Good morning Vietnam! No, welcome to Kaneda's Pinball Podcast coming at you from Dublin, Ireland. I'll be back in New York this week and I will go to Jack Bar and I will play Toy Story and I'm going to have fun and maybe I'll do it for my Saturday morning spectacular and then I'm not going to buy the machine. I don't care because I love Toy Story 1 through 3. We're going to talk a little bit about that but I want to start this show before I go around the pinball horn and talk about everything happening in the pinball world. I want to talk about price again real quickly because I've been hearing from some of you and you've been saying to me, Chris, look, I know that LEs and CEs have highly sought after games The real volume in pinball is not those titles. The real volume in pinball are the pros and premium machines. And if you look at that market, I'm hearing from more and more people and more and more distributors that the premium market is really slowing down, especially the new in box premium and pro market. And I think right now, if you look at the prices, a $9,000 Thank you for watching my video. My name is Jeff Smith. This Week in Pinball, Franchibokkiailand parties.com where I show you what can be done for you before a big game of PINBALL tavalla at the same time. This 경우에는holic meme renews life KELLY MINUTE. Also comfortable dollar premium is really expensive and also if you look at Jersey Jack Ellie which The pinball marketplace if all of a sudden we've got distributors sitting on like hundreds of thousands of dollars of merchandise and it's a lot harder to find people to buy these games. Because remember, it used to be like a premium was like 7,500 bucks. I think premiums used to be like 7,000. Now they're $9,000 and it's a lot of money. And $12,000 for a Toy Story LE is crazy amounts of money. I think you know everyone said the market was crazy and these companies would be able to price their machines higher and almost remove people's ability to make money on the flip. Now the flip only happens with the LEs of Stearns and the CEs of Jersey Jack Pinball Machines. But if you've been following Toy Story pricing right now, there's no money to be made on a collector's edition flip right now. People are starting to list their CEs for basically MSRP. Now here's where it's going to get really interesting is that theseidisigm ihrero balances deserve I guess Miraculous Developer I want to buy one used. It's going to be like $10,000. It's really, really hard to justify spending 15K on a brand new CE if you can get a used Ellie for $10,000. That's a 50% increase in price for what? For different colored armor and a topper for $5,000 more? And for just $1,000 more, you can go get a Stern Pro basically. And this is where it's Now, do I get two Sternpros or oneJerseyJackLE? Do I get almost three sternpros or oneJerseyJackCE? But it's not even about those now. Now it comes down to this. Do we think Stern Pinball will be able to sell high volumes of premiums at $9,000? Do we think that will happen? Do we think JerseyJack can sell high volumes of games at $12,000 for the LE? And if the premium The market goes soft, right? If people stop running at these games because there's so much money, what's going to happen? I think it's going to slow down the entire hobby. I think people are right when they say, Chris, you need to stop focusing on the high, high end stuff. It's the stuff in the middle and the entry level stuff. If sales start to slow down there, you're really going to see dealers and distributors in big trouble sitting on a ton of inventory. Because the other thing is this. When Stern Pinball releasesperor Counting The game is being committed in games and stuff like Rush Premium is not selling at $9,000. Stuff like the Mandalorian premium is not selling at $9,000. The games are sitting. You know, I hate to use a cargument, but in the car world, when you have last year's model, it goes on sale usually. Now I know the car industry is like over sticker right now and pinball has been well over sticker for a while. But if these prices keep getting this high, I really think you're going to see dealers having to sort of finagle the price a little bit to find a home for these games at $9K and $12K. It's really hard I think for a lot of people who have been in this hobby for a while to simply accept the fact that now all of a sudden an Ellie of Jersey Jack Pinball is priced what a CE used to be. And I've said it, the Trojan horse in all of pinball pricing is Stern Pinball is now We're now pricing a premium in which there is no limit to how many they will make. They are pricing a premium at what an LE used to be, and I think that's going to be a hard pill to swallow. And if the looming recession and people start looking at their pinball collections and how much money they have tied up in it, I do think we're going to see a real slowdown of running at new and box purchases. Time will tell though. No one has a crystal ball. No one knows how things are going to go. But I do know this. These This Week in Pinball, FranchiTyler I just don't think you can sustain this market at these prices for very long. And as I said, the silver lining in all of this, as