be broadcast to everybody a couple of days from now. But when we're recording this here for me. This is live. so we can actually have real life in time conversations it's June 30th which is the last day for the Williams Bally tables to be on sale with Inside Pinball Arcade that's it I can tell you that it's actually the 1st of July here at the moment and the world is about to end so just give me your full warning because I'm from the part of the world that's ahead of the Northern Hemisphere looking grim. So strap on on and get ready for it. That's right. But it is also tonight at midnight, but my time will be 9 o'clock, is when NBA Free Agency starts. And in our local market, because for the Lakers, the fact that we might be getting LeBron James, that's all that's been talked about on the radio, on sports radio for the past two weeks. And so I've literally been just waiting for this weekend to just hurry up and get here and kind of be done so that all the talk that's been on the forum can go away and all this chatter on the radio can go away and life can resume normalcy. Yeah. I mean, imagine getting LeBron James. LeBron. It's a pretty big deal. This is a pretty big deal. So, you know. Well, and it's one of those things where it's, a lot of dominoes that are going to fall depending on who signs and who doesn't. There's a fair amount of intrigue, but that's not why people tune into this show. Not normally. We almost never talk about sports. Let's not get onto a bad trend there. Exactly right. I will talk about though, and I cannot believe this. I should have expected it, and then what I expected is happening. So, okay, here it is, the last day for sales of this. And I was like, there's going to be people that are absolutely positively holding out until the very last second to purchase this. The bitter end, as it were. And I can't wrap my head around it, other than that maybe there's a thrill of getting it right at the wire and waiting until the last possible second. But at the same hand, I also think these people are kind of hoping that they get denied it so that then they have something to complain about. Well, you know, there is always the whole concept of FOMO, fear of missing out. Right. So perhaps these people thrive on FOMO. I don't know. And I understand like one person was saying yesterday, they were like, well, I'm just waiting for my paycheck. And I went, what? You haven't had a paycheck for the last two months when this is going to bounce? but then they also said well no I paid for the $150 cabinet version and I had to buy all the seasons that's unusual though those must have been people that were well and truly new to the whole franchise because most people by now would have actually had all the seasons or the ones they wanted well I know that this information has popped up on even sites like IGN so the reach is broad Exactly. I think the reach has broadened. There's been a lot of that, hey, did you know this program existed? Because it's about to lose all the good stuff. Yes, you might want to pull your finger out and actually get this done. But even still, it was one of those things where it was like, okay, fine, you want to save up your money, but you want to buy it all in one go as opposed to maybe spread it out. I don't know. Because of paychecks. Yeah, I don't know. Do it in installments. Lay away for the DLC. Then what I figured was going to happen is people are going to miss out, and they're going to complain. Oh, yes. And they're going to complain because, well, it no longer is available on the PlayStation store. Well, yeah. I said to everybody that it was going to be gone on the 28th, and then it was just – and I just saw this post today. They're like, I tried to buy it on Steam, but it's not available anymore. Well, no, it's available in-game. Oh, because I was waiting for a 20% off. And we're like – No. I'm sorry but Farsight has made the announcement that no it will not go on sale we've made it in our podcast no it's not going to go on sale if you went onto the forum there's various points including on our main headline thing it's not going on sale no discounts so it's amazing how they'll still find a way to make it sound like there's something wrong with it there's something wrong I imagine that tomorrow there's going to be posts going, I'm so angry that this is gone that I wasn't able to get it. It wasn't. You had two months. Sucks to be you, mate. Like it really does. Sucks to be you. It does. And now go fly the Jolly Roger and, you know, find that version. Yeah. We, we those are people. You don't even have to look far, Jared. You really don't. No, you're right. Especially on Steam. That's what I'm talking about. And believe me, the guys up at Farsight are well aware of it. And they might just accidentally turn a blind eye, maybe. Maybe. Well, you know, yeah, especially since some of the comments that I heard, one of them was from one of the people up there. They were like, yeah, I really want to just make everything, the whole collection for $1 on the final day. Yeah, that would be really unfortunate if that just happened to slip out on the final day. Oh, a misconfiguration in the pricing structure on Steam. What are we going to do about that? Oh, I'm sure that scientific games would come back at them and be like, well, what are you going to do about it? Is he going to fork over a buttload of money? Probably, yeah, because they don't miss a trick, unfortunately. Well, as it seems. As it seems. So anyway, like I said, we'll be able to breathe a sigh of relief and maybe talk about other things finally in the podcast. I don't know. Maybe someone will pick this thing up. Who knows? I don't know. But we're not there yet. We've got one last podcast to really just dive into this. Yeah. And we've got a special guest to help us dive into it. Yeah. They had questions, and we might have answers. We may potentially have answers. I want to go ahead and bring on Greg Holden. You may know him from his YouTube channel called Spacey's Arcade. Welcome, Greg. Hey, guys. Hey, Greg. Thanks for joining us from the Western seaboard of Australia. Great to be here. Thanks for inviting me on. Absolutely. So, yeah, now I've got two people on the other side of the world. I think it's going to cause the world to tilt here. I don't have a problem with this, actually. I'm glad that we actually have another Aussie on the podcast to actually deal with the slight delay that we have to deal with with YouTube Live. We'll be going all the way back to the U.S. and then coming back to Australia and then going back to U.S. again. it'll be kind of good amazing that it works as well as it does um so greg tell us why don't you tell us a little bit about uh spacey's arcade yeah sure so um spacey's arcade really is just a it's following my journey to create an ultimate arcade and the ultimate arcade from my perspective because you know a lot of people on there saying you know you should have this machine or that machine or why don't you like this that or the other and that's not really what the channel is about. It's really about documenting my journey of putting together my own arcade. And funnily enough, from that perspective, it's a little bit of a selfish channel. It's not a commercial venture. It's not about facts. It's about my opinions, my journey, and just sharing what I'm doing on a week-to-week basis. And I really set it up because I started putting together this arcade and I thought, geez, I'm doing so much. I'm spending so much work and time in here. I sort of need to justify to my wife while I'm sort of buried up in the man cave for so long. So I thought, you know, why not document it? Why not share it? If some people can get something out of it, then great. But it's not actually there, funnily enough, to serve a YouTube audience. I know that might sound a bit strange. but you know a lot of people obviously set up YouTube channels for the commercial side of things but I haven't done so it doesn't mean that down the track you know that there might be a commercial angle on it I was one of the the lucky YouTube channels that got struck off the the advertising revenue from YouTube anyway because I the thousand thresholds I'm on 700 odd subscribers now. But again, it didn't bother me because it was like, well, whatever. I mean, I'd earned probably over two years enough to buy, I think, a coffee and a muffin. Very sustainable. You're right. About 70, what was I up to then? About 60, I think, actually. 