There's nothing I could see that would mean more to me than what you are to me, oh my love. Sit up, sit up, sit up, sit up, sit up, sit up, sit up. Good morning everybody. It is 6 o'clock in the morning. The whole family is still sleeping and I just wanted to do the podcast today in response to the great two-hour interview that Kerry Hardy did with Mr. George Gomez over at Stern. So, you know, there's been a lot of people sharing photos of the new cabinets, how the wood is put together, how the corners don't look like they used to. Sitting through two hours of listening to everything George said about his experience making cabinets over the years. He's made more cabinets over the decades than he's made of pinball machines. He made arcade cabinets for many, many years. I mean, I absolutely trust the man's ability to make a cabinet. But after listening to two hours of George talk about a lot, and we're going to talk about it on this episode of Canada's Pinball Podcast, I tried to just like decompress it a little bit and figure out why I think this is happening. Why is a man who's in charge of the world's biggest pinball company going on to shows having to explain himself the way he had to explain himself? And I think I've sort of figured something out. And I think it's just simply this. I think people are looking for a lot of reasons to justify not buying or being enthusiastic about Stern Pinball's recent offerings. And I mean this. So outside of the cabinetry and how long the code takes and the delay for toppers and flat plastics, the real reason why any of this is truly happening right now, You're really just not overly satisfied with the product. If the games were great, we're not having these conversations. If the game's a masterpiece, you're not looking down at the corner of the cabinet. If the game's incredible, you're okay if there's some flat plastics here and there. If the game is like magical and it's got so much in it that creates moments of memory for you in pinball, you don't really care that the code took a little while to be completed. The reason why so much of this is happening right now is I just think the product overall has been very underwhelming for a long time. And so then it's easy to deconstruct it, to look at every single decision they've made and say, hey, that's the reason why I'm not buying a stern. It's because the wood, it's not the wood that it used to be. That's the reason why I'm not buying the sterns because the accessories are overpriced or don't ship with the game. Or that's the reason I'm not buying the game because of the flat plastics. or the uninspired mechanisms, all of this stuff. But the truth is, maybe it's a little bit of everything. But after listening to George talk about all the, you know, reasons why they made the cabinet this way and the reasons why there's delays on toppers and flat plastics, the other macro thing I walked away from after listening to George, and I always love listening to George. I mean, you have to respect the man. You have to respect what Stern Pinball does. It's almost a little bit of an insult to him that he has to talk about his company in relation to other boutique companies that are just making eight to 900 games a year or 500 games a year. And this dude is doing that in like one week, right? So you can imagine there's always a little bit of smugness under the surface. Like, how dare you? Like, if these guys had to do what I have to do, they would collapse immediately. if they had to create product with the margins we need to create product with, they would be out of business. And I think he's not wrong there. Like there's just a lot of us sort of look at these products and we put them all in front of us and we compare the products and the companies almost equally. Now, look, you can't blame us because the prices are pretty much equal. So this is the big part that I don't think George ever quite gets. And I want to talk about one specific answer he gave when someone asked, Kerry asked a question about flat plastics. Like, why are we seeing such flat plastic cheap stuff in a world in which all these other manufacturers and boutique companies are giving us beautifully sculpted worlds under glass? And George starts the answer by saying, you have to remember, Kerry, when I came through the door here at Stern Pinball. There were only eight people maybe in design and 20 or 30 people manufacturing. And now we're this big. And, you know, to grow at the volume we've grown and to become effective and efficient the way we have and to be successful over the years, you have to do things that keep you in business. And I think this is the part that George still just doesn't get. And I don't think the leadership over there at Stern just doesn't get. We don't care about your growth as an organization. We don't. We're not investors in Stern Pinball. We are buyers of Stern Pinball products. And there's a big difference there. See, if I was an investor in Stern, then absolutely, I want to see them grow. I want to see the volume of games increase at any cost. I don't care if