all of these prices get really high, all of these manufacturers have dug a ditch. They've dug a ditch and the only way for them to get out of it is to give us great games. See, I love the next six months to a year in pinball. Cause I love looking at this thing and saying, okay, Jersey Jack, you're going to release another game this pvca peppers oneshopd 35 tenho300 outstanding 0019 The road and if a company comes out with something that just mediocre at these prices who going to buy it Because the days are over of just jumping in and only losing a few hundred bucks and we seeing it now across the entire hobby If the game is mediocre you going to jump in and lose like two to and I don know anyone out there who used to losing that much money and I think everyone out there is saying well then I just buy a game that I know I love and that how it always should have been But it was much easier to speculate in the past. It's not that easy anymore. And I think a lot of people, I mean it, a lot of people are going to get burned with their Toy Story CE nonrefundable deposits of $2,500. I think when they make a thousand of these games, you're going to see a lot of people, and I'm going to say this, I think you're going to see a few hundred go up for sale for less than $15,000 where people are willing to lose maybe 500 bucks on their deposit or a thousand bucks on their deposit. heard at the beginning of the series that havent left home work or sports or the If you are a Godzilla fanatic, you're happy. If you are a Guns and Roses fanatic, you're happy. If you're a Lord of the Rings fanatic, you're happy. You know, you go down a list of all of the greatest theme integrated games and everyone who loves that theme needs to love the pin and there's no way around it. You can't spin it. You can't tell me I need to just see the way the game shoots. I love Toy Story and I don't want four. Okay. All right. Let's go down the horn and talk about what's going on in pinball. There's absolutely no updates over at Stern Pinball. We will wait a few months until we see the next Stern game. Over at Spooky Pinball, there is a code update for Ultraman. They have fixed or adjusted the interface on that game, I think to use more of the screen to make the stuff more easy to read and I think to show the clips a little bit larger on the LCD screen. So that's good news. I was in the thread today. I saw some people were still having some issues reading some of the fonts and some of the scores on the game. I will say on some of these modern games, it's not just this one. They really make the scores too small to read. And you have to have like eagle eyesight to see what's going on on the screen. And these LCD screens on most of these games, they're not that big. So if you want people to be able to read what's going on, you also have to make sure there's great contrast between the font and the background color. And I think people were saying that about the new spooky interface. It's sort of like a gray background with a dark gray font. But man, just make the font black. Make it easier This week's topic is a bit more complicated than the previous one. But if you have an Ultraman, make sure you get the new code into your game today. Now they are quickly moving on to the Bloodsucker editions of these games. I think Spooky's gonna be done with their manufacturing of these games by the fall. I think they want to be done by the fall. And I think they want to move on to their next stuff come Expo and TPF. If I was a betting man, I think they'll announce around Expo the next run of TNAs. TNAs and I think they're going to save Scooby-Doo for some time around Texas Pinball Festival. So that's just my guess is we're going to see more TNAs by the end of the year and then we see Scooby-Doo. All right, Spooky Pinball, new code. Haggis Pinball is next. So as I said on my last podcast, Haggis Pinball still struggling to get games out. I have some friends of mine who are series ticket holders and then some friends who are regular orderers of this. Is that a word? Orderers of this game? I have people who have a regular ordering and they've shared with me some of their correspondence with Haggis Pinball. They emailed Damian. It takes them a few days to get an email back. There's no timeline. Like, he is not telling people when they can really expect their games. We don't know how many they're making a week, but what I know is this. He's waiting on parts. And this is always the challenge is when you're waiting on parts, you really don't know what First of all, we need to know, first of all, what you have to say because you don't really know exactly when you're going to get the parts in. Now I always go back to what Ben Heck told me. He always said, you need to have all the parts in house before you start production. So then, how do they even make any games if they don't have all of the parts in house? That's the part I don't get. Are they working with like a few prototype parts? But if you're making 250 Fathom Mermaid editions, wouldn't you only start production when you had parts for all 250? And so I think everyone's realizing now that Kaneda wasn't unkind, Kaneda wasn't the bad guy. That video