60 videos at about, you know, two hours of recording, three hours of editing each. and that was pretty much my payday from Google. It's definitely not about the money. It would have been just coffee and muffin you ever tasted in your life. Got to savor that one for sure for all that work. For those of our audience that happen to be watching the YouTube feed of this, right behind Greg, he's a little sample of his cave there. He's got a NeoGeo machine. We've got, looks like some ancient basketball game. I don't know. Is that like vector graphics kind of thing? It's quite funny, actually, because I'm actually in my study. These machines are not actually in the arcade. And that's the problem that I have at the moment. I've literally run out of room in the arcade. So now machines are being dotted around the house. I've got some here in the study, but now they've actually overflowed out into the living area where my lovely wife and kids are um and how's that going down i'm sure the kids like it yeah yeah um i sort of keep having to say that it's temporary and you know i'll move them but i've got i've got games in the garage i've got games out um out on the on the outside deck as well they're covered up so yeah i've got a bit of a i've got a bit of a addiction problem I don't know if problem's the right word it's because these games come up and they're such good price and I have such a nostalgic attachment to them I can't I just can't let them go, if the price is right I can't let them go, I don't go out and buy things at stupid prices, I'm out there trying to save a lot of games that need a little bit of repairing and stuff which I can do and part of that funnily enough and and and doing this uh channel it's been the journey of picking up these machines which has been probably almost one of the most fun part of it um but i do find myself doing so much working on the games i feel like i'm running an arcade i feel like i'm an arcade operator and i'm not actually playing the damn things because i guess i'm all bloody working problems and software issues and you know bloody using java pies and just using all sorts of different types of hardware to get stuff going. And, yeah, I think I should be paid for that job as well, and I'm not. Well, I think the good thing is because you're doing a vlog, you can actually help probably other people who are having the same problem with getting these old boards up and running again. And that in itself is invaluable because it sounds like you've got an electrical engineering background or at least some sort of board repair background, or perhaps it was inherited along the way. You want to tell us a bit about that? How did you actually get into actually repairing them? Yeah, sure. Well, that's interesting, actually, because I don't actually have, not on that side of things. I've got a background in IT and I've done some software programming years and years and years ago. We're talking COBOL. We're not talking Intel. Yeah, that's old. And so you have to write two pages of code just to say, hello, world. You know, just to declare everything up the front. But, yeah, so I've been in IT, hardware side of things, been, you know, through doing computer support and stuff in the early years is really where I've got my knowledge of hardware. But I certainly haven't got down into the nitty gritty. I mean, I can build my own PCs. I know what's sort of going on. I can, when it comes to looking at circuit diagrams, I get a little stuck. I can sort of follow you. Yeah. That's right. I can sort of generally work things out. And at the end of the day, I've learned a lot online as well. So, yeah, you're dead right. People may be picking up some good things from me. They might be picking up some bad habits from me. I don't profess to be completely know what I'm doing. That's the whole purpose is just sharing what I'm doing and even the mistakes that I might make. But I've learned so much off other people's channels. And so, yeah, I feel it's good to give back where I can. That's certainly a side benefit of doing it. And without YouTube, I probably wouldn't be doing this in terms of the knowledge that I've picked up. Because I wouldn't be able to work on the games to the level that I can without it being hugely expensive and having to sub off that work. But, you know, I like solving problems. You know, being in IT, you sort of get that mindset. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, I don't mind picking up these old machines and then trying to figure out what the hell's going on with them. So that's just another fun part of the hobby. So the video that brought our attention to you, and one of our forum members is the one that linked it in the forum, it was like, oh, we were basically looking for people who wanted to see what the Arcuda software looked like in cab form. and all of a sudden, bam, here's this hour-long video that has lots and lots of footage of it running on a cab. I think you posted that video probably about two weeks ago. And within that video, you were showing both the Arcuda software and how that was running in your cab, as well as visual pinball running, kind of doing side-by-side comparisons and stuff like that. Out of curiosity, was that a home-built cab? Did you buy that cab? What have we got running on there for your pinball cabinet? Yeah, it's a complete – well, actually, I'd say the cab's not home-built in terms of the actual cabinet itself was an original World Cup cabinet. And the playfield for that is actually hanging on the wall. So that was a gutted cab that I bought years ago in terms of had no electronics and bits and pieces. And I probably could have got that back and working. But that game itself is not great. So the cabinet itself is real. It's been I've got some Theatre of Magic decals on the outside because my channel name originally was called Theatre of Magic. The whole concept of the room that I built, my quote, quote, arcade started off as a theatre. That was my home theater, getting turned into an arcade as this hobby tends to do. It just sort of absorbs and takes over certain rooms. The whole concept of the sort of magical aspect was earlier on I was more actually into doing a lot of the emulation stuff and I started off main and I started off also with visual pinball and then I branched out into getting real machines and sort of dug back into the roots of of the nostalgia that I have for all the the old old games so that's that's sort of how it transpired so that's why we've got theater of magic decals on the side of it, which is a total mismatch, and I'm sure people will complain that, you know, I've got a DMD-style decals on the side of a non-DMD cabinet. These are the things that we do, right? So that's the cabinet. Everything else in it, the PC that I put in there, it was one that I just built up myself. The screens, just, you know, there's two screens, There's a real DMD running pin. There's pin DMD hardware that runs that, which I've got set up in there. And I've got some force feedback. I've got a shaker motor and a wiper motor from Zed Boards. So that's their particular hardware. There's an analog plunger and nudge sensitivity or tilt sensor. So that was through VP forums, I think, through a guy on there who goes by the name of Noah Fence. And that's that part of the hardware. Other than