Hello and welcome to episode 3 of the Eclectic Gamers podcast. Today is Sunday, February 28th of 2016. And we are here, myself, Tony, and as always, joined by my friend Dennis. Hello, everyone. And we're going to be talking about the big three, pinball, video games, and tabletop. Well, let's start off with, what have you been doing lately, Dennis? Oh, mostly on the video game front, as typical. I've wrapped up my playthrough of the campaign in Fallout 4, and actually earlier this morning I concluded my Rise of the Tomb Raider playthrough, which I started basically a week ago. So I have a lot of cleanup I still need to do in that title, but I have wrapped it up. I played a couple other little games. Night Squad, which was a little free game available on the Xbox One. I really only did that for points. I can't recommend it for anything else. and I've started, I think it's called Valiant Hearts. It's kind of a puzzle game, sort of set in World War I. I'm not very far along in that, but it's got kind of an interesting two-dimensional art style going on with it. But it's one I've been meaning to play for a while. I've owned it for quite a while, and I finally did give it a start late last night. Other than that, I have prepped a little bit more in terms of playing some Star Trek Pro Pinball. I actually got four games in today since I just read that it was the fourth announced game for qualification on the DMD side for Texas Pinball Festival. So I lucked out on that one. Yeah, that definitely makes things easier. You've got at least one machine you've got a good experience on. That'll definitely help. How did you guys do on your cutoff? Did you guys, on your little contest, did you guys survive the cut? But yeah, we do have bonuses that you can use to get essentially free points. I used that just before 1 a.m. because we were not safe. However, one of my other teammates ended up scoring enough that we didn't actually need to use that. So I wasted it. But yeah, we survived by quite a bit thanks to that. But yeah, no, we're OK. We live to fight another week. Another week. All right. Let's see. I've been, I just finished XCOM 2 earlier this week. It was good. I liked the ending. No spoilers, but the ending definitely, especially the final cut scene, it's one of those cut scenes that lets you know there's more coming and that gets you interested and ready for it. I enjoyed the game all the way through the end. You survived through the end, and you scored one of the final two major kills. Well, I am a professional sniper. Well, that's true. But you did it with a pistol at point-blank range, So it was pure luck. The other things is I watched all of The Expanse, which is one of the Sci-Fi Channel's new shows now that they're returning to actually having science fiction on the Sci-Fi Channel. It's based off a book series. I have not read the book series. I've heard really good things about it. But the show was surprisingly good. I mean, it was very strong. It was 10 episodes. It was 9 or 10 episodes. I'm pretty certain it was 10 episodes was the first season. And I would say every single one of those 10 episodes was at least on par with the best season of New Battlestar Galactica. Probably those 10 episodes were strong as the miniseries, I would say, honestly. Oh, wow. That's impressive. Yeah, I was amazed. It was really solid. Having not read the books, I wasn't sure what I was going in for, and it's not super space opera-y like New Battlestar Galactica was. It's actually more political than I was expecting, and I really enjoyed it, and I was really surprised. I don't know if it was the fact that there was only the ten episodes and that it was based on a book series let them get the writing so tight and work so well, but I'm really looking forward to season two. Well, that's impressive. I might have to check that one out. I haven't really watched anything from sci-fi since the end of the new Battlestar Galactica. I think the only other thing that we could note is both of us last week went and saw Deadpool, the movie. Yes, we did. I enjoyed it a lot. I did as well. I would say I was thinking about it actually earlier today, And I think I would put it in my top three rated R-based comics, comic movies that have gotten an R rating. I wouldn't put it in my number one. I think I'd actually put it at number three. What would you put in your number one? Dread. Oh, yeah. I will not disagree. Dread. I love Dread. I wish I'd seen Dread in theaters. I did not. And I think that's because of how they advertised it. It didn't look good. And after the Stallone, I am the law, Judge Dredd, I had no desire to see it. But once I saw it at home, it was excellent. It was very excellent. Yeah, I didn't see it in theaters either. They didn't have much of a marketing campaign that I recall. And anyway, I did catch it eventually. I really regretted not seeing it there. But yeah, it still holds the title for me as my number one R-rated comic theme. My number two, I'll put V for Vendetta. I don't feel as strongly on it, but I do really like the themes in it, and I think it worked really well overall as a movie package. So I put Deadpool in my number three after those two. Yeah, it's not a horrible spot for it. I don't know. I enjoyed V. I know V's really popular with a lot of people. I enjoyed it, but I didn't think it was as great. I really enjoyed Watchmen, too, but I don't think that was as great either. I think it could have been a lot better. I would definitely put Deadpool up there. It's definitely up there. I was surprised because, I mean, they made no bones about this being an R-rated movie, and there were a lot of little kids in that theater. I mean, I was shocked by how many kids, it looked like there were maybe 12 that were at that theater. I can only assume either parents don't look at the ratings before they go, and I haven't checked to see if there was a lot of backlash, parents claiming that it wasn't announced well enough. I don't really see how you could have much of that claim because the whole thing was how it was going to be a hard R. That was the everyone knew going in. And the only other thing I could think of is they just didn't care, which is possible. Yeah, and that is possible. I mean, I wouldn't have taken any of my kids to see it, but it's definitely not everybody's like that. I mean, I definitely would not have been wanting to be the parent trying to explain some of those scenes to some of those kids. Wow. Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, and now we're here in Hollywood now that they've seen this success because it's done gangbusters at the box office. that there's a lot of talk about more R treatment or hard R treatment for some other comics, which some of the names I'm hearing, I kind of question moving in an R direction. But I do like the idea of there being more R-rated material. I think Hollywood to try and expand the reach in the theater market has gone PG-13 on a lot of stuff. And there's a lot of graphic novels in particular that are very adult-oriented. And I really would like them to see an appropriate treatment. and a lot of times that means you have to just accept that you're going to take an R rating. Yeah, that's definitely a valid point. I mean, there's plenty of things. There's plenty of even purely new stuff that is being made that I think would probably be in a better position with an R, but that's just something they've dodged. I mean, I don't want to see R-rated Guardians of the Galaxy or R-rated Avengers or R-rated Captain America because I don't think those movies need it. I think those movies fit perfectly as a PG-13 where they are. I think that's exactly the tone they set, and that's the kind of fun they have. But there's definitely room to have R-rated comic book movies. There's plenty of comics that are definitely dark enough that you can't really see them as a PG-13 gussied up, cleaned up. It kind of comes off weird. I mean, that's one of my things that's been with, like, Wolverine. Wolverine, I mean, in the comics, Wolverine's kind of a vicious guy. And in the movies, Wolverine's kind of a, oh, he stabbed somebody with some claws, but they didn't bleed out. He didn't cut somebody's head off or cut their arms off or do this or that. He just kind of stabbed somebody and they fell down and died with no blood. Yay. Yeah. And I think another one I could see the case made for would be Batman. I have mixed feelings on it. Well, much like with Wolverine as well, where I think Wolverine, obviously the nature of his character could really warrant an R rating. I would definitely think they would want to stay away when they are doing an ensemble X-Men movie from going that route because the X-Men has been targeted to a broader demographic, but including a younger segment than what maybe a Wolverine by himself would warrant. In the case of Batman, by and large, I think Batman should probably stick with PG-13. However, there have been some versions, like Frank Miller's approach to Batman, that I could see in an R-rated scenario. I just don't think I'd build my world around it. But Hollywood may go a little too far on the R rating. I don't think it'll last very long if they do. I mean, the main thing is Disney's Marvel, as I refer to it now, or we