they put up two months ago saying production began where Marty was putting his Martyapproved sticker on the game. That was a manufactured stage production video. It was totally manufactured and totally staged. The last point I'll make about this whole thing is it's been a year now. Like Damien promised production one year ago in July and here we are a year later and how many fathoms have even been built. to learn more about C podcasts and our newest episode of Pinball Pantheon. And you should get your money back because he didn't hold up his end of the deal. Why do you then have to have your money frozen there forever? And I still think these 250 games are not going to be made by the end of the year. There's no way they're going to be made by the end of the year. Not at this pace. And I really am praying for you series ticket holders because you bought the next like four or five games from this company. Oh, Kaneda, you can't be negative. You got to cheerlead everything or they're going to come at you next the way American Pinball came at you this past week. Alright, let's talk about American Pinball real quick. So there's no real update. I mean, they're still making the Legends of Valhalla games. That's great. We all know they were making up that they got a ton of orders for the standard edition. It's fine. David Fix can create his own sort of revisionist history about the orders around this game. But the thing is this, there's not really going to be American Pinball news until the fall. And my advice to them is just be quiet, get it done, release a great game in the fall. And I'm as I'm as excited as everyone else is to see what this game is. Now we're hearing that it's not a sequel to Dennis Nordman's older titles. Now I heard from someone who used to work at American Pinball who doesn't work there anymore and he said to me, Chris, this game was originally going to be a sequel to a Dennis Nordman game so they might have reskinned it into something else. So I don't know what it is but that is the word on the street that it is not a follow up now to Whitewater. So we shall see what the game is but we still have a few months to go and there is no point in doing podcasts, there is no point in attacking Kaneda, there is no point in taking a victory lap yet. They still have yet to make a hit game and I was just on pin side and someone says American Pinball is so great they pick up the phone and they stay late to help me figure out problems Why do you think that is Because they not that busy people And I hope they create a game that is a smash hit but they have not done it yet And we heard from Joe Bossor when this company was started they considered the finish line to be a thousand games made And I don think they made a thousand of any of their titles If they have guess what Then tell us you have This Week in Pinball, Franchi), Proudly at the CoinTakeR TailgatingParty, the super awesome pinball shows doing a tailgating party. I think it's September 24th, I want to say, on that Saturday. I hope I get a chance to go down this year. Last year it got canceled. They're going to do a little teaser of what the next American pinball game is. So that will be exciting. And then it leads us to believe that Expo will be the moment in which they pull the curtain off the machine, which makes total sense because David Fix is one of the organizers of Pinball Expo. So that's good news. The only thing I hope they figure out is production. What I hope they don't do, I hope they have enough staff and parts to make a lot of these games quickly because that's the name of the game now. Like nobody wants to wait six to eight months and I hope they don't start making This Week in Pinball, Franchi), Franchi, Tanyo Klyce, tilt pendulum or tilt mechanism I don't get it. I don't get where these orders are coming from. Unless David Fix is ordering a thousand standard editions of Legends of Valhalla himself. But I do know that I poked the bear. Man, I poked the bear. Like when you poke AP you get like podcasts coming at you, you get Knapp's Arcade coming after you, you get everyone colluding saying Kaneda's yellow journalism and I still fail to realize where I was really wrong. Like what was debunked? Alright, so Dennis Nordman's game is not Whitewater 2. That was just a rumor. Was I wrong on the reason why JoshKugler left? Was I wrong on the fact that Joe Balcer was working on a game that was licensed? Was I wrong on that? Was I wrong that they only had the ability to build a hundred Legends of a hollow when they revealed the game? I don't know. I didn't hear any specific debunking of most of what I said. It's just a broad like, K-man's wrong again. K-man's the Twippy winner. I get it. I get it guys. I'll say this, the only way you can be wrong is if you actually try to deliver the news and no one else tries to like give you scoops on anything. They don't they don't try to give you scoops on anything. It's only when I say something that they think is wrong. They're like, see, let's swoop in and say how wrong the K man is. All right, let's talk about Chicago Gaming Company. I still don't understand what's happening over there. Apparently, and I keep seeing more and more