that, I've got some Cree lighting that's running off the, you guys would know about the DOF, the direct output framework, which hooks into Visual Pinball. and that allows it to trigger off all the high-intensity Cree LEDs, which I've got positioned down the side of the table. And if you see the video, you probably see all the lights going off, and it's a really, really nice effect. And those are also on the top of the cabinet as well in duplicate. And a lot of people put those lights at the end of the table, like in a row of six, whereas I actually put three down one side, two down the other. in generally the places where those lights are on real tables. It's actually quite funny. So many tables have those lights in very similar positions. When they fire off, it really looks like they're flooding across the top of the glass and really giving you that sort of pinball experience. It's interesting because when I saw your cabinet, I almost – I questioned and I realized that you probably weren't going to ship it over from here, but it looked a lot like what VP Cabs is doing in terms of having an actual glass with the monitor sunken below the glass to kind of give that cabinet depth effect. They also have lights along the side of their – on the blades basically. So it was one of those things where I was like, guy, that looks a lot like what they're doing, but I know that they don't have anything that's branded Theater of Magic, so I knew it wasn't. Well, I haven't seen what those guys are doing in terms of that sort of setup. But funnily enough, I had a lot of people say to me earlier on, like, you know, why have you sunk in the top screen? And as you say, like a lot of VB cabinets, it's flat. Sometimes they do that because I think the bezels on some of the TV sets are such that they've sort of actually fit them on top or etched out the top and sunk them in a little bit. I think bezels have got lots more over the years, obviously. So I think you can, I think you pretty much get a 40 inch now straight in and position any which way you like. But from my perspective, I really felt that I wanted that illusion of depth in the cabinet. It does achieve that. And also I've got a real plunger and a button on the right hand side. And the real plunger is lower than the button. and that's because it sits underneath the screen, is it? The actual screen. You've got to have clearance, right? Yeah. Otherwise, unfortunately, you would see the plunger actually sitting above the screen there. So I had to sort of rejig that slightly. So that might look a little bit odd from a front perspective in terms of the cabinet view, but it works. In my view, it works really, really well. I can plunge and I can put my hand on the top of the machine and then I can use my thumb to actually use the button for those ones. It just seems to work nicely for me. Cool. So within this video, then, obviously, you had a go at the software, and that brought up some kind of issues. And I wanted to kind of get into that. Just now that you've had it for even a longer bit of time, how has been your impression using the software? I'm assuming you did the $150 version of the software, obviously. Yeah, I... Steam Key Unlock. Yeah, under Gunpoint, I bought the unlock. Under Gunpoint. Well, actually, you know, and it's really interesting, isn't it? And you guys, I'm sure, know. So they just released, I think, on the Cuda website, they've got a statement there saying that the cabinet mode unlock will be available after the 30th, but obviously not for the purchase of the Williams tables. I don't know what, I don't know. Yeah, so I gather they're saying you could still unlock it after it, probably if you own the tables. I didn't actually say that. Again, just the brilliant communication that we usually get where we have to sort of try and work out what they're actually saying. That's all part of the fun. But I believe that's the case. But you know what? The funny thing about that, and one of my subscribers actually posted it on that video that that's happening. And the immediate thing I thought it was, wow, OK, so we've got this massive cash grab to get people to get the unlock key before the 30th. Then a day before, it's like, well, actually, no, you can unlock the cabs after the 30th. But, you know, clearly you still have to have the tables. but it would mean that people could hold off on that $150 purchase right now if they wanted to unlock it later. But they wouldn't have known that before. Well, here's the thing. Arcuda didn't know that beforehand either. This literally has been… In negotiation, pretty much. Yeah, them trying to find information from Farsight, Farsight trying to find information from Scientific Games about what they're allowed to do, what they're not allowed to do, And eventually Farsight came to the conclusion that, wait a second, this unlock has nothing to do with Williams Tables or Bally Tables. It has nothing to do with the sale of those. It's purely our software paying for the development. Well, I guess that would be Arcuda's standpoint, paying for development costs. So Farsight was really trying to make sure that this was possible. and only just released that information to Arcuda. And so Arcuda then came out and be like, okay, now we've been told that we can have this indefinitely. However, and I don't know if this has gotten lost in the shuffle or not, but the, yeah, those 76 table packs, so the two $500 packs, if you will, the standalone version and the Arcuda cabinet version, those absolutely positively you cannot purchase anymore. By yourself, basically. So what instead has happened is Arcuda went ahead and basically bought because Arcuda is paying Farsight for all three of these versions. Like whenever they make a sale, they're paying Farsight. So they're paying Farsight for the 150. You know, somebody goes to their website, says, hey, yeah, I want the $150 version. Boom. They have to pay Farsight that somebody does the $500 version. Boom. They have to pay Farsight for that. So there's three versions that they're essentially paying for. And so they went ahead and bought a block, and we don't know how many of these they did, but they bought a bulk purchase of the Arcuda software version to put into their cabinets so that farther down the line, if people purchase the cabinets, depending on how many they did, they'll still be able to sell the cabinet. They can't advertise what's in the cabinet and use that as an advertising feature, but they'll be able to sell those cabinets off for a little bit still. And people will still be able to get the software within that. But I think the majority of us that already knew about the game, I mean, there's plenty like myself and Jared included. We don't have a cab setup, but we have all the games. so it is nice to know that, hey, two years down the line or whatever, if all of a sudden I have this ability. $1,000. Exactly. $1,000 lying around. Australia. Then I'll be able to fork over the $150 and be able to have cabinet mode. Woot, woot. Yeah, and I guess, guys, it's the timing of this stuff, and I appreciate that they probably followed through the bouncing ball those conversations to get to that conclusion. But it's the timing and the way that it comes out. And without that insight, it's easy for people like myself to go, wow, you know, massive cash grab, last two days, oh, we can still get it. You know what I mean? It just doesn't come across well. So half the time I think they don't help themselves with the way that they communicate what's going on and some of the challenges. We've discovered that a lot of these companies don't know how to communicate well with their fans. Who knows? Maybe they've been sitting around the boardroom too much, bantering between themselves and think everybody knows everything. And then they don't think about the silly questions that we tend to ask. But it's also one of the like you keep on