could call it MCU Marvel, they're never going to do this. So things like the Avengers and Guardians, all of that, they're not going to go down to the R rating. They just because I think because it's Disney and if they had had if they had had control of Deadpool, Deadpool would not have been R if it even got made. So those are always going to be oriented towards a broad audience pretty much no matter what, as long as that ownership is consistent. so I don't think there's much risk of the beloved franchises, at least the Marvel ones, ending up all of a sudden becoming R and no longer being valid to take kids to just because the ownership model is such that they're not built to take that sort of aggressive approach. But yeah, Fox, Warner Brothers, maybe. We'll just have to see. Yeah, definitely. We'll see what they end up doing, and I'm sure that they're going to – So somebody's going to end up burning it out and overdoing it and putting something that doesn't need an R into an R, and it's going to do badly, and they're going to blame, oh, it was because of the R, it was because of the R. And it will probably just be because it was actually pretty poorly written, whatever it was. I know some Batman stories definitely I could see. I remember reading an article saying that they've been given the go-ahead. They're doing an animated version of The Killing Joke, and they've been given the go-ahead to do that as an R rating, which makes sense for The Killing Joke. I don't know if they'll actually do it. Yeah, you could pull off The Killing Joke either way. I've actually read The Killing Joke, and in terms of the panels and such, it's not graphic. there's a lot of implication um and and some of that is just reading between the lines and some of it may even be far more speculative in terms of what exactly the joker did beyond just the the famous shooting from that from that comic book but i mean that's a case of one where i could see it going uh one way or another uh and probably being okay no matter what uh we'll we'll see if they end up wanting to if it's going to be like a standalone they just want to do the killing joke and not really incorporate it into the DCU, then I could, I think going R then would make a lot of sense if they're going to try and keep it wrapped together. They may want to just stick with PG 13 for consistency reasons, but. Yeah, no, from what I've heard, it's just, it's going to be a standalone cartoon. It's just like all the other little standalone DC cartoons that they turn out so many of. So it's just, we'll see what happens with it. Because I've heard a lot of people talking about the killing joke that have all read it. I've read it, and it's just how bad it was is really how much you read into the subtext put in to the story. Yep, I agree. Well, I think that covers our non-topic related intro stuff. So we can probably go ahead and segue into our first topic, which is pinball. Okay, and looking at pinball this week, we're going to be talking about pre-ordering. Dennis, tell me what you think about pre-ordering. I debated, given we're so young in our podcast episodes, actually tackling this because I think it's somewhat of a sensitive topic. And a lot of our listeners who may not be pinball people, I'll put that in air quotes, might not understand why it would even be a big deal. But I want to tackle it because I think it's an important issue. And I will open by answering your question. I am against pre-order in pinball. And I want to note, first of all, that I'm drawing a distinction between putting down deposit, which is a pretty common practice, and the actual process by which you prepay in full for a game that has not yet been built. And when I say I'm against preorder, I mean that specifically, paying in full for games that have not yet been built. And I don't mean just manufactured. I mean, you know, they haven't come off the line. I mean, like the design isn't done. They don't have a working model yet, that sort of prepay. Yeah, you don't want to go into the whole, I have a great idea for this. I just need some seed money to start. So why don't you just buy a table and then you'll get it whenever I get done building it type situations. Exactly. I mean, if there's a game and it's announced and you pre-buy, but they're not going to be built yet for a month because they have to, you know, these are assembled like cars. I understand. That's okay. It's this more speculative aspect by which companies rely upon the prepay money to fund the development and construction cycle for a game that has not yet actually been completed conceptually. And the way I see it and why I think it's important is we have a couple ongoing cases of this and we have a couple failure cases of this. And just in terms of the ongoing, we've mentioned them before, back most specifically, I believe, on our first episode when we talked about upcoming pinball machines. One is Jersey Jack Pinball, the Hobbit machine, which is slated to, as we said before, there are test machines out on location. It sounds like actual production models will be going out, finalized versions, to customers who pre-ordered in March. So probably in a few weeks here. Yeah, I remember seeing that there's supposed to be several production models at Texas Pinball Festival. Yeah, it would fit with all the timelines I've heard. This machine, however, was funded on a prepay model. And as we noted back, I believe, in our first episode, this was announced years ago and is over a year behind. Their first machine, Wizard of Oz, was funded on the exact same mechanism, this prepay model. The Hobbit, though, in terms of from time announced to time of release, has actually been longer than Wizard of Oz was. So I see this as an ongoing example of the preorder, and I think it raises some concerns given the timeframe. Same situation with Dutch Pinball, which is making the big Lebowski. Again, we had a game. It was in development for over a year since the pre-ordering was an option for people. Like Jersey Jack, I don't have any personal fear that the game isn't going to come out. However, when will it come out? We now have a time frame that everyone seems to agree is reasonable for Jersey Jack. I think with Dutch Pinball, there's still the thought it's coming out this year, but we don't exactly know when. However, all of this, I think, needs to be borne on the knowledge that we have two failure cases. And these were not long ago. These were last year. In fact, it was almost a year ago, I think, that both of these imploded. And that would be the companies known as Skit B, which stood for Some Kids in the Basement, and Zidware. And just for a quick summary for our non-pinhead people who are listening, In a nutshell, Skit B took pre-order money to build a Predator-themed pinball machine, the Arnold Schwarzenegger original Predator movie. The project failed, and the failure primarily hinges on the fact of copyright infringement. Skit B never secured a license to make Predator machines. The studio found out about it. Cease and desist orders were issued. ultimately refunds were supposed to be underway uh because i believe the uh skit b people or person it was primarily a one-person shop i i think it started as two but i think it ended up being just mostly one person he was supposed to issue refunds because i believe he indicated that most of the money he had received in pre-order had not actually been spent however as near as i know and this may not be 100% accurate. But as near as I know, the only people who received refunds didn't actually get a refund issued. They either contacted PayPal or their credit card company and got the transaction reversed. So those that had waited too long to be able to do those reversals because they had paid so many months in advance were out of luck. My understanding is civil litigation is ongoing on this and uh skit b is interesting in that it it never seems it doesn't seem to have ever incorporated as a company it wasn't operating as an llc uh and so there's not really a legal structuring like you would think of when you hear that it's a company instead it was i i i think i mean generous and saying a sole proprietorship i don't think it was actually organized legally in any way as near as i can tell was it basically acting as a dba type thing doing business as well the thing or i mean i came i came in the pinball scene after the implosion of skit b so i read up just stuff afterwards i wasn't part of the actual i wasn't around when it did the whole thing not to my knowledge i don't i don't even think that it went that far possibly i don't i don't know i was never in i was never interested in the table uh i wasn't looking to buy then anyway The way it was phrased by the owner we say is that it sounded to me like he was claiming he was a nonprofit which means he would need to be more than a DBA I mean, he would have to have incorporated, but under like a 501c3 status. And the reason why the nonprofit thing came up is I think initially when people were raising concerns about how secure the license was and indications were being given that it was okay, that he was told, the studio said it was okay for him to do this. I thought he had indicated at some point that it was because he was a non-profit that