people talk about this. Apparently, the legs they're shipping with these machines are causing the decals to Pfizer, FEAH,len,κι, Cameron, Cand XDin, milj Lemonascety, GOKADEL, gebracht,onialle,cka,e member, G UKyZ45 Yah, Nexätte var qualquer Conclusio This week's topic is what to expect from the Chicago Gaminging Company. This company has always made high quality well built machines and it's really concerning that this was not caught at the factory level. So hopefully they figure this out before they make the LE versions of the game. Who knows when the LE versions of the games are actually shipping. I think all the momentum and all the excitement around this game is sort of gone at this standpoint. It's just they've made people wait too long. Now the one way I think they can really get the excitement back is when the LE game is ready to ship. Because remember, it's been 10 months since they announced the LE. 10! So when the LE game is ready to ship, I think they need to have the Lyman sheets, the final code update for this game, ready to go. And shouldn't it be ready to go, right? It's been a 10 month delay, so how much more time do you need to get the code ready? And that's That's what everybody wants to see. This is the last code package that Lyman Sheets worked on. Arguably the greatest pinball coder of all time. Now the other question is how much are they going to charge to install that code into your game? How much would you pay right now? Now all things considered, Cactus Canyon LE was only what like $9,200? Like it was a bargain. Think about it like this. This game being almost $3,000 less than 2. It is full new concept product.승 I will say I think for a lot of you out there, I hope you play cactus can because it's pretty easy game. It's not that hard of a game. So how much though with the code be would you spend 250 on a code update 500 a thousand we shall see what they price it at but I do know this Chicago gaming company doesn't want to rip people off. They are not a greedy company. So I do think they're going to pass on this code update. If I were to guess I would put it somewhere between All right, so no real news from Dutch Pinball or Pinball Brothers except the following. I think this Wednesday, July 13th, we saw this from Mr. Pinball Australia. We are going to get a new game reveal and it is not going to be Spinal Tap. So that means it's got to be, it has to be, it's gonna be Queen Pinball from the Pinball Brothers. The Pinball Brothers, I know that they were trying to get this game released in June, but now it's going to be a July release and reveal. So the next game from the Pinball Brothers, I think we're going to see it this Wednesday, July 13th, and it's going to be Queen. So we shall see. Now, if it's the game that we saw in that Queen pop-up store, I'm a little bit worried. It looks outdated. It doesn't look like it's at the same caliber of a Stern Music Pin or a Jersey Jack Music Pin. The Right pinflation is crazy and so many companies are asking for all of this money And you're really gonna need to love a pin to buy a pin and Queen as an act is a great act Like Queen is more popular than rush, but I don't think this game is gonna be anywhere near as good as rush I don't want to say this game is gonna be dead on arrival until I see it and I don't think Anything with the name Queen is gonna be dead on arrival De Salam Aneer Spivck nya R aquiloquele Pal Polish an dopai Thomas Neamel02 grinder polls write a bio of concrete I be back with a new video but I not sure if I be able to make all those alien games and if this game gets revealed how long is it going to take to get it This is the thing with boutique pinball The days of being excited about putting money down and then waiting forever are over No one no one really wants to do it anymore I think that ship has sailed I wish I had an update on Weird Al's going out, but I don't. Maybe I'm wrong. Jerry, are you out there? Can you hear us? Good morning, Gerry Stellenberg. Where the hell are the Weird Al games? Something must be up over there. Jerry, why is it taking so long? Even if you're just making the kits, like the modular back of the game, why is it taking so long to make just that? Like I get it's harder to get cabinets and do all the other stuff, but this game should be in the hands of everyone who already owns a multi-morphic P3 system, but it's not. Like it's still taking forever. And your guess is as good as mine. All right, is anything else going on over at Pinball at Deep Root? Now, we're not going to talk about Deep Root. Did you guys see that? What great witch John, the guy who's looking for a $100,000 whale investor to make a one-off pinball machine based on a licensed theme, and he thinks if he gets $100,000, he'll be able to put together one working prototype. This Week in Pinball, Franchimunition He hasn't even shared with anyone where that $100,000 will be allocated. I don't understand. This guy is obviously very passionate about pinball. I know that he fell on some hard times financially. I think he was making playfields and he got them all done for people. But you can't make a pinball machine the way he wants to do it for $100,000. Now he says he's