saying cash grab. And I know some people immediately thought that it was a cash grab. just, oh, here's the announcement. Oh, by the way, you can buy these table packs. And it's one of those things where it's like, well, you initially weren't ever going to be able to buy these table packs. It was going to be exclusively for the Arcuda cabinet. That was going to be their sell feature, basically. You weren't getting cabinet mode, period. Farsighted stopped working on it. They hadn't really worked on it much to begin with. No. And so it's kind of funny how the narrative should have been oh hey isn't this great that arcuda is opening the software up for everybody to be able to use and instead it's kind of turned and people are like well how come you know you're just doing this to to you know to take the money and run and it's like no they they're the ones that sunk the development cost into this for their product you're now benefiting because the license is going away so it is kind of weird trying to to shape that narrative yeah i i guess the the thing that is difficult in that narrative is that people that have bought the pinball arcade have bought it probably on the pretense of what it's advertised for and they advertise it as a real pinball simulator to a degree. Yes. They go to their website. They talk about painstakingly recreating the pinball experience. And I think this is something that is at the root of probably a lot of the conversations and a lot of the actions out of Farsight, and that is who is their target market really, and what is this product, and who is it aimed for? because I think if they'd actually put on their website right from the outset, hey, this is video pinball for people that like to play pinball that you remember from the old days but not enthusiasts, I think we'd all be on the same page for what it is. We wouldn't be talking about physics. We wouldn't be talking about why, you know, there's no cabinet support natively in the software. But I think it's that communication that it is some form of simulation. simulation, the fact that they've got all the licenses over the years, so they're recreating real tables. They're not doing pinball effects. Pinball effects is clearly video pinball, and you play it on the basis. I don't mind so much, and I haven't actually ever minded that previously there's been no forced feedback on that. Over the years, they've added things like third screen, DMD support, that sort of stuff, but they don't have to. You know, they're not promoting that whole simulation. Now, as soon as you see all those real tables and you see this company putting this product out, it's like you're going to capture or at least get the attention of real pinball enthusiasts and people that are building virtual tables, you know, similar to myself. And it's those people that really, I think, get frustrated because they're like, why are you doing the key things that make this an awesome experience? And that's the things like the physics, you know, And that's the thing is about the force feedback and having those options to be able to get closer to that experience. And it's just, I guess, made more difficult the fact that you've got software like Visual Pinball available and all of that stuff is freely available there. And, you know, and it's not right. It's not right from a licensing point of view. And, you know, I personally would like to support companies doing the right thing and getting the licenses and delivering the stuff. but if they can't deliver the same features that you know the free software can do it it's and as a pinball enthusiast i want to just play the best experience and i can't do that with farsight's tables yeah unfortunately the when when farsight first developed this uh they were going after and and this is going back before pinball arcade even this is going back to pinball hall of fame they were developing it for the console market purely that was it and when they came out with pinball arcade it was hey wait a second we can catch the mobile market too and so that was the the engine that this is built upon it was built for mobile and built for console and that was it. And the telling sign of that was it wasn't even made available for Steam for the first two years of the product. They didn't know if they wanted to dive into those waters. They had to do the Steam Greenlight and the only thing that kind of excited them about it was the aspect of being able to do better lighting. And that was basically it. So you're talking about a product that it has not changed its engine this entire time. It's probably, I think we've figured it's an eight, probably an eight-year-old engine. Yeah, about that. About that. Whereas Visual Pinball was, well, I should say Visual Pinball 10, Visual Pinball 7. I don't think Visual Pinball 7 was necessarily meant for cabinets, but Visual Pinball 10 was certainly designed for cabinet use, among other things. so you've got one program that's constantly shifting constantly changing because all they have to do is change the program then they make all the the community is the one that has to go ah crap i got to redesign this table make it work within you know visual pinball 10 whereas fireside is well if they change the engine they're the ones that have to then make everything work again and they're not that large of a studio um so i think that's where the now i get what you're saying is, oh, well, they're saying they're doing this detailed recreation or whatever. I think it was more for we want people to experience these tables and we're lovingly creating them so that they're getting that. The cabinet niche, I mean, that's a niche of a niche market here. And so I don't think they ever really, I don't think it's right that they didn't, but they never really saw them as a marketplace i mean we're talking about i think they have something like 25 million unique downloads of pinball arcade and pc is not the main market it's ps4 and iOS and then Android and then Steam. You know, so. And then within the Steam, it's how many people actually have a cabinet. You know, and when. Again, when you're dealing with such an old engine compared to what Visual Pinball is dealing with. And, you know, you've got an individual author who is willing to spend two, three, four months creating that one table. That's a lot of man hours that I don't know if the company could justify. Sure. I think that and I get that, you know, I get that where it's completely niche market. I did mention on my video that perhaps there was an opportunity missed there in relation to looking at the spend to appease this very niche market as a marketing angle as a marketing cost on their side if you could you know if you got the cabinet owners uh on the side they're the people that love and promote pinball that you would then have them re-promoting their product through youtube channels and whatnot and just help extend goodwill really of the of the community yeah um but notwithstanding that you know as you say probably the massive market that they've got is the casual gamer yes um i would still argue that um you know if i was sitting down looking at their their business model and trying to work out how to make the software as successful as possible that the amount of energy and time i'd be focusing on the actual physics of it would still be a lot would be proportionally a lot more than i think that they've done because it's still a key part of the gameplay experience. Even the ability to, I guess, have levels of difficulty with physics. Because some people might hop on, you know, the Pimble Arcade and go, I actually really like the physics. You know, a casual gamer might go, I really like this. This plays really easy. It's really nice. You know, they might hop on VP, lose the ball within three seconds and go, I don't like this. This is not a good gaming experience. because it's more true to actually how it