he was allowed to do this. So obviously, if you're saying you're a non-profit, you're indicating that no one's actually going to make money on the sale of the machines. He was going to sell them, and then what? I think most people when they hear non-profit think that he would have to sell the machines out of break-even, and that's not true. I work for a non-profit. We don't have to break even. We can have net income gains. But they're no shareholders. No one personally profits when we exceed our budget and have more net income than otherwise assumed. So I think maybe that was some maneuvering or phrasing or maybe in his mind he thought that it was just basically going to be a passion project and pay for itself. But regardless, that was not that was not what the studio meant anyway. The licenses was really not secured. And this as an entity wasn't structured in a in a way that makes people comfortable. so it looked shady it looked sketchy and that's sort of borne out as people have tried to get their money back yeah that sounds kind of like if you know you and me just decided to go you know what hey i've got a great idea for a pinball machine i've got a jigsaw and we can throw we can buy some wood and throw something together and get people to pay us money for it we'll just see what we can do i mean that sounds real sketchy especially trying to run as a non-profit with something like that. That's not what you would expect out of a nonprofit. Right. I mean, my guess would have been that the intent was just to fly under the radar and not be noticed and just sell off whatever run of machines was intended. And that would have been that. They'd have been out in the wild. The money would have been made. And I don't know. But regardless, the license was not secured. That became very obvious. It was admitted to, in fact, and their pinball news had an interview with the owner of Skitbee. And that's available online. Anyone wants to go and read up on what his responses were to a lot of the claims. The way it all imploded is fascinating, and it would almost be worth doing an entire episode just talking about that. However, it was a year ago. We don't need to live that much in the past. It was an example in 2015 where this pre-order model really backfired for a lot of people who were very passionate about this theme. And that was what was selling people on it was the theme. I haven't heard anyone who said it shot well when they played demo versions. So it was all just about, well, we love Predator. We really want to see that contained in a pinball world. The other example, which is more complicated, is Zidware, which Zidware is owned by John Papadiuk, and he is a known pinball developer. He was the designer for Circus Voltaire, World Cup Soccer, Theater Magic, Tales of the Arabian Nights. These are real pinball machines that a lot of people are fans of. So some of them sell for quite a bit of money. they're generally characterized if i could speak in broad strokes of having pretty interesting concepts and usually above average art so i mean he has he has his fans john poppadoo has his fans this story in some ways is even more complicated than skit b because in the case of skit b why it failed was really obvious there was no license the studio got mad that's not the case at all with Zidware. What happened with Zidware, though, is over time, John announced three different pinball machines. Magic Girl was the first one. Then there was a zombies-themed one that came next, I believe. And then finally, an indication about an Alice in Wonderland was going to be a third machine. Pre-order money was taken on Magic Girl, which was going to be a fairly limited run, so it was priced high. And then the zombies one pre-order money was also taken from. And my understanding is there are some people who pre-ordered on both and combined had put in over $20,000 on these. $20,000 put down on two pinball machines from a brand new company that's never kicked out a pin before. I mean, that would be like going and talking to somebody who's like, I'm building a car in my garage and giving them $20,000 for them to give you a car eventually someday. Right. And I think that the logic, and again, we'd have to ask the people who got in on this, and I'm sure we can find some of their, if they ever want to talk about it. I'm sure it's a very touchy subject for people. But the thought was, John is a known entity, John Papadiuk, or Jay Papa, as he's commonly called. So using your analogy about a new car manufacturer, I would say my sense was their response would have been, yes, but J-Pop used to be the head designer at Ford. So he knows how to make cars. He's just gone out on his own to make the ones he wants to be, he wants to do, not the ones that Ford wants him to do. So the thought was, well, he's a known entity. He's been in the business for decades. so the thought was he's he knows how to build he knows how hard it is to build pinball machines skip me didn't know all right they it was a passion project they liked pinball machines they'd never been involved in the development or construction of one but j-pop had been with bally and then with williams so he had to know because he had been involved with what was at the time the largest pinball manufacturer in the world so anyway so that was a thought there it wasn't a license issue these were all original licenses well except for alice but no money was taken in and i believe that is uh in public domain at this point anyway so it wasn't a license issue however there's a there's pinball podcast called coast to coast pinball i don't remember which episode number it is but there's an interview with j-pop that was conducted on there if anyone wants to hear his reasons for why things have developed the way they have the current status as I understand it, is Zidware is still in business. Zidware is still officially working to complete these projects. I don't know of anyone who has actually received refunds. There may have been some cases, but it's not clear to me. There are civil suits in play. There are people suing to try and get their money back. My understanding from that coast-to-coast pinball interview is that J-Pop has said that most of the money in this case has been spent versus SkitBee, which had claimed that most of the money had not been spent. Those are my two failure cases to couple with the two ongoing cases, which have both experienced a high degree of delays. I should note that this is not a commonplace thing that pinball companies do. Stern doesn't solicit pre-order money for games that have not yet been developed. Spooky waits until they have their game ready, and then they ask for deposits, and then they move forward. So this isn't something that all pinball companies do. This is, I think, a relatively new phenomenon. Yeah. And I heard that interview with J-Pop, and I read some of the other articles and stuff on it. And from my view coming at it, again, I came at it, I really came into pinball and started paying attention to pinball just as everything was imploding there. And I really think that it sounds like he is very good at what he does as a table designer. and I think in his mind that made him very good at everything else and that it sounded more like it was a business problem because he's a very good designer and he's a very bad businessman. And I think it sounded like everything got away from him. He became so enraptured with what he could do that everything else, the business side of things didn't really work. And then there were some other complications that I'm not even going to bother to get into there from the interviews with some business support coming in and some assistance and stuff falling apart. It sounds like it was pretty complicated all in all, but it definitely seems like something where just something got completely away from him and away from everybody being involved. Yeah, I agree. I think in both cases, the bottom line was that these were entities entities that did not have good business plans in terms of how they were going to actually execute and get off the ground. And again, that may have to do with how skilled they are at starting up businesses and may just have to do with how much planning they put in. It doesn't in a way it doesn't really matter. My issue is I think the reason why they were able to get as far along with other people's money as they did was because of the preorder model, which is what I what which is why I want to attack that. why I want to attack the pre-order model. So with that as my backdrop, these are the reasons why I'm against the pre-order model. And a lot of this obviously is shaded by the aforementioned points I've already made. But I think of it broadly as, oh, four categories. So my number one issue is the cost of failure. It's too high. Pre-orders are done in a lot of things. Obviously, Kickstarter, we've discussed before. It plays a huge role in the tabletop scene. It plays an increasingly growing role, I feel, in the video game scene. However, a pinball machine is not like a Kickstarter campaign for either of those two products. In those two cases, what's failure? A hundred bucks on someone, on a potential customer? I mean, most of those campaigns, people don't tend to contribute all that