there's magic under the glass as long as you're growing and you're making money because that's making money for me. But as a buyer and not an investor, it's 2025. And so when you still put flat plastics into your games and you're charging $13,000, I don't care that these are the design decisions you had to make to grow and to remain profitable as a business. I don't. All I see is for $13,000, you're giving me this. Spooky's giving me this for 10. Dutch is giving me this for like 13. Barrels of Fun is giving me this for 11.6. CGC is giving me this for like $9,500. That's what I see. And I do think that whenever George talks about why this is this way, he does have a tendency to talk in a way in which we should be thinking about the decades-long journey of Stern to grow this big, and I just don't think people care. And I mean this when I say this. I love George, but after listening to two hours, it is a little bit exhausting. It's like, I mean, an hour of it was spent on the damn wood cabinets. Now, let's talk about that for a minute. So he's saying since 2018, it's been the same sort of composition of wood that makes up the cabinets. These are the cabinets that have been making Godzillas and everything afterwards. And so, yeah, look, do I worry about the strength of these cabinets? No. Does the corner where like just the edges meet and they're not rounded out, they're not glued together anymore, does that look cheap? Yes. Does making it this way make it easier for them to assemble the cabinets? Probably. Now, he said a lot of the decisions were all about consistency and making sure that the cabinet quality and the strength is consistent because if someone's gluing cabinets together, he doesn't have any idea how much glue was used. And so you get an inconsistency of quality. And if you're doing it this way and every single piece of the cabinet is made on one machine and doesn't travel to another machine, so the left side's made on this machine the right side on this the bottom and then you put it all together with those brackets should be sturdy and it should feel the way a stern machine feels and i was glad he said that because stern machines do have a very particular feel and so they wanted to make it so the weight distribution and how this game feels in your hands is similar to the other stern machines you love okay so i get it all i get it all like i not like gonna argue with a man about manufacturing the wood cabinets But what I will say is this though there still is just this perception that Stern pinball is cutting corners. That Stern pinball has been making things cheaper, not better. And so this is why this cabinet, I think has such a lot of conversation around it. Because I do think the cabinet in a strange way in this hobby is a great metaphor and a great example of what everybody's been talking about for a few years. Is this an improvement or is this a cost-cutting measure? Now, if you're George, your goal is to achieve both. Why can't I improve something and make it more cost-effective for us? So maybe that is the case here. See, I would be really lame if I told you he's lying and these cabinets are going to absorb moisture and they're going to fall apart in a few years. I don't know that. I'm not a woodworking expert. I'm not one of these dudes that's going to look at this thing and say, oh, because of this, I'm not buying a Stern machine. Like, I think anyone who thinks that way is being very close minded. If they put Back to the Future in this cabinet, you're buying it. If they put Beetlejuice in this cabinet, you're buying it. If they put Akira, Big Trouble in Little China in this cabinet, I'm buying it. I don't really care that much. But it's not even about him needing to take an hour to explain things. It's more about how did it come to this? And I've been saying it for a while. The whole rollout of Spike 3 has been embarrassingly bad. And because they never took the time to go over Spike 3 from head to toe, they're now stuck doing it this way where every little incremental change is being noticed by the community because that's who we are this is for a lot of people this is the thing you love more than anything so you're going to notice when all of a sudden there's a few new random holes on the cabinet near the legs and George can explain to you well that's where the bolts go to hold the cabinets together well that's new we didn't know that so all of a sudden like if you walk into your house and all of a sudden there's just something new inside your home, you're going to notice it right away and you're going to wonder what is it doing there. And I think this was a really big miss by Stern Pinball over the last year and a half that they didn't take any real time to walk the community through. Your buyers, these are your future buyers, George. They're going to notice every change. They might have a perception that some of these changes are for the worse, that they are cost-cutting measures. And instead of getting in front of it and controlling the narrative, they once again have done what they always do. They