happens in real life. But in that case, you would tend to build in levels. Here's the basic physics. Here's the expert physics. And maybe even sell the expert physics as an extra add-on. Get the money back for that, but also appease that market because you're still going to have simple enthusiasts as part of the market that sit with their PlayStation controllers. They still want a real game and they want to be able to come back and play it and have a good time. And if the physics is such that it's just not that, then you won't get that even in that market. We have long argued, and this goes back to my visit at the end of their Farsights first season. We have long said, hey, ramp up the difficulty. Give us difficulty differences. Put in tournament mode. anything of that nature to make the tables more challenging. Now, for quite a few years, the beginning years, the person that was tuning the tables was their vice president, Bobby King. So obviously he had other duties also to take care of. That's since been handed off to Rob, who has been trying to go back through many of these and get them to play a little bit more like how they actually play. And I described in our podcast last week, I think it was, that I had them put up Creature from the Black Lagoon. And I told them, I said, I haven't had a single table that I've played in real life do the ball behavior off of a hard launch or a hard plunge that you guys have in the game. And I said, no, I don't know if that's the way you have it is the way the game was intended. if it was the way that your machine is tuned or not. And he was right there on the fly, able to kind of tweak it and make it do what I've seen it do. But that's kind of the difficulty with these things too, is it's like, okay, are we trying to make these how they are out of the box? Or are we making them the way that almost everybody plays them now, 30 years later? That's actually a really, really good comment because you're spot on there. In fact, I've had situations where I've played real pinball and the ball's done something off the flipper that I've gone, that shouldn't have happened. I thought to myself, if that was in the pinball arcade, I would have complained to all buggery that that should not have happened. Like if you've ever played on a freshly waxed table, that ball does magical things that you wouldn't buy for an instant in video pinball. Exactly. Exactly, yeah, some tables have an inordinate amount of spin happening on the ball and all sorts of stuff. So I absolutely get that. And I think that would be that part of it clearly is very difficult to recreate. And a lot of program would have to go into working out even, you know, staging the table in such a way. Is this a new table? Is it a worn table? And so forth. some of the you know the visual pinball creators there's been a few tablers over the years where there's been a couple releases of old table sort of dynamics where they've actually tuned you know the left flipper down a little bit from the right flipper and it's just sort of aged the table from the way it actually plays but you know clearly there's a lot more work in doing that but I think fundamentally like the basic options the basic options to be able to change things like table slope you know table slope is the thing that will help with the the ball speed um and like last night i actually i actually went through the akuta set of tables um from season one up each table i went through each one and i'll be absolutely honest with you guys i have not played every table of theirs because I have no reason to. I play a couple of them and I'm like, I really want to enjoy this, but I know I can just flip over into VP and I'm going to really enjoy it. And that was the problem. But I thought, look, last time I thought, give it a go. I'm going to go through each table and I'm just going to get a bit of an assessment of what I think of them. And I think overall, and I didn't go through all of them because I just, I got bored. I'm sorry. I got bored. The reason why I got bored was I just felt the moon physics. The ball was too floaty in general. Some tables seem to be slightly better than others, I must admit. A couple there were sort of playable to a degree of enjoyment. Others, I sat there and I thought I could just play this all night. I'm just not going to finish this game. and the ball was just not coming to me fast enough and I think if you just had that table slope option at minimum just that one thing to get the ball moving around faster even though the rest of the physics is still a little bit dodgy it would help immensely with playability what's funny is the flip side of that is their EMs play way too fast actually that is a classic because which one was it that I big shot actually I made that comment. I played it and I thought, this is enjoyable. I actually could play that game for a while. I ironically came to the conclusion, I thought, this is great, but it's playing faster than it would normally. But it's great. It essentially feels like it's got solid-state coils in it, not EM coils. Yeah, it's like everything's bouncing around really quick. But just the way that that table's laid out, The ball can drain quite easily. And so it's a bit of a challenge. Again, the problem with that, though, and for me, is not having real nudge. For a table set up anyway, I've got so used to just nudging the table. And I guess that's the, you know, from a pinball enthusiast perspective, it's not just the physics from the video side of things. It's that real world moving of the table. Yeah, if you're at a cabinet, you're going to want to nudge realistically, not push a button to nudge. Yeah, absolutely. There's worlds of difference in that, and that's a huge part of the pinball experience I think a lot of people don't necessarily realize unless you're a pinball player. And again, that's where I know that you had been kind of critical of Arcuda in that regard, and that's where I was like, well, that's one of those things that they're holding for themselves. It's the, hey, buy our cabinet. And I don't – I know to you and to probably a lot of the homebrew community that deals with this bin entrenched in VP, that that can kind of come off as rubbing you wrong. It's like, well, hey, how come I can't have my coils activated? How come I'm not having my manual plunger do what it's supposed to do and everything? And it's, I totally get your guys' point of view, but I also get Arcuda's point of view. And part of that, and this is where I don't think that you were aware of this, they are developing, they're having boards made that are their own tilt board. It's not using a plumb bob, it's using a accelerometer, I believe, but their own tilt bob or their own tilt board and their own plunger board. and those are not going to be compatible with what else is out there on the market. It's software specifically written to those boards. So within the software that you're getting to play, it just plain isn't going to run on the regular thing. It's going to have to be the button style. Now, unless somebody gets creative and hangs a PS4 controller inside their cabinet and uses the accelerometer on that because I know you can turn that on, I believe, and do it that way. Sure. And I guess who's doing then the software coding? So they're building their own hardware to work with effectively TPA. Yes. Who's actually building the software? Who's developing the software to integrate with their hardware? Is Arcuda doing that? Do they have their own software people doing that, or is it TPA? So it's – the software is specifically designed for Arcuda's cabinets, and it's Farsight that is the one that is coding it. Yeah. When it comes to the hardware and the boards, that's Arcuda coding it. Yeah, sure. So from that perspective, it makes perfect sense that they only are able to support their hardware because they don't have control over the