much money. In these pinball cases, there were some people who were involved in partial pre-orders. They didn't fully pre-order the game. It was almost more like a deposit. And so there are some cases where people lost less than $1,000. For example, my understanding is Skitby had a $250 tier for Predator. And so some people were only in for $250, which, especially for a pinball machine, that's not all that much money. There are many people that were in with either Skitbee or Zidware for over $3,000. And as I noted earlier, in the case of Zidware, some had actually gotten up to around $20,000 if they went all in on the two games of which preorder money was being taken. Like we see with Kickstarter efforts, those who most want to use this preorder model are the newish entities. But what's the problem with that? They're untested. so that because and that's why they need cash because they haven't proven themselves investors they're not getting investors on board either they didn't try or they tried and they failed which wouldn't be too surprising because it's an untested entity in a niche market pinball machines require a lot of hardware it's not just a case of developing some software for an existing platform such as a video game developer billing something to a pc spec or to a ps4 spec or anything like that, or tabletop games, which have a low bill of materials, you know, as production of cards, maybe a board, basic stuff, which a lot of things have already been developed in terms of other games using, you know, similar materials, it's just different things get printed on them. But with pinball, you have to have a significant amount of money per machine just to create them. And when you look at the companies that exist and make pinball machines, they tend to rely on a lot of experts, multiple experts in multiple fields. You have to have a software designer to be able to program the intelligence of the game. You have to have some sort of engineer to do the designing of the physical devices. You have to have your pinball designer who knows how to do proper layout. And then, of course, you have to have labor, and it's skilled labor, to be able to assemble the thing. So when these wannabes skip the need to attract proper investors, they end up having a They end up avoiding a higher level of scrutiny, and instead I feel they have exploited hobbyists, many of whom probably lack much in the way of investor savvy, and get them to underwrite the effort instead, and then they get burned. So that's my big number one and number two, really, on the pre-order model. Number one being the cost of the failure is so high, and number two is this newish entity Kickstarter-style thing just doesn't work the same for pinball as it does for video games and tabletop games. Well, yeah, and with Kickstarter, like I said, I don't have any real problems with Kickstarter, provided you understand what you're getting into with it. But it's definitely a different case. I mean, unless you're one of the magical people who drops $10,000 for some super high-end special Kickstarter thing when you kickstart it, most of the stuff you can get by with is $20 or $30, maybe $100. I don't think I've dropped more than $200 in a Kickstarter ever. I think that's the highest I've ever dropped was $200. And if it pays out, awesome. And if it doesn't pay out, well, it's going to suck because that's $200. But that's way different than $20,000. And one of the big differences, I think, is a lot of these guys who are doing the pre-ordering in the pinball area is they have an idea. It's like I have an idea for a machine. And especially in the board games, when it comes to board games and tabletop games, a lot of these people is they've actually created it. The game is created. they might be playing it with pieces of paper and pennies with blocks glued on top of it as pieces but they're the game is done and is being play tested but yeah i mean you spend you spend some money you that much money when you're spending you know ten fifteen thousand dollars even five thousand dollars that's a completely different entity than if you just spend 200 if you're out 200 it sucks but you know it's 200 and the big thing is a lot of with so many of those games being already play tested they need the money for to actually print the game and do the art assets for a pinball machine that would be something more along the lines of having, we've got a finished white wood model it's all done, it's playable it just needs art assets and us to start building machines type issue right, and I think the other two parts, two points I should say that I wanted to note Where I have a problem with this is my third one would be that pre-ordering isn't investing. It's like Kickstarter in that no one involved is really an investor. The person sending in the money doesn't get any reward for the success of the project other than the ability to acquire the product. And essentially, it's an ability you would have had if they had gone about you as a consumer. if they had gone about the conventional way to raise capital, such as getting investors or going to the bank and getting a loan or however normal companies go and raise money. Pre-ordering under these circumstances where people are sending high dollar amounts for pinball machines means they're not getting any sort of investing benefit like profit share, but they're assuming all the risk for the loss. And so that leads into my fourth point, which is I just think overall the model does more harm than good. I've heard on other pinball podcasts and I've read mainly on Pinside, there are some pinball enthusiasts and they seem to, the sense I've gotten from them is that they think pre-ordering is actually good for the hobby of pinball, that it helps a boutique company start up and it spreads the hobby because it gets more machines out there and gets more competition in the industry and that all of that's a good thing. But to me, these ends do not justify the means. All of this would be possible. All of this, the idea of having a Jersey Jack and having a Spooky and having a Dutch and had they worked out a Zidware and a Skippy, all of this should have been possible via traditional investing routes. If a bunch of rich collectors want to back a startup boutique in exchange for shares in the company, then I have no problem with that. But if you're trying to form company and you want to use other people's money just to shift the risk off of you, but keep full ownership, I think that model is completely ridiculous. And I don't have a lot of sympathy for companies that decided that that was a smart route to go because they want all of the gains and they don't want to bear any burden. And I understand the motivation for it, but I don't sympathize with it. Overall, though, I think that pinball collectors who are the people who really got burned by Skippy and Zidware, I think they're suspicious of pre-order now so so that's good maybe we'll see the model die die a natural death due to these failures i think the big question is uh with jersey jack pinball because they've put out machines they put out machine number one machine number two is imminent they used pre-order for both of both of those i believe they've indicated that they're not going to use pre-order to do game number three. But I think that was also said quite a ways back. So if they don't, and they kill off the use of pre-order for their company, I think maybe it will go away. But otherwise, I mean, if there's someone who they're seen as the biggest player besides Stern, and so if sufficient numbers of individuals continue to put in pre-order money and are okay with those risks, then we'll probably continue to see other boutique startups look at it as a viable model. But I think it should go away. Well, yeah. And Jersey Jack, even with all of their little issues, have gotten to a point that it's different between saying, oh, I'm going to go ahead and give Jersey Jack some money because while it might be late, I know it'll come and saying, well, you know what? I'm just going to shift $8,000 to Bubba Bo Bob's big house. So pinball flippers because they said they're going to make a machine yeah well i mean with with jersey jack the thing is they they have always released so they've not collapsed and not delivered the games had they been the only ones doing pre are they in dutch for example and we see dutch get their machine out My disdain for pre it probably honestly it still exists just because I don like the I don't like these unconventional investing concepts where people start, because they're not investing concepts. You have people that don't want to assume risk forming companies and shifting it onto customers, and customers are falling for it. And that bothers me just conceptually. I don't think that's a proper markets approach to it. But, you know, people have the right to do with their money what they want. Had we only seen entities like Jersey Jack doing it, the model would – no one would have been burned. And people would probably be – I mean, really, in that case, it only comes down to are you willing to have your money, thousands of dollars tied up for years, yes or no? If yes, preorder. If no, don't. And no one would really feel burned per se. Anyone who's