Now, you know, something interesting happened with this, And it typically does happen whenever you're giving opinions on different games that are new. I've noticed that this happens a lot. And I've seen it elsewhere before I even started doing podcasting. But, of course, I'm experiencing it a little bit more when I get to interact with you guys out there. Right? And here's the way that I want to really break this down. my idea of being able to do this podcast is essentially me and you the viewer the listener whoever it is if you're listening right now i want this to be as if we are at a bar having a beer sitting down and talking pinball but obviously in this situation you just aren't able to talk back immediately but i enjoy interacting with people and hearing from you guys in the comments in the emails, messages, whatever it could be. And the one thing that I really want to tell everybody is whatever my opinions might be, and I said this before, it is not gospel. I'll tell you guys, I have an extraordinarily non-ego. That's like extraordinary humble. Remember that, Monica? I'm extraordinarily humble. No, what I'm getting at, guys, is I don't really have an ego on this thing. I don't feel like my opinion, just because I happen to have a microphone, just because I happen to have a camera, just because I happen to hit record, it doesn't necessarily mean my opinion has any more weight than what all of your guys' opinions are. And I feel like we can have differing opinions, and they can both be right, because it's based off what our experience is in pinball. What is our experience playing pinball? What experience are we having? There's a lot of variables that goes into this when we come to a decision on whether or not we like a game. And I'm never going to fault anybody for not liking something that I like. You know, one of my favorite games of all time is sitting right behind me, Star Wars from Stern. And that has been panned by a lot of people as being something that didn't quite capture the spirit of Star Wars or wasn't as immersive as it could possibly be. It wasn't the world under glass. We've heard that said a lot. And I got to readily admit they're right. But I still enjoy the pen. So what I'm getting at, guys, is that we can have all kinds of different opinions on this. And it doesn't invalidate anything. I'm telling you guys. I got some emails that, and this was kind of funny to me. I got some emails from people that are Jersey Jack fans that were really upset over my assessment of it. Even given a B minus, they were upset about that. And what I would just like to say to you guys, and if you're listening to this and you happen to be one of those people that was legitimately upset, I would say, look, the reality is, is just because I don't see something as a runaway hit, and you do, does not invalidate your purchase. If you think it's a runaway hit, then that's where you need to go with it. That's your enjoyment level of it, and that is great. that is perfect I should not have the power at all to take that away from you and I don't because I am literally a nobody when it comes to pinball I am a nobody I I told you guys this before I'm just an idiot with the mic with an opinion and I enjoy conversing with you guys even if somebody disagrees with me I enjoy it I don't want to be in an echo chamber at all I don't work like that I don't want to be in an echo chamber to where everybody's just agreeing with me I mean if you do agree with me great we can talk about that and we can go a little deeper into it and we can find common ground that perfectly fine too but I also got emails too from Stern fans that felt like I wasn critical enough And it like guys guys and that shows you right there And what I'm getting at is, is people will have different experiences on the same pinball machine, right? We'll all feel something a little bit different based on how do we perceive this theme? what has happened in our lives leading up to enjoying a certain theme, to enjoying a certain type of gameplay, to enjoying how the lights, how the sounds are, how whatever it is, it could be within that machine, the design, whatever, anything, art, the whole, the whole package. Right. And, you know, I know that also one of the critiques that, that I gave was that the multiball for me was a little too much. And some people interpret that as I hate multiball. I got that a little bit. I don't even know what that means. I, you know, here's the thing guys. I like ice cream right now. I'm in my Batman mode. It's winter time. I need to work out. I need to shed some pounds. Like I'll readily admit that. Don't laugh again, Monica. I see you over there, but I do. I, and so what I'm getting at is guys, I like ice cream, right? But I like a bowl of ice cream. I don't want to go eat the whole damn gallon of ice cream. After a while, it's diminishing returns. And that's kind of the way that I view this. Now, for some of you guys out there, you may want to eat the whole bowl of ice cream and that's, or the whole gallon of ice cream, the whole store. You may even just buy a fricking Baskin Robbins and that's perfectly fine. That's perfectly fine. I think we should all enjoy pinball the way that we enjoy pinball. Period. Full stop. That's what it is. That's just the way I feel. You know, and when it comes to GNR, I do, even though I feel like it's not game of the year, again, my opinion, I feel like it's not game of the year, I still think, though, that it is going to win game of the year. Like, I still do. I don't see, it's so popular to the majority of people, and they sold so quickly, and they got people so fired up. There's no denying that. You can't. It's a factual fact. It's not a fake fact. It's not an alternative fact. That's a fact. It was a roaring hit out of the gate because they crushed it. They crushed it. They crushed the marketing. They crushed the hype. It was the perfect theme for what they were doing. It's awesome that they're still following it up with all these behind the scenes things. There's a lot of things that went