software to support any other hardware anyway. That's TPA. Right. So I understand that. So I guess from that perspective, though, I probably have still the question of they're actually going after potentially a niche market. And I'm not sure if they're actually looking at also commercial like actual operators to put these things out and have them actually coin controlled. I'm not sure if the licensing allows them to do that, but they're clearly going for a very niche market with those machines. They're not cheap machines. And there's a lot of hardware and all the rest of it in there. So that's cool. And the scope of pinball machines and their total cost, it's sort of right in the normal money area. But I guess I would I would think, well, why just go for that? If you go if you're developing hardware pieces, why not sell the hardware pieces as well as an option and still make money on the way through and be able to provide those parts to people that can't necessarily outlay up to 10K on a machine, but can build their own machine up over time using their parts. You know, and those people would not buy that machine anyway. You know, they're not in the financial position to do so, but they would be buying their parts. And then, again, just getting more of their product out there, more awareness, more exposure, you know, sending out a message that you're not locking people out. You know, you're not, again, forcing people to buy something that they don't maybe can not afford or they don't need. I'll take this one. You take it. So with this one, it's interesting because if you start to sell the modules, like sell the tilt boards, sell the interface modules that allow you to power solenoids as separate units, and I know that you'll be aware of this as working in software, that then becomes a shelf product. So what you then need to be able to do is build a whole ecosystem around supporting that shelf product for a myriad of different software PC configurations. So you essentially have to build up a backplane of support people that will go, oh, so how have you installed this particular board? Oh, so you've got a GTX 960 and you've got this and you've got this technical combination. What USB board, what interface driver are you using? do you have the correct drivers installed? Do you have everything configured correctly? So you have all these extra layers of stuff that you need to then support by offering the board separately. Flip that around and say if you have a proprietary set of boards that work with a proprietary set of driver software that's installed on a box that you actually get with the game, that starts to make things a lot more supportable. Yeah, and 100% agree with you and understand where you're coming from there. and the interesting thing there is that I don't think a lot of people understand that. A lot of people don't understand the business side of things to provide that level of support and the sheer cost behind it and I get that. And sure, so they may have gone through all the modeling exercises and determined, hey, to sell these parts at this price point and make this X amount of profit to cover our support requirements and all that sort of stuff, it's not going to be worth doing that. It's possible. Yeah, possible. Again, you know, companies don't have to put their business plans on the table, and most people wouldn't. They really do. And most people probably wouldn't be interested anyway. But, you know, I guess those are just some of the challenges, right? A lot of enthusiasts don't see the challenges of the business side. Yeah. And I can understand a lot of the things that TPA have done from a business perspective. And I think I made mention on on my video that their business model is a fantastic business model, probably for being a profitable development company in terms of the way they've targeted multiple platforms and reuse their IP across as many platforms as they can, probably at the lowest possible cost to them. And, you know, from that side of things, businesses are there to make money. It's not a charity. Yeah, totally. But I guess, you know, you can do that in such a way, I think, but still be nice to your customers. And sorry, that's probably a bit harsh, but I think, you know, I think they've made a few missteps in terms of communication, which just they could have avoided quite easily, wouldn't have cost them anything, and just built up a better rapport with the community to help sell more product. It seems like they've sold a lot of product anyway, so they probably haven't really thought of caring about that aspect of it. They probably looked at their bottom line and gone, well, we're making good money out of this. Let's just keep churning that through. The model's working. We don't need to spend cycles when we've got precious little time worrying about a small subset of the community and keeping them happy. Well, it's funny too, because we honestly believe that Farsight had no intention of making this game beyond those first two years. That's what the contract was for. That's why they front-loaded it with all these AAA titles. I honestly don't believe that they expected it to take off. Then when it did take off, it caught them unawares. It was like, oh crap, we've got to do this every month? How are we going to possibly keep up with this? Their first thing that they did to try and keep up with it was, hey, remember how we were releasing two tables a month? Yeah, we're only going to release one table a month now. And even that was too much for them. So I think they were behind the eight ball every single month. Being in the beta testing wings that both Chris and I were, particularly on mobile, They were up to the day putting things into the product to make sure that the thing didn't crash and that walls weren't going through walls that shouldn't be going through. You could actually interact with things correctly in mobile. It was down to the wire every single month. So I think that actually speaks to a lot of why things like these things like, you know, even head to head mode, for example. Let's not even think about cabinet support mode, but the whole competitive aspects of it. Like there were things that they would probably have wanted to do, but they just couldn't. They were flat out just getting the tables out every month. And then you come to the end of the cycle where they stopped doing those monthly DLCs. And you were thinking, ah, finally, we can go, cool, let's just stop for a minute and go, right, let's lay out a plan for the next one to two years about how we're now going to go back through and refine and tweak. and then the license thing landed on them. And it just all went out the window again, right? Yeah. It's shifting sands of being a software product developer. So with that time schedule, I guess the expectations that they set, it's an interesting thing. Was that driven internally by Farsight to ensure that from a development cycle they would always push out a table or two tables as it was every month from a point of view of getting the revenue flowing in like if you don give that to i mean if you don give timelines and deadlines to developers nothing ever happens nothing ever nothing gets done right so do you think that was a self-imposing or do you think because i because i think the interesting thing there is is that the customers actually started expecting that monthly thing. Once you say that you're done every month, and if you don't make that deadline or if it comes out and the product's not finished, a lot of bugs in it, you're going to get a whole lot of backlash. And it's ironic in a way because the company set that and communicated that. They could have actually just done that internally. They could have just gone, hey, guys, every month, you guys have got to shoot out a table. And if it slightly gets missed, okay, we'll deal with that internally. We'll just release it on our