wanted out of Jersey Jack has been able to cancel their order and get their pre-order money. So that wouldn't have been – they've done it the best of any entity that I'm aware of. The thing is, though, that I think that their success in being able to get money that way inspired entities like Skit B and Zidware to try the same thing. And it cost people tens of thousands of dollars. and that I think it's done more damage to the pinball hobby on the collector side than whatever advantage people may think we're getting by possibly getting more boutiques maybe only because of this particular method of raising capital and our boutiques really the answer for pinball I know having more pinball companies is a good thing and I know a lot of these people are starting as boutiques but a lot of people seem to think that oh boutiques are great boutiques are wonderful boutiques are the way to go but do you really want nothing but a bunch of five six seven eight different people who might put out one or two machines or even just you know just do the one-off and have them do limited runs and it'd be a big great thing or is it something we'd like to see some these companies settle into a more normal release schedule where they're putting out machines, they're considered a pretty big to-do, and it's not just, well, we put out our 75 machines, or we put out our thing, or we're doing this one core project because we love this project only, and then the company's just going to dissolve after we finish this one. I don't know. I've actually never really thought about it like that. Perhaps that should be a topic for another podcast. That does sound like a good topic for another podcast. And with that, I think we should go ahead and take a next step over to video games. Yay. A far happier topic for us on this episode. On this episode. There are definitely going to be episodes where video games are going to get us into the weeds. Let's start out with a game that is actually out and playable as we speak, Firewatch. Now, Firewatch is a game that falls into what I consider a visual novel. It is not a movie. You're not watching a movie. You're doing stuff, but it's not really as involved. It's not playing Call of Duty. It's not playing Total Nuclear Annihilation. You're not doing StarCraft or XCOM. It's more about the story and there's gameplay in it, but it's not as big. And I've played a lot of these games. I've played a lot of the Telltale games, and I've played some of the others. But Firewatch, Firewatch is special because unlike all of those other games, Firewatch made me feel and made me sit down and just stare when the game was over and I honestly believe Firewatch actually had a very positive message and a positive, I mean with the good things and the bad things and everything else in the story, I'm not going to give anything away but it is something that it affected me as a person and as a gamer and as a player it was like watching a great movie or reading a great book where you finish it and when you're done you're just you can feel things are different and i was surprised with this game and this game being like this and just how good it was and how it affected me well i've not uh played firewatch i actually i've heard it uh come up a number of times i've only heard good things i actually heard them discuss it on podcast unlocked which was interesting because podcast unlocked is an xbox themed podcast and firewatch is not available on the xbox and most of their discussion was lamenting the fact that is not at least not yet out on xbox and that they think it should come out there because it's such a good story it seems to me that quality storytelling games are are enjoying something of a fad in fact fads maybe not the best word to choose but yeah it's you know there's a resurgence there's a desire for it i i credit telltale it seems like when they released walking dead the the first the first season of walking Dead that really ignited a desire to have games that aren't focusing so much on gameplay, but rather are hinging their success and popularity on having a compelling, meaningful story. And I like that there are other companies doing this, doing this concept, but not doing it in a cookie cutter way that is just like a telltale game. Because all the telltale games, they have different themes, like the Game of Thrones is very dark, and thematically it really feels a lot like the show. whereas Tales from the Borderlands feels very silly and zany. But structurally and how it approaches and how the games play, there is the telltale style. But there are other ways to do this sort of visual novel or adventure game storytelling. And so my overall feeling on the style, I have nothing negative to say about Firewatch itself, but I have mixed feelings on the style. And the reason why they're mixed is generally, I really like the stories that come out of this style. I really do. And I don't want to go into the debate about are video games art or not. But I think when you have something that's structured, when you have something that's very scripted, that rides the line closest to being able to be art. And the reason is the whole thing about art is an artist is able to put out an image, put out a concept. How you maybe interpret it is, of course, up to the individual. However, one can always say, well, the artist had that intention. And you and I have had these discussions before with, you know, when people are trying to, like, analyze literature and such. And it's like sometimes a blue door is just a blue door. Well, the artist, the author, in the case of a book, they know that. They'll know whether or not the door was blue because it meant something or the door was blue because they said the door was blue. And so there's an answer to that. The issue, of course, with video games is that when you can play them, you actually have control within the medium, and that means you are doing things that the artist didn't want or didn't foresee or whatever. So it's just different. So generally, I've always sort of avoided the idea of games as art and willing to weigh in on it or not, because it's not just someone or a bunch of collaboration like a movie of putting out something. And when you watch it and I watch it, we see the same thing and how we interpret may vary on our personal circumstances. But since we play these, we have our own way of going about them. well in a game like call of duty but in games like this or games like telltale where it's structured and you're always going to hit the particular dialogue choices and whatnot they're able to tell a more compelling story because there's a lot more structure behind what's actually valid what's actually an option whereas if you're in fallout 4 totally open world and that's why we see game glitches and everything all over the place because it's just so massive so that's the positive for this style. I think the negative is just because they're basically interactive audiobooks. I almost can't even call them games. To me, it's like, well, okay, I really enjoy them. So, and you put them in consoles or on the computer and you play them. So, you know, I think technically they are games. But when I think of things like Game of the Year and stuff, I always have trouble choosing games that are like this because whereas I thought they told me a really good story i almost can't say i played them it's more just like i experienced them i don't know that makes any sense but you know it's always a sort of my mix on that but overall i'm glad they exist and i i really enjoy them so i'll continue to play things like this and i'll just have to watch for a steam firewatch sale i think yeah that makes perfect sense and i said i i that's why i like to consider them a visual novel is kind of how is how i see them um i know visual novels have that whole connotation because there's a lot of games out of japan that are visual novels and are very on their own special thing but this that's what this story was i mean it was it was almost it was like more more like a choose your own adventure the old choose your own adventure novels it's like that uh you get to choose how your answer and how you deal in situations and there's only so many choices and they only have so much of an effect on the story but it does make changes throughout and just in this particular one i mean i love tales from the borderland i haven't finished it yet and that's just because i haven't got the time to sit down and finish the last couple chapters uh it's funny it's a lot of fun walking dead was very good and it it definitely did the tug at the heartstrings thing but firewatch was just it's the same but different it feels like a much more mature version of those stories uh the art is beautiful it's not a hyper realistic art but it's not the super cartoony art it it was going for i'm not sure i'm not i'm not sure what you would call it i mean it's kind of cartoony but it's very almost abstracty but it's beautiful and there are some scenes in the in the thing that you You just want to sit and watch. You don't want to move. You don't want to continue the story. You just sit there and watch what's going on because it's just pretty. And the way the story hits its beats and this and that, and it's not one of those