right. But at the same time, it doesn't mean that it's going to be a runaway hit for everybody in their experience. And that is fine because there will never, ever be a pinball machine that is 100% loved by everybody. There will never be a 10 out of 10 pinball machine. It won't happen. There's just no way. Unless somebody puts out one single pin and only one person experiences it ever, and that person is, hey, 10 out of 10. It just won't happen. So, you know, moving forward out of this, I think what I would like to get across to all of you guys is that I respect everybody's opinion. I respect opinions that differ from mine. I respect opinions that are the same. I think pinball is a very hard thing to do. It is not easy to code. It's not easy to design. It's probably not easy to get some of these licenses. It's probably not easy to market it. There's a lot of things that are difficult when it comes to business, especially if you're running businesses in the sense that you're selling millions of dollars of product. That is a difficult thing to do. These aren't, I mean, these aren't super, super small businesses. These are mid-tier small business that are getting up there. When you're talking about revenue going over $20 to $30 million, you're getting up there a little bit. And it's not an easy thing to do. And what I would like to see the industry move towards more is that, you know, I would like people to understand that just because you don't like something doesn't mean that you hate it. We don't have to shit on everything that we don't like. It doesn't have to be that extreme. You know, there's plenty of TV shows I'm sure you guys can think of that, hey, if it's on and you're sitting down, you might watch an episode or two. But are you going to spend your Friday night binging on previous seasons of it? Maybe, maybe not. Does that mean you hate it? Just because you don't? Like, no, of course not. Of course not. But anyhow, I would fully like to say that Guns N' Roses for sure, for sure, full stop, is a hit. For sure is a hit. Is it a hit that I would want to play all the time No it not And I can say that I can say that it the same way There plenty of movies out there that are surefire hits that just crushed the box office I watched it one time. I'm good. I'm good. I enjoyed it for what it was. It wasn't the perfect experience, but I still enjoyed it. I got the utility out of it that I needed to. And that's what happened. Anyhow, let's push forward a little bit more. What is really interesting to me right now is that we are seeing after my last podcast that I did put out that I talked a little bit about potential issues I could see cropping up. It turned out that there has been some reports of play field pulling. Now, I cannot really make any type of assessment on it because quite frankly, I don't know much about it. I'm sure you're going to hear it on other podcasts and people talking about it that know way more on this issue than what I know. All I can really say from a pinball a fan standpoint is I hope any issues that are happening out of box that could be happening with a play field or anything else, I hope it's figured out because I would hate to see people that bought the collector's edition or any edition at that rate, but especially the collector's edition and spend close to $13,000 an all in price for some people. It could be over that for people that are buying a third party and even be higher. But I would hate to see people get their pinball machines after spending that much money on it and it not be as close to perfect as possible out of box. Of course, you're going to have, you know, you're going to have mechanical issues. You're going to have stuff like that. But when you have, you know, I guess the word I'd want to use is superficial issues or any type of issues that deal with the play field in general. That's alarming to me. And I hope it gets fixed. I hope that this is isolated. I really do. and I would just like to see them get that right because I don't want to see anybody put out that amount of scratch and then get a pin and that happens. It happens because it's not fun. It's not fun at all. So I wonder if that could possibly be why we're kind of seeing a slower rollout of getting these pins out. Obviously, Jersey Jack even admitted that they got a lot more orders than what they anticipated. There's a lot higher demand, which, you know, kind of threw me off a little bit. Not going to lie, because I figured if you're going in that deep into your marketing in terms of bringing in a professional team, in terms of using straight down the middle for, you know, the featurette in terms of using Buffalo for a gameplay stream, I mean using what was it? I can't even think of the can't think of the name, the podcast name, the other podcast where they had the designer going. I'm drawing a blank. Was it super awesome pinball show? There we go. Okay, I remembered it now. So what I'm getting at is that they did this full-prong attack to where they had people going here, they had people going there, they had people going here. So they were obviously, it was well-coordinated. It was great. But what struck me as odd, it was almost like they did not anticipate their own success out of the gate. And I don't know how that happens because I'm not inside there. I don't know. I would just have to generally assume. I know whenever we did a product launch for the various things that I was associated with, we always assumed that it would sell more than we anticipated. We always assumed that. Because the last thing I'd want to do is understand. I did not want to sell out immediately. I didn't want to do that. And that's for a variety of reasons. And so I'm kind of curious how that played out. Again, I'm not sure if that's related because of manufacturing. I'm not sure if that's related just because they underpriced it, although I think that they did underprice the CEs just based off judging from demand and the amount that they actually sold, because apparently demand was twice the amount that was available.