normal schedules out to the public without them knowing that we're committing to a table every month. I think they looked at the rock band model of releasing new music every month and went, hey, that's a that's pretty good. And then combine that with at the time, this was the only program that Farsight was working on. the only game that they were working on. And they were used to kind of turn out a game, support it for a little bit, move on to the next. And suddenly they had something that I think blew up a lot more than they were used to with any of the previous games that they'd ever made. And there was such a demand being like, Hey, when's the next table come when, you know, I mean, as soon as the table would come out, people were jumping on going, what's next? Yeah, absolutely. And, and that became a game for them. They were like, oh, man, check this out. We've got some buzz going, and we didn't even have to tell them what's next, and people are frothing at the mouth, you know. In fact, on the forum, there's, like, these speculation threads that are, like, seasons out in length about speculating what was going to be in the next season. Like, when one season started, the next season's speculation thread started up. Like, it was just this insatiable appetite for the community, and they could feel it. And obviously, they thought, well, the appetite's there. Let's play to it. and when they were making the games at the level they were making them for those first two seasons, I think it was sustainable. But then people started making demands on them and saying, hey, you're not doing this right, you're not doing this right, we expect this, we want this, we want this particular thing emulated, you know, blah, blah, blah. And they realized, well, if we want to keep on these people, we need to improve our game, but we don't have time to really do the big giant improvement, so we're just going to patch it together. Meanwhile, Zen's over there releasing a table every three months, four months going laughing, you know, with very little bug patching after the fact. Exactly. Yeah. So, yeah, it's kind of a. They kind of did it to themselves and never expected. And I joked with with them when I was up there, I said, you know, you've got all these millions of downloads and then. But you really pay attention to those of us that are in the forum, and we number, at any given time, active users probably on the high side. It would be 2,000 people. I mean, that would be on the really high side, I imagine. And we're the ones that are really driving you. So on that aspect, they were actually paying attention to the community and catering to us. so it's one of those things where I have a hard time faulting them but I completely agree there was a better way of doing it too yeah and I look at the end of the day that specifically obviously helps their revenue and sales anyway that particular aspect of if you looked at it yes they're serving the community by providing these tables on a regular basis and that's an awesome thing but really Like, mentally, it's revenue through the door to keep paying the staff and lots on, basically. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I know you had asked me about what, you know, you already asked what Farsight's target audience was, but you had also asked what Arcuda's target audience is. And I think that's also something that's a bit of a confusing. And part of the confusion comes from Arcuda is having to release their product before it's quite ready because of this license loss. They had it all planned out. However, they're going to make a big splash and, you know, lay it all out. So everybody understood what their what their goal was here. And instead is kind of starting with the pinball market. But their their idea is that it's this machine is going to be for any style of gameplay. and that's whether it's pinball or traditional arcade because that's the other thing that hasn't really come out yet is that this cabinet is going to be able to play not emulated games but actually licensed arcade games on it with the joystick attachment that will go on the front of the machine, whether you want to play it vertical playfield or play it up on the backbox with the horizontal playfield and the whole thing is designed to be plug and play So it's kind of ease of use thing. You want to plug your consoles in, you plug them in, you can play them on this thing. You want to take your phone and play, you know, whatever game, mobile game you play on it. Boom, you plug it in, you've got the touchscreen. Now it's a giant phone and you can use the whole touchscreen, you know, in that fashion. So it's kind of, it's for an audience that wants many games, but in a single unit. You know, they don't have your space. or maybe you don't even have the space either. You're just willing to fill it up with your machines. But they've got a designated amount of space, and this is going to allow them to have the biggest bang for their buck. Or maybe it's for a location operator. If you go into a bar where they only have two machines set up or something like that, well, hey, if you have this machine set up, is going to take care of a lot of space issues, problems like that. So it's kind of one of those things where it's like you've got to think bigger than just the home market, bigger than just the pinball cabinet market. They're going after anybody that would ever be interested in buying basically a Multicade and kind of going after that. So the other thing that you had kind of asked was, what's Arcuda's position within the pinball community and how that deals with? And I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but Arcuda, they, and Arcuda as well as Highway Games, they're part of the Highway Group, and they've been in the coin-op business for over 30 years. They were the Bally Williams distributors in Australia. they had a apparently a bunch of Star Wars Episode 1s that they wound up shipping back to the US and selling in that regard and they're currently handling the distribution of Homepins Thunderbirds Pinball so they understand the operators out there and that whole kind of arena they're arcade people yeah and again I I think that level of insight is so important for people to understand. You know, the way that people go and play games now in arcades, of course, it's different to when you guys look sort of similar. Yes. But, you know, when we used to go, the arcades were very different. The machines were different. Technology was different. The experience was different, right? But today it's a very different, you know, when my kids go into an arcade and the machines that they gravitate towards are not necessarily machines I gravitate towards. So that market's changed. That's the market that clearly you're serving if you are giving machines to operators that's going to get their most income from. And so I can definitely see that. I can see the sort of multi-thing, as you say, space-saving area, but being able to provide a whole load of different experiences in the one machine makes a hell of a lot of sense. You'd be able to dial it up, change it, mix it for the particular environment off the one machine. maybe it doesn't have necessarily the you know the real pimble experience you know even from the fact that the front area i believe is sort of set back a bit to make way for the you know the controller yeah that sort of stuff um you know i don't think that matters i don't think that matters for that but again you know i i think this all comes down to when they market that product then go for that you know, go there. This is a commercial thing. It can have all the multi games for operators. You know, this is what we're doing it for. Also, if you want it at home, blah, blah, blah. You know, it's a secondary market. It's not as important to them. It's not for real pinball enthusiasts, but this is for enjoying a pinball