things where it's not an all. It's a twist type thing where something comes out of stuff. You can see what's coming at times, and sometimes it's a thought in the back of your head that, oh, maybe this is what's going on. Oh, no, maybe it's this. Maybe it's that. It keeps you going back and forth. It's really the story, the very story of it. It's very much about the human condition, and it's very much about you as a person and your interactions with other people. And it's just, it hit me for some reason. It just hit me beautifully. I've actually, after I finished playing it, I considered playing it to make some different choices, and I couldn't bring myself to do it. So what I did was I sat down and watched Let's Play of somebody else, and they made different choices. and that was interesting to see the changes, what changes were important, what choices weren't that important, and to see how their story differed from mine and to see the things I found that they missed and the things they found that I missed in the story and even watching it was beautiful. I mean, it's definitely, I would say it's the number one of the games I've played, if I'm going to consider it a game, I would say it's probably better than XCOM. XCOM took more time. XCOM was much more of a game. But at the end, when I finished XCOM, I didn't sit down and go, wow, that was just wow. And Firewatch did that for me. For me, Firewatch was an experience. It wasn't just a game. It was an experience that will have great, I mean, I can tell you right now, the next time I play a Telltale game or any of these other visual novel-ish type games that come out, they're all going to be compared to Firewatch. It is the bar. Is it better or worse than Firewatch? That's the bar from now on. So everyone go out and get Firewatch. It has Tony's seal of approval. Well, let's go ahead and transition to another video game topic, one that is much more conventional in its gaming nature. But I wanted to talk a little bit about Titanfall 2. Titanfall is a first-person shooter, and at least initially was an Xbox One exclusive. This one, though, will be multi-platform. We've known that for a while. That's going to come out on PC and PS4 in addition to Xbox. However, information has come out indicating that it looks like it will be getting a winter 2016 release, so we should actually see it this year. I did hear a reference, apparently in an interview, someone had indicated something about magic being involved in the game, And that's – I don't know what's – the game is very sci-fi. It's a first-person shooter where you get in and out of mechs. And so otherwise, it kind of plays like a blend of Brink, which was sort of a parkour-themed game, I think terribly executed, but it was a good idea. Call of Duty, which Respawn Entertainment was known back with when they were with – they were Infinity Ward, essentially. the head honchos as i understand it and they broke away and quit working on call of duty and titanfall was that you know one of their their big first game and uh anyway so the game's a sci-fi concept wrapped around a war shooter so i don't know what the magic thing that i heard reference of was i'm hoping it's just gonna be tech stuff i don't want no harry potter sort of magical spells going on in my Titanfall world. Expelling Mechis. Yes. All right. Well, that one might be worth it. But anyway, the big news for me, though, regarding it was that Titanfall 2 will have a single player campaign. That was my big complaint with the first Titanfall. Titanfall was not on my radar. It's just the price on Titanfall fell through the floor really quick. And I picked it up. And actually now all the Titanfall DLC on Xbox One is free. It's been free for a long time. The game itself is pretty cheap, and it's fun. It's so competent in so many ways. I mean, again, coming off of Brink, which was my only other parkour shooter game I ever really played, it works in Titanfall. So I really like a lot of the mechanics that are behind Titanfall. But when you played it, you had to kind of get the story from it. There was something akin to a campaign mode in the multiplayer, which kind of told you they're almost vignettes. vignettes there were little segments at the start and end of these of these campaign maps that would tell you a little bit about what was going on but you know when you joined you didn't know what map you're going to start on so you'd often experience the story out of order it was just it was kind of a mess and there wasn't much to it where which but they've got a they've done enough world building that you think oh well this should actually have a mythos this should actually be a world that feels lived in like halo so the the single player was a was my big complaint uh about titanfall one the other thing is um i have so i have decent hopes for this the mech suit use was was well executed so not only the parkour elements but the mech suits that kind of function like vehicles but you could have them operate independently of the driver so you didn't have to be in them to be useful and so that coupled with the parkour i think gives them a very uh unique segment of what I call the bro shooter market. I'm not a big bro shooter player. Battlefield is my game of choice within that subgenre, but Titanfall has been the one I've put in the second most amount of time in, and so I'm really hoping that it does well. I obviously did well enough that they greenlit it. My understanding is that the budget for this version, Titanfall 2, is higher now. It's actually been raised above what it originally was assigned for a budget i'm you know hopefully it's not like a movie where they just have to start throwing money at it because it's not good and they're trying to fix all of that i'm just hoping that they really really want it to be successful and so they've had to expand the budget because of the single player and all of that but i think that titanfall was a a game that maybe didn't get as much due credit as it should have it's hard to say that year was kind of dry for xbox it was his first full year and so titanfall really stood out in a lot of ways and i think it did get a lot of attention by gamers but its player base doesn't seem to have held up very well i was in the game less than a month ago and the number of people in the various sessions were not particularly impressive it wasn't dead it wasn't a barren wasteland but as competent as it was i would have thought it would have had better legs than what seem to have and i'm hoping they can take those lessons learned and actually make titanfall 2 a triple a release that's worth buying and playing for long term yeah i never played the original titanfall um because i don't have an xbox one obviously and by the time it was got any releases on a pc or anything it was done and gone it wasn't something i worried about now the pure multiplayer aspect that's becoming more common to see a lot of pure multiplayer games out there and I've never been real big into them. The only pure multiplayer game that I put serious time into would be Team Fortress 2. And the next game coming out that's a pure multiplayer game that I have interest in is Overwatch, which is Blizzard's take on Team Fortress 2. And I don't know if that's just how I am. I'm pretty certain it is because I played tons and tons of multiplayer Call of Duty, the original Call of Duty. I was playing the original Call of Duty when they were up to, like, Call of Duty 3. And when Call of Duty Modern Warfare came out, I was still playing multiplayer of the original Call of Duty. And that kind of gives me hope because, I mean, the original Call of Duties and Call of Duty 2 and the original Infinity Ward group, if they're the ones putting this game together, I love their games. I love their single-player parts of their games. I love their multiplayer. And if this game is like that, but with the added joy of mechs and jumping from building to building and doing all that crazy pseudo-sci-fi futuristic bionic commando type stuff, I think it could be a lot of fun. I'm definitely going to be keeping an eye on this one as we start seeing beta drops and as we start getting the early A reviews and stuff come this winter. Yes, we will see how well it does. I think the issue regarding the single player and the multiplayer only, I mean, for me, I want a story so I have something to kind of get invested in. And I don't tend to favor multiplayer in general, and that's just my play style. I think the trouble that a lot of multiplayer-only games have is how are people supposed to be attached to the franchise if they haven't experienced anything in it yet? And so I think that's why maybe a lot of them don't tend to do all that well. It's hard to say. In a lot of ways I don really care whether they do well or not I just ended up trying this one because it was really cheap and so i i looking very forward to seeing if they make some significant improvements to the second one but for titanfall one was a i think a very good first time effort anyway yeah good one to keep yeah and that's the thing i know there's been more and more you hear more people clamoring they want oh i just want a multi-version player of this game i just want to play the multiplayer i i mean uh global