working with an older designer. Here's who I think he's working with. I think he's working with Jon Norris. I know Jon Norris who joined Deep Root is really looking to get back into the pinball designing game. But no one's gonna do this. Like no one's gonna go fund me a one of one game. You're not gonna get someone to give you a hundred thousand dollars. The richest people out there and I know some very rich people in this hobby. They're rich for a reason. They're rich because they're smart with their money. And this would be the easiest way to lose one hundred thousand dollars imaginable. And even the way he How do you think he's asking for this money? It's almost like he feels like these people won't even care. It's like so disrespectful to say I'm looking for a whale to give me $100,000 to pursue my dream. You know what happened in the world? You know, just in general, let me just talk a little bit about if you want to make something, go make it. If you need to raise money to make something, go raise the money, but do the hard work. Don't just ask for someone to give you a check like this like socialistic approach to making pinball machines has never worked. Look at what Bobby Mueller did. Look at whatAndrewhighway did. You could spend millions of dollars and not get a game off the ground. A hundred thousand dollars is peanuts. It won't get you anywhere. You can't afford a coder, an artist, a designer. You can't afford to order the parts. I don't think people realize how expensive it is to do one-off custom-made parts for a pinball machine. You need to have a CNC machine. You need to do all this stuff. You know how hard it is to mold plastics and make ramps and do all this stuff with just $100,000? And so it's a little bit of a silly offer, you know, that thread is going. Nobody really takes it that seriously, but it is what it is. You know, every time people are like, well, what is there to talk about in pinball? Something inane like that pops up on pin side. You know, and the last point I'll make is this. We don't need another pinball company. We don't need another startup. We don't need another boutique at all. We've got like eight or nine companies right now making pinball machines. And on top of that, there are hundreds of thousands of pinball machines that are great. Hundreds of thousands of them in the world out there, both in the wild and in people's homes. We don't need more. Like we just don't. And you're going to see the amount of used games that are going to be on the market for now until forever. This hobby is oversaturated. It's a great way to make money online. If you want to buy a pinball machine, you don't need to fall into the FOMO around the LEs and the CEs. You can go get a great pinball machine, have fun and you have a pinball machine in your home. You know you don't need 5 in your home. You don't need 10. You don't need 30. Yes, some of you might have that and some of you might be able to afford that and that's great. But ultimately we all know that you can only play one machine at a time. Like you could just have an Ironman Vault Edition and have fun, right? You wake up, how many hours a week can you actually play the damn thing? You wake up, you jump on your Ironman Vault Edition, you have fun, it's got some fun mechs in it, it shoots amazingly well, it's got great flow, it's fast, it's fun, it's a theme that everybody knows. The more and more I think about the amount of games and how much money they want and how silly it all is, I really do think everyone's going to start to really slow down, re-evaluate this whole thing, and make sure I'm only paying these high prices for masterpieces. If I just want a game that's fun, I can go get a fun game for like four or five grand. It's still fun pinball. There is no reason you need to spend $12,000 or $15,000 to have pinball fun and everybody knows it. And here's the other part too. 99% of your friends don't have pinball machines in their homes. 99% of them. So when they come over your house, even if you just have one pinball machine, they will be like, cool, you've got a pinball machine and you'll have some fun, drink some beers and that's it. You know what I'm saying? It's like sometimes I think we forget like how to put all of this in perspective And it gets a little bit out of hand because you spend too much time on pin side. You spend too much time staring at pinball that you think having it that we start to overemphasize the importance of having so many of them. And again, I'm all about like Zen and simplicity. Like if I have a couple of good machines in my house and a healthy family and I travel a lot and I have enough money to go out and eat when I want to go out and eat and I just have peace of mind, I can tell you right now, the guy who has the most peace of mind in pinball has like one machine Thank you today, workout event for teamゲ임 newcomatee glecuggling 4 Always fun to talk to you about pinball. Hit me up at kanedapinball at gmail.com. This show is still the best bang for the buck in all of pinball for five bucks. You know how much content you're getting every month. It's so much fun doing this and thank you so much for the support. We'll talk to you soon.