experience and a ton of other stuff and really beef it up and position it for what it is. And I think there's just not enough of that. It's the marketing positioning which is so unclear that it leaves people like us who are a few years to go well why hasn't it got this why hasn't it got that that's like well it's not serving for you yeah but i don't think it's also necessarily fair to say this not for the pinball enthusiast because it is a pc running steam um you can run visual pinball on it you can run zen on it you can run Zachary on it. You're going to be able to run all these, anything that has cabinet mode, you're going to be able to run Time Shock on it. Presumably, it has the shaker motors in it. It has the coils built into it. It's going to feel like a real you're going to get that experience. It just happens to be that's the only cabinet that's going to let you have that experience with Farsight's Pinball Arcade offerings. Sure. That makes perfect sense. Wow. I don't know. Boy, we've filled out this hour. Yeah, how'd that happen? Jeez. How did that happen? You talk so much, Greg. And that's saying something because we're talking about Chris here. is there anything else that uh that you want us to clear up for you greg um look i think in general i you know i had some some quite specific questions that i said through to you previously and we may not have touched on some of those um in a targeted way but i think the general discussion covers a lot of that anyway and i really enjoyed actually having this more broader discussion about it. And, you know, and I just want to say, like, hats off to Farsight and Makuta and for what they are building. You know, without those sort of people, we'd be completely dead in the water. And I think, you know, people should appreciate what we have. I mean, often we often get on our high horse too quickly to start bashing these companies down when really we should be sitting back and going, wow, Look at what they've actually managed to develop here. I mean, it's damn incredible stuff. Yeah. You know, we should be appreciative of that. We should support it as much as we can. If we don't agree with certain things or whatever, you know, we're all entitled to our opinions. But overall, I think, you know, everyone should get behind these sorts of organisations and help them out for what they're trying to do. Yeah, I agree. The thing that is going to be really interesting to see is that when the cabinet actually does start to be delivered to people's homes and people start to, you know, they invite their mates over for a beer and they start playing this, what will be interesting to see from my perspective is will this cabinet open up the concept or the idea of digital pinball cabinets to more people? Because I think one of the hardest things to do, I'm sure that you can probably have many stories about this, is working out how to actually set one up to start with and actually doing the construction, doing the build, sinking the hours upon hours you have to do into making one of these things stand up. And it might get to the tipping point where you go, well, I could spend literally $11,000 Australian on one of these or I could have a go doing it myself and then work out that it's probably going to be about $11,000 to actually do something to this level of integration and this sort of feeling. So in a way, I actually think that Akuta might be kind of like the home console version of digital pinball cabs. Definitely. And there's definitely a market there for that. And you only need to go to the VP forums and just see the sheer amount of people that are confused on a daily basis trying to get their stuff done. Oh, that poor guy. And even for myself, I'm fairly seasoned with it, but I'll turn on the machine. I'll be like, what's going to happen today? It's a new and interesting experience every time you power it on. It's definitely the idea with Arcuda is you're going to open the box, you're going to put the legs on, you're going to plug that thing in, turn it on, and you're going to be able to start playing. And there's huge value in that. From an operator perspective, out of location, you need that level of reliability. and home point of view there's plenty of people as you say Jared that's a great point there's going to be people that just want to plug and play solution and just enjoy playing the damn game it's kind of similar to the hot rod market you know where it's like well there's some people that want to you know they want to wrench on a car and build the thing out themselves and there's other people just like I don't got time for that I just want to drive the thing and look cool you know yeah exactly Hey folks if you've enjoyed our time here with Greg you should go check out his channel on YouTube it's Spacey's Arcade just enter that in the search bar, you'll find his videos go ahead and subscribe why don't you get him back over a thousand so he can start collecting coffee money again muffins and coffee, I'll make sure to link you through on the show notes when I do the post production on the episode, Greg and then make sure you also go visit his Twitter site because he's woefully low on people. I mean, I thought we were low, but... We might be able to get you another 10. Yes. Go visit BC's Arcade. I haven't told anyone about that Twitter account. I did a few. Because you know what? I thought, if I'm going to commit to this, I need to commit to taking regular Twitter stuff. I thought, can we do that? and I tested it for a while and I realized no, I'm not very good at that. I'm not going to tell anyone about it, but anyway, maybe I need to start doing it now. We're telling everybody it's at Spaceys Arcade. So go ahead and subscribe to that. And while you're subscribing, you better subscribe to us at Blockade and we'll let you subscribe to either mine, which is at Shut Your Traps or his, which is at Jared Morgs. Make sure you also go ahead and hop on our website, which is blockadepinball.com slash episodes and there you will be able to find links to things like what we're referring to here, which is the YouTube channel of Greg's as well as timing notes and Jared has been known to throw in a picture or video or two relating to what we're talking about. If I can find them on the internet. If you can find them. Otherwise you just have to suffer with my movie reviews. So yeah, here we go. This is it for this episode. It was a lot of fun talking to you, Greg. Next week, we have no idea what we're talking about, and it's wonderful. Yeah. Who knows what's going to happen next week? Oh. Maybe it'll be... We are firmly in the camp, Greg, that there is going to be another company doing these tables. And we have a... We have a feeling that they were being nice that letting all this play out until the 30th and then after the 30th is going to be announced so who knows it might be this week it might be next week it might be a month or two from now i don't know but now that's what we're we got our eyeballs staring at is is there going to be announcement at all and if there isn't boy it's gonna be a long bit of us waiting for something to happen and not yeah um all right yeah so that does it for us uh again thanks greg thank you very much I appreciate it thank you and we will talk to you all again next week bye bye bye wizardamusement.com the site to visit for custom pinball shooter bugs easy to install totally unique mention blockade podcast for 10% off your order wizardamusement.com sales restoration customization don't forget to leave a review on iTunes or your favourite podcast hosting service that BlackAid is delivered to. We can't improve unless you tell us how. Now stop listening and play some pinball.

_(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_

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*Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: b9c1997c-b536-4b6a-95d8-f8518f49ed3e*