offensive has some of the highest consecutive online player number of players constantly and that is just a modernized version of the original counter-strike that came out you know years and years and years ago and that's just pure multiplayer and it's the same map that they've been playing for over a decade but for some reason that has resonated with people that is is this huge popular thing uh the call of duty games the battlefield games They get these huge numbers of heavy multiplayer stuff. And while I don't know, I think maybe I'm too old to play Twitch shooters. Maybe that's what my problem is. I can't handle Twitch shooters anymore. I don't know. I mean, you can always just die. Well, yeah, I do do that a lot. Well, I mean, I think the thing is that a lot of these, the ones that are successful and the ones you've mentioned, Call of Duty, for example, which, I mean, they always have a single-player campaign, incidentally. But the thing is that they already got their – they already proved their bones. They already got their hooks in people by having competent multiplayer in the past. So they've got the pedigree. I mean I still, though, want a – I still want – if you're going to have a single player, I want you to have a single player. But make it a good single player. If you're going to do a bad single player, then just drop the single player and just do multiplayer only if that's the case. And I bring that up because, I mean, Battlefield, the first one I played was Bad Company 1, and I didn't think the shooting engine was very good in that. I enjoyed the single-player story, though. So while I did not initially play multiplayer very much on that, I was into the single-player. I got Battlefield Bad Company 2. The new engine was, I thought, a lot better. And while I enjoyed the story, I didn't enjoy the story as much as I enjoyed the first one, I really enjoyed the multiplayer. come battlefield 3 the single-player campaign i felt was awful it is the worst single-player campaign of battlefield or call of duty that i ever played it was i mean it was bad i thought it was terrible it was so cliche and boring and i would have bought that game anyway for the multiplayer but it was so unfortunate that they decided they needed the single player and they just didn't even try because they know that it's the multiplayer people are buying buying their game for battlefield four i thought a single player was better than threes but i didn't think it was anything particularly special but you know that i think single player is good for getting people who aren't invested already you have a past background in team fortress 2 something that's going to be like team fortress true 2 will probably be on your radar because that has already hooked you but if it's something new like how titanfall was for example i think it would have helped them had they actually done a Titanfall 1 with a single player because no one had any experience in terms of how Titanfall was going to be. So I think they left a lot of potential players on the cutting room floor, so to speak. They edited them out because they just didn't put in that single player because their focus was making a really good multiplayer experience. Made sense. They were guys from Infinity Ward. They knew Call of Duty had its legs come from its multiplayer. That was their pedigree. And so that's what they wanted to execute with a high degree of competence. And I think they succeeded. But unfortunately, to people that just saw the name and they're like, oh, Titanfall, Respawn Entertainment. I don't know the name of that game. I don't know the name of that developer. Oh, let's see. Oh, there's no campaign? What am I supposed to do? How do I learn it? I just go online and shoot things? Battlefront, the Star Wars thing. That's the criticism I'm hearing is why isn't there any? This is Star Wars. Why aren't we getting to do any single player? Where's the story? It's all just going in multiplayer, and that makes a lot of people mad. So I think that it's smart to try and put in single player stuff. Maybe once you get established, go ahead and drop out your single players if your heart's just not into it anymore because you've got the pedigree. But if you don't have the pedigree, I think it's smart to do the single player. Yeah, I can definitely see that. We'll just see how things go from here. I mean, it's kind of a new world. I mean, first-person shooters have been the big bread-and-butter multiplayer thing for a while now. But the fact that there's other people starting to slide in, it's not just Halo. It's not just Battlefield, and it's not just Call of Duty. We'll see how things go and how they change. I was just wondering. I think the stories help. It's just me being an old curmudgeon. I like playing the stories, and these young whippersnappers who just want to run around with their gold guns and knife people and shoot people and feel special about themselves make me feel old. I think that's the problem. Well, we can't solve that. We'll just have to give them more gold so they're distracted by the shiny, and we'll just enjoy our story-driven better games and just have to live with ourselves somehow. Oh, yeah, I guess we can do that. That won't be – I don't think that'll be too hard. All right. Well, let's transition to segment three, our tabletop games portion. And you wanted to talk about Legendary. Yes, I wanted to talk about Legendary. It is a – it's from Upper Deck, who you might know because, you know, they do baseball cards and stuff like that. Oh, yeah. I used to collect baseball cards. I never liked watching baseball much, but I did collect the cards. This is Upper Deck's take on a deck-building system. What's interesting and what I kind of like about this one is it is an actual – they built a core deck-building system, and the mechanics can be applied to anything, and they use it as a license machine. So they take the core. It's a cooperative deck builder, and I will unabashedly say that deck builders are my favorite type of board game. I love deck builders. Cooperative deck builders, non-cooperative deck builders, I just love deck building games. And this is an interesting take on it because of how they play. they are you have a challenge and or a villain and objects you have that your goals are to play against and there's other smaller issues that come up while you play that you have to take care of too what's interesting to me is how they started out with just the marvel license and they were the that's all they had originally they had released a whole bunch of expansions they've got the main marble core deck they've got a marble villain deck i think the villain one's actually the one i've played the most often for uh of legendary period is the uh marble or the villains but i've played the regular marble one at the same time and what was really interesting to me with this system is they took it and they licensed it out and they just changed the license they've got a Predator one now. They've got an Alien one. I've heard the Alien one is the best one that anyone's played. A lot of people have told me that they love the Alien license. And what's interesting is now they have two new licenses that are releasing this year. One is the ever-fan popular Firefly. I'm not really sure how it's going to translate into a game, but ever since it's It's untimely, young, deaf. Firefly has made tons of money between the pen and paper RPG, the Firefly board game, neither of which I have played, but I've heard very good things about the board game at the very least. And the other one, though, Big Trouble in Little China. That is something that's really old school to see pop up into this type of thing. And it's kind of, I mean, the old adventure type movies would make a good addition to the deck building games. And what makes me wonder is with these licenses in play, what other licenses might we see enter this? I mean, could we see an Indiana Jones license? Could we see some of the other type of older titles enter it that is the kind of things? things and what do you think on how they're doing the build a core game and then just slap licenses on it to keep it going and keep it fresh while still being the same general gameplay well um in terms of the the theme shifting yeah i think it's a i think it's a good strategy for them because there are some people that uh maybe they're not marvel fans but they are big fans of cheesy 80 movies and so big trouble little china is obviously going to resonate whereas maybe something that is a masterpiece that is not a cheesy movie it is a pure masterpiece look it's it's special i i will hey i own it on dvd so i'm not i'm not going to criticize big truck china but i'm going to say i wasn't surprised when it didn't win any academy awards however uh so yeah no i mean i don't get too excited about about re-themes and again that kind of gets back to pinball where some people are really all about the theme and i'm more about the gameplay. So if they've got a really good core gameplay and it sounds like they do, then generally I'll be pretty receptive to any theme as long as it's enjoyable to play. I, of course, have my own partial biases. I like Aliens as a movie franchise, and so I'd lean towards that. Big Trouble resonates