don't do anything. They lead people to speculate. The speculation runs wild. And then you're doing damage control. See, when I see George on the Kerry Hardy show, to me, that's damage control. That's not the way he wants to talk to the community. You know, he gets up from his desk and the camera unplugs. It's all grainy. His voice quality is not great. You've got this professional studio in which Stern Pinball could have had Jack Danger go over the new changes happening on Spike 3 from head to toe. See, George now said they're going to do it, but it's almost already too late. You know, you don't get a second chance to make a first impression. I've always said this. You get one chance to make a first impression. And it's always been somewhat embarrassing that Stern has basically had an inability to communicate what Spike 3 is, why we should be excited about it, and what the true benefits to the player are going to be. They've sort of dabbled in certain things here or there. The screen's bigger. The sound is better. You can have more node board functionality, all that stuff. The lighting system. I don't know. I still, to this day, I do a pinball podcast every week. I know everything there is to know about all these companies. And I'm still somewhat confused what all of the major changes are to Spike 3. When I stand over Star Wars the other day, I was looking down at the lighting system and it just didn't look good. And I'm like, well, is this it? Is this as good as lighting can get on the Spike 3 platform? And so a lot of this, a lot of the reason why he had to go on there is Stern has done a really bad job in utilizing Jack Danger, utilizing their personalities to communicate what the changes are going to be. If you were to ask me, I think they got a little stuck. Like Spike 3 kind of slowly rolled out. And the big issue, again, it gets back to what I was saying at the beginning. The big issue is they just didn't have like an amazing game that showed off the new technology. And it's really a shame. You know, when you think about a brand switching over to a new platform, what you really want to do is make that great first impression with a product that everybody's excited about. So, for example, if Spooky Pinball has an all-new display, what better game to display it on than Beetlejuice? If Barrels of Fun has some new technology happening in a game, what better game to display it on than Winchester? And I just don't think Stearns had a hot product that has excited people recently that showed off anything that is part of their new platform. And so we get this. Now, we got a lot of other news from George Gomez. we got news around is one of the next two titles going to be Transformers or Pokemon and he said one of them so it is most likely now that I think about it going to be Pokemon and it is going to be a dual design game by Mr. Jack Danger who started it and George Gomez who's going to finish it they are both going to sign the LEs of the game I don't think we've seen that before I've been covering Stern for a long time I've never seen two designers sign a game and have design credits. Now, what do we think about this? I don't know. I did feel like George took a little bit of a shot at Jack when he said a game designer doesn't really develop his signature if he only has done three games. And I'm like, huh, you know, this would make Jack Danger's third game. But look, I think Jack Danger from a flow and a gameplay standpoint has made games that I think flow better than any George Gomez games. What I like about George's designs is he does try to put interesting mechanisms into his games and he does try to sort of make it fresh like doesn't try to just repeat ideas I think we see more repeat ideas from guys like John Borg and more original ideas from guys like George Gomez but I just have this like feeling like this like sixth sense that George Gomez at his age designing Pokemon just doesn't feel like the guy for the job and I also just feel like what happened to Jack you know I still feel this way what happened to Jack. Like, I don't get it. Like, he's still over there. Like, what did you do to him that made him not want to finish what could be the biggest IP in the history of pinball? I don't know. Now, maybe it's Transformers. Let's just think about this for a minute, because George Gomez did the other Transformer game. And maybe these guys are not working on Pokemon because he said, is it going to be Transformers or Pokemon next? He said it's one of those. And so I heard Transformers was first. Now the rumor was Elliot Elliot Eismin's doing Transformers, Keith Elwin's doing Fallout. The whole thing gets a little weird to me. So I also know from Jason Knapp reporting that Keith Elwin is one of the biggest Pokemon fans. So if you have the biggest IP in the history of Stern, why not maybe Keith Elwin does Pokemon and Jack Danger and George Gomez do Transformers. after elliot did john wick do you really think they're rushing to hand him another theme i don't know that game was a failure like it bombed and i think he stepped in to do