with me, so I'd lean towards that. Whereas Firefly, I've seen, I wasn't a huge fan of it. So if I was going and buying it off the shelf, there's some themes I would rather have than others. And doing that strategy means it is more likely that I'd actually drop my money the more themes I have, just because statistically, they're more and more likely to actually have something that I care about. Overall, though, I like the idea of cooperative deck building style. So it's their style that resonates the most with me. I think it works really well for novice players, of which I am. You expose me to most of the tabletop games that I play. and what I like about a cooperative deck build style is that when we're in a social event and you have a lot of people that aren't familiar with these types of games in general and much less whatever specific one we're going to try and play, in the cooperative model, you can basically teach people while you're playing it and you don't have that awkwardness of, well, I'm trying to show you how to properly play while I'm trying to beat you down sort of thing where it gets a little weird. It's like, well, am I throwing the first game? Do we have to have a practice game so people understand how it works. Whereas with the cooperative, it's sort of like you're going along, you're clearly trying to win, you're trying to beat the system. So you're trying to get everyone to understand fully from the get-go. It still probably doesn't work out, but everyone's going and learning at the same time. I think people ask questions more readily because they know that they're not trying to win. It's not like, oh, I got to hide my cards. And so I think as a structure, it works really, really well. But I'm biased because when it comes to multiplayer video games, I favor PvE style things to PvP in general anyway. I like horde modes. I like firefights. I like the idea of having a group of human beings trying to beat the AI. And in this case, the AI is the deck, the evil deck. And so I think it's a really good style. And I think the approach that Upper Deck is taking here makes a lot of strategic sense from a business perspective. Well, yeah, and I like how they do the different playthroughs. The different licensing, and I'm wondering if it's not a system that works in tabletop that wouldn't work as well in other games or in other systems like the other ones we talked about. Would you be happy to have a choice of five different games if they were all Steve Ritchie's Star Trek Pro just with different art thrown on them? Would you buy – I mean, with the cost, people wouldn't buy more than one. or if there was a situation where there was like, well, we took and we just reskinned Call of Duty, and we've got Call of Duty that's just regular everyday Call of Duty, and then we've got this version of Call of Duty where now your M16 has just been reskinned and it shoots a laser, so it's space Call of Duty. And now it's like you've just got a single-shot M16, so now you're Civil War Call of Duty. I mean, would that be something that people would be interested in, or is it a system that's kind of unique to how it works? And the tabletop gaming, is it something that works better that way? I'm not sure. I think with pinball, definitely it's not a system that would be really popular because of the cost, but it's working here for Upper Deck. and it's working, I think, because if you know the system already and they come out with a theme that you like, there's no reason you're not going to pick it up because you can just start a game. I mean, especially with the prices of how most tabletop games are and the fact that a lot of tabletop people are their collectors. I mean, they have huge collections. They're like, I like this game. I'll buy this game even though I might not play it all that often. I like this game enough that I want it in my collection so I can play it. Yeah, you bring up a good point. And my thinking in terms of the sort of the reskins, because that's essentially what all these different themes are, would be that the value that I see and why I think it makes good sense for them is I've assumed and this could be a wrong assumption, but I've assumed that their goal is to expand the market of people buying the game. So I wasn't assuming that they're selling Firefly to the same people buying Big Trouble from Little China, but rather they recognize, okay, well, Firefly is going to get a certain segment of people that maybe they're not tabletop people in quotes, but that they are people who love Firefly. So let's get them to buy this affordable game that is regarding a topic they really love. We'll just take the same exact thing, but we'll make it for Big Trouble in Little China, and then the 80s fans will lap that one up, and the aliens fans will do the aliens one. So my thought was, and why it makes sense, is that these different themes broaden the appeal of the game rather than trying to resell a game over and over to the same core group of people. Now, the collector segment obviously is going to buy those, and the logic there would probably be those collectors are going to buy our stuff no matter what. So they're guaranteed sale. We don't even have to worry what the theme is with them. They're a fan of the game style. These aren't high dollar prices, so they're just going to keep lapping that up. So instead, I imagine that they want to expand their overall market. Now, there's a saturation point where I don't think you can get clever enough with the themes anymore that you're actually going to reach all that many different people and sales would naturally fall off. But it's getting to a business element that I'm not an expert on, so it's all highly speculative on my part. But the reason why I think it works is in part the price point, but in part I've assumed the strategy is let's get new people into our tabletop game. The easiest way to do that is just to change the theme. Yeah, and that makes sense. And I think you're right. That's probably what it is, the best way to spread the work out, because at that point they're just changing art assets and making minor tweaks. So it's going to be a lot less of a background cost for the initial spin-up to the game. they're not going to have to do all the play testing. They're not going to have to do the actual creation of the game. So it does make sense that way as spreading things out. I don't know how well it would work otherwise, but I know there's several other versions of this that are very visible currently in the tabletop gaming and board gaming. Star Wars there's a Star Wars X-Wing game that uses Starfighter minis and the general rule pack behind that I know there's been a conversion and there's a Star Trek version that's for sale now that uses the same movement and the same general rules to build the decks and build the ships and how things play there is some sailing games like old age of sail naval warfare games that use the same engine and with minor tweaks a very similar engine is used for several like World War I and World War II aircraft dogfighting games and they're all and I don't mean they're all the same engine but I mean there are several different engines that are used one for the Spadar fighters and there's a different one that's real popular with aircraft games and there's another one that's real popular with like naval type games and they just reskin it, but they use the same general rules and the same general movement and all that set up. Well, I think we've covered our three segments for this episode. I should go ahead and remind people if they want to follow us or get ahold of us. A couple things to know would be our Facebook address, which is facebook.com slash eclectic gamers podcast. You can also email the show, um, eclectic gamers podcast at gmail.com. So those are the two best ways to get a hold of us at the podcast here. We are both going to the Texas Pinball Festival, as we've mentioned in the past. We have been talking about it, and we'll probably have perhaps our first exclusive-only episode that will discuss just pinball around that time after or during or something along those lines with Texas. And we follow our normal pattern. I would assume we'll probably have one more episode before we go on that trip because we have been putting this out about every two weeks. But we are planning for a pinball-oriented one towards the end of March based off of our experiences at the first pinball convention that either Tony or I have gone to. yeah and we'll uh we'll see we're still we're still debating we're talking about we might do an actual live table record where we're actually in the same room and which will help us avoid some of the audio troubles that we had with our last episode and if you notice some cuts in this episode it's probably due to a couple audio issues that are cropped up while we were recording it and we might even have some of our first guests. We're just going to have to see what shakes out of it. Yeah. Well, I don't have anything else to add today, so I'll just say goodbye to everyone and see you next time. It's been wonderful. Glad to hear from you, everybody. And go ahead and remember, drop some quarters, play some games, whatever you do, just have fun, be with people. See you.