that because other designers were like busy i don't know i really don't know the answer but i know that we should see this game in less than a month this is what's crazy we're gonna see this next game i believe at ces which is january 6th so george talked about the topper delays why are there accessory delays Are we going to see accessories ship with the games And he talked about how it a design choice We hear this a lot over at Stern It a design choice to make a topper either more complex or more simple And based upon the designer's choice, it takes longer to make this stuff. Now, the thing about it is this. I would believe, George, if there was just one other thing that wasn't happening everywhere else. Why is it that every other company can get it done but not you? Jersey Jack can get it done on every single CE. Jersey Jack ships a topper with every game. Spooky Pinball, same thing. They get it done. Barrels of Fun has a little bit of a delay now. There's no topper yet for Dune. There's no topper yet for Winchester. I believe the Labyrinth Topper was available day one. So look, I understand there's a little bit of a gap, but some of these Stern toppers, we're talking over a year. See, I don't buy that. I just don't buy that. Once your game has been designed and it's moved into manufacturing, why would it take you longer than even a month to just apply a little focus to get all the accessories done, to get the vendors lined up, and to make the product? a year and a half on some of these toppers, even longer on some other games. Like we've waited years. You know, some of the phrases I'm just so tired of hearing, licensor approval, and tired of hearing it's a design choice. I don't really care. You know, at this point, I mean this. I just don't care anymore. I don't care to hear how the sausage is made. These games are just so expensive now. They know what consumers want by now. As a consumer, you know what you want in a game by now. You know what your threshold is for how long you're willing to wait for a game's code to be complete. You know what your threshold is on how long you're willing to wait for all the accessories. You also just know your threshold for how long you're willing to wait for a theme that really speaks to you, for a game that you really want. My whole thing with Stern Pinball lately is simply this. I just see no compelling reason when you hear them talk about the delays on getting to the code, on all the secondhand value that's lost on LEs. Let's just talk about that for a minute. So George does talk about the fact that he says 30% of his games go on location, 70% of his games go to home buyers, and only like a small, small portion of those are LE buyers. But he did talk about how they're working on, I mean, I'm just kind of tired of this excuse by now. Like they're working on how to give the LE buyer more. George, Seth, when I met with you over a year ago, I said this was the number one problem facing your company from a home buyer standpoint. If you lose the collectors, everything else is connected to the value of that halo version of the product. And they've still done nothing. And, you know, even when he talks about how the expression lighting on the speakers, it's encased in something that is exclusive to the LEs. George, not enough. I mean, what is this? An encased lighting system. And by the way, it's not an LE exclusive. anyone with a pro or premium is going to be able to buy that. What LE owners are looking for, besides great layout and design, they want to see something that justifies why their game is over $3,000 more. It is $3,500 more, George. That's the thing that I don't think he gets. For $3,500 more, what did you give me? That is basically almost the bomb on an entire Stern game. For $3,500 more, you didn't give me exclusive code. You didn't give me really a lot of these new games, even like exclusive artwork. None of the playfield artwork is exclusive. You didn't give me an exclusive topper. You didn't give me an exclusive mechanism. You didn't give me like even armor that looks exclusive. So that's the thing, $3,500 more. And now for the past few years, everyone buying these games has lost so much value on the LEs. And I'm just tired of it. I'm tired of them still trying to figure this out when the answer is staring them right in the face. He even said it like, oh, we've been thinking about maybe we give an exclusive gameplay feature. Yeah, duh. duh like i don't understand like so but you're not going to do it you're not going to do it because it messes up everything they're aiming for which is what's the lowest we can get the cost of manufacturing this product to be what's the lowest we can get the development cost to be what's the easiest we can give our assembly line to make you know so then every play field's the same regardless if it's pro premium or le basically the cabinets now i mean i'm just going to say this. Like when you see the cabinets, I don't care that the wood is like sandwiched with like eight or nine layers and MDF, whatever the damn names are. Again, I don't care. It just looks cheaper that those pieces of wood are held together by brackets. There's just something about that. It's like if Michelangelo carved the Pietà out of a solid piece of marble, you walk up to and you're like, wow. But if he attached the different arms and legs to each other using brackets connecting the marble, it looks cheap. And that's just the thing. It's just the optics of it all. It just doesn't look premium at all. It's got some advantages, but the optics are, it might look a little cheaper. But as I was saying at the beginning, I think Stern's big problem is a few things. I think the games just haven't been that great lately. I think the remastered stuff just feels lazy. And, you know, I get he said like, oh, it's 70% of the original work is spent on the remastered. What he means is like doing a remastered is 70% of the work it takes to make a brand new game. Okay, I don't care. I don't care if it's 70%, 30%. I just feel like Stern is trying now to get credit. And look, if the credit were due, and I mean this, if the credit were due and they earn the credit and the machines were beloved like they used to be, if they were achieving what they think they're achieving in their own heads, then we wouldn't be having any of these conversations. and the reason we're having these conversations, the reason why Kerry Hardy's chat was so vitriolic, the reason why people are so like angry at Stern is they have passed on to thousands of customers over the last four years, cost-cutting measures, themes people don't really want, not putting all the assets into the game, putting the same artwork on a $6,000 game as a $13,000 game and then the competition is done really most of the improvement in pinball. If you look at the companies over the last four years, who's been improving what they've been making, Stern is kind of still running in place. Like, we don't see these things as leap forwards. And again, they're so far above everybody else. I know it's almost like comical for me to say, like, they should be worried about anybody else. And they're not. And that's the other thing. I just feel that they don't care. They don't care. They sell so many games, they just don't care. And yeah, there's so many newbies who buy their products who don't care. Like, you know, trying to tell someone who just bought a Star Wars, they didn't buy a great game. It's a futile effort. Those people think they just got a new pinball machine and they're having fun. And we were all in that boat, each and every one of us. There was one point in our lives where we finally put a pinball machine in our house and we had so much fun and we didn care And I think that kind of where I at now with this hobby is I don expect a lot from Stern anymore I really don't. I don't expect to be blown away by these Stern games. I'm glad Stern is in business. I'm glad they're going to bring out four games a year, three cornerstones, another remastered. It gives us something to talk about. I think buying any of their products new in box is absolutely silly, unless you're an operator. I think only operators really need to get the new games on the floor to make the money. The home buyer who buys any of these games right away, I think is foolish. I think if you wait, you'll get a much better price. You know, George acted like he didn't have any idea why there was a Black Friday sale. He had no clue what was going on, that you were having Amazon and other places sell games at a huge discount and the distros did not know that was happening. That's a bad look. It's just a bad look. It's just like it's his company. Like it's a bad look not to know that. People ask, why are you bringing in people who know nothing about pinball? And he said, hey, they have to, you know, get used to our business. They have to learn the business. I'm okay with that. But a chief marketing officer who knows nothing about pinball, have you felt his impact once? He's been there almost a year. I think it'll be a year in like March or something like that. I don't know, George. Like, you know, when you see these hires and you bring in people from the outside, it doesn't feel like they're listening to the community and they're making a positive impact. So all of this in my conclusion, after listening to George for two hours, first and foremost, thank you, Carrie, for doing that interview. And thank you, George, for giving so much of your time. But I think Stern is stuck. I think they're stuck and I think they need a way out. And I think the only way out to justify where their prices are at, how the wood corners look in the cabinet, how like the lighting looks next to modern games like Jersey Jack's Harry Potter and Beetlejuice and Evil Dead and the games over at Barrels. Their games are looking dated and they're looking expensive for what they are. And the only way out is if they really design some bangers. Kerry said to him, hey, why don't you slow down and make just two games a year? And George said, hey, we tried that during COVID. It didn't work because there were shortages. But George, the COVID demand is gone. It's a new world now. And I do think they might want to explore being more focused as an organization on just two cornerstones a year where they put so much more effort and details into each game. where each of these games does ship with code that's further along with all the accessories. See, if you only had to do two projects that were cornerstones, one every six months, you could apply a lot more of the company's resources to making sure those games arrive in much better fashion. And I think that might be beneficial to them. Let me say something that's going to be absolutely crazy. Stern Pinball in 2026 they could have if they only released two games in one year and they focused all their efforts and they actually listened to the community and they picked themes we wanted imagine if 2026 was different and they were only going to release two cornerstone games one is Beetlejuice and one is Back to the Future you could have Jack Danger designing Beetlejuice and Keith Elwin doing Back to the Future. You put all of your company's resources against each of those games. You can't tell me that they wouldn't sell more total volume units if they did that. And then on top of those two cornerstones, remaster Tron or remaster Lord of the Rings. I think that would be a more successful year than what we're gonna get. And I'm so curious to see how Pokemon does with this demographic. I'm very curious about Transformers, but I've sort of lost feeling like giddy about what's coming next from Stern. And I think a lot of us have. I'm just not giddy. I know what they're gonna do almost before they do it. And they've had just so many games in a row where it's just not exceeding any of our expectations. And our expectations are not too high. And I know George would agree with this. They should be holding themselves to the highest standards of the industry. They are the smartest. They are the most capable. They have the most resources. They have the most experience. They have everything. So when I put Star Wars next to Harry Potter and Beetlejuice and Winchester, why is it when I look over at your product, Stern, it looks like the cheap bargain bin thing that belongs at Costco? That's all that I care about. I don't care. I'm not an investor in your company. your thing just doesn't look the part. It's time that they slow down and make a game that reminds us why this company is as successful as they are, how they got so big. You know, George, it's like the proof needs to be in the pudding and the pudding they've been serving lately has gone. It's been expired. It looks expired. It looks old. And so we need a new moment. We need a magical moment from this company. and I know that each and every one of us is very level-headed and we want to see them achieve that. I'm not rooting against Stern. I don't hope these guys fail. I don't want Zombie Yeti to be mad at me. I don't think we're being unfair though. I think we're looking at this company and we're seeing all these changes and they just still, for the size of Stern, they still are poor at communicating the changes. They're poor at rolling out these changes and they're poor at getting us as a community to see the value in any of these changes. We just don't see it. And it's not enough to have just a few multi-millionaires like Iceman and Neil McRae, you know, buying everything or Ralph, like going to bat for Stern's woodworking. Like, I just don't get it. Guys, you're also part of the community more than you are an employee of Stern. And so these guys who shill for Stern, they always feel a little weird to me. It's like, what are you doing? Like, you know, you should be on the side of the customer. And that's always been my thing is like, just be on the side of the customer. You're not an investor in Stern. But I do think some of these guys, they get discounts, they get games at better prices, and they're friends with the Stern people. I get it. Like, you don't want to say bad stuff about your friends. But anyway, gang, it is now 630 in the morning. The little ones are about to wake up. Life is very short. It's very precious. I want to give a big shout out to my friend Tux Browning down in Texas, who's in a battle right now. And I had a great conversation with Tux. We talked all about how he fell in love with Guns N' Roses. It's a long story. It's a beautiful story. And he says how that is just one pin that's never going to leave his house. And when you hear the story of why he loves GNR, it's beautiful. That's why I put the new Guns N' Roses song, Nothing, on this podcast. I don't like the new GNR stuff. I feel bad for Slash. He has to make guitar solos over songs that were throwaway garbage that Axl was just tinkering on. And Axl's never gone back into the studio to make these songs great. It's so painful, the new stuff they're putting the Guns N' Roses name on. And that's what I hope Stern doesn't do. Don't put your name on stuff unless it's worthy of the legacy of your organization. Kaneda out. I'm so alone without you You're dead on my mind Without you I'd never leave this day alone Thank you.