I see the fairy moon rising. I see trouble on the way. Sit up, sit up, sit up, sit up, sit up, sit up, sit up. Welcome everybody to Canada's Pinball Podcast. Can you feel it? Can you feel the tremors in the water? Jaws is upon us. We might get the trailer, like the teaser trailer for this game as soon as today. if this game's going to be at CES on January 9th, which is next Tuesday, not the coming Tuesday, but the one after, Stern usually reveals a game before it brings it to CES, right? Because CES is the worst place to unveil a game. It's too loud. It's too bright. Remember when they brought Stranger Things to CES and we couldn't see the projector? And so we're like one week away from the Keith Elwin game. And when this thing drops, it's going to be like a seismic shift in the entire pinball marketplace. I'm so excited. I know you're excited. We've been waiting two years for a new Keith Elwin machine. And this is going to be a moment. Now, look, is Stern going to raise the prices? Will this game have the mechanical magic that we've been waiting for? Are there going to be unique shots. Will this be the first Keith Elwin machine with an upper play field? This mechanical shark is everything. But before we talk about what's going on in pinball, a huge shout out to those who have raised the roof with the Canada Club. Rodney C went from $30 a month to $50. Donald at Oasis Arcade from $15 to $30 a month. Nolan J went from $10 to $30. and Anthony Salerno from 10 to 15. Everybody, thank you so much for raising the roof and for your continued support. So let's talk about what's going on. Spooky had a stream in the middle of like a snowstorm and the internet was going down. Someone chimed in on the spooky chat about employees being laid off before the holidays. I don't know if this is true or not, but I do know this. The pinball marketplace is about to get disrupted by Jaws. I'm also hearing that Pulp Fiction is finally on the line. And so here we are, 2024, and all of a sudden we're going to have to start diving into our wallets again, because for a lot of us, we haven't had to pay for stuff in a while. Unless you bought a Stranger Things or an Elvira, what was the last game you bought? Maybe it was Foo Fighters. You lost a lot of money on that game. Maybe you just bought Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Looney Tunes. Everyone's still waiting for that Looney Tunes stream, waiting on licensor approval. But the word on the street is that the sales of those two games is a little bit softer than Spooky is used to. These games are not going to sell as quickly as Scooby-Doo, and they might be trying to figure out how to scale up or scale down the amount of people that are on the line in Benton, Wisconsin. Because remember, like Spooky Pinball, unlike Jersey Jack, unlike American Pinball, unlike Stern Pinball this company does not have like another company bankrolling its operations so if the sales are not where they thought they would be I could definitely see Spooky Pinball slimming out you know sort of having to let some people go because as we all know making pinball is really tough and I think they usually have like part-time employees that put all of these games together the same thing happens over at Jersey Jack a lot of them are temp workers Maybe they're permanent right now. I can't imagine Jersey Jack is looking at the sales orders for Elton John and saying, hey, like how can that company have as many people making these games as they used to have making Guns N' Roses? The demand is just not there. So now we've got this Jaws pinball machine right around the corner and everyone's about to see it. And I think the questions we have are this. Is it going to bring the magic? I think it is. Is Stern Pinball going to raise the prices on this game? There's no better time to sneak a price increase into a game than a Keith Elwin machine. And if Stern just raises it by a few hundred bucks, that equals a few hundred thousand dollars more per model of each game. Think about it. If they just raise $250 on every LE, all of a sudden that's $250,000 more going into Stern Pinball. It's insane how they can just raise the prices by a little bit and it equals a lot more money for them. I'm super excited about Jaws because as I've looked at the pinball landscape over the last year, I think we're all waiting for magic. We're waiting for something that wakes us up again. We're waiting for something truly special. Are you going to feel this way if there's a remake of a Bally Williams game that we've been staring at for 30 years? If Pedretti Gaming and these guys over in Europe if they remake Twilight Zone or Fishtails or Monster Bash all of these remake games Of course they gonna sell them There enough new money in the hobby that will throw money at anything But are we really going to get super excited about a game that we been staring at for almost 40 years I don't think so. I think the excitement in pinball will always be about what's new and what's around the corner. That is why I love covering this hobby. That is why year in and year out, the thing that excites us are the next machines. Now, what's been disappointing about pinball over the last couple of years, I think we all could agree, it's not like every new machine is an improvement on the machines we've had before. Has any machine since Godzilla been as good as Godzilla? No. And I know Godzilla is a high benchmark, but that's two years and 13 pinball companies releasing products into the world, and we're not really moving forward with every release. So even if you take Godzilla out of the mix, what was the last truly great masterpiece pinball machine that we got? At these high prices, right, shouldn't we be naming like three, four machines that are easy to name? They're not there. They're just not there. And so that is why I think when Jaws lands, Stern Pinball is not going to be able to make enough of them. And it's just going to be a game that just crushes it. I think they're going to sell out of the LEs instantly. I think it's going to be a day one sellout. I think this is the moment distributors have been waiting for. They've been sitting on a lot of inventory. They've been trying to move these Venoms, trying to move these like premiums of Foo Fighters. They've got a lot of James Bonds in stock. There's a lot of machines just sitting there piling up at distributors. And finally, a game that they can just drop ship a few thousand of them and not even have to stockpile any of these Jaws machines. Now, look, the big question mark with Jaws remains, what will the assets be like in the game? We know they figured it out with Jurassic Park, but a lot easier to make Jurassic Park exciting, you know, because it's a park filled with all these different dinosaurs where Jaws is just one fish. So how will they do it? How will they make it exciting? And also, if you've seen the Jaws movie, they really only go hunting the shark at the very end of the movie, where in Jurassic Park, it's different, right? The dinosaurs have escaped and the dinosaurs are really hunting the humans, which I think makes it easier to make an exciting game around Jurassic Park. So still a lot of question marks when it comes to how Stern will approach this game. You're not going to be playing as the shark. You're going to be playing as the human beings. and we shall see so much of it over the next two weeks. I've also been getting some silly rumors land in my inbox. One of them was the funniest I've ever heard. It's that Back to the Future is going to be based on the Back to the Future musical. Not the movies, but the musical. I'm here to tell you right now, I can 100% confirm for everybody that Back to the Future pinball will not be based on the Broadway musical. It will be based on the movies. I love how these rumors get started and they're all so strange. and just use a little common sense, people. Do you really think we're gonna get the musical version of Back to the Future? No. If we're gonna get a Beetlejuice pinball machine, it's gonna be Beetlejuice the movie, not Beetlejuice the musical. I've also been hearing people tell me that I should do some investigative reporting into what's happening over at American Pinball. Let me ask you this question, everybody. Do you think I need to go investigate if American Pinball is doing okay on a financial and a business level? Do you think I even need to do that investigative reporting? Do you even think I need to investigate that? I can tell you right now, American Pinball is not doing well. They have not sold many Galactic Tank Force machines. And as I've been saying, I'm worried they're not going to get to their next game. And I've been saying this for months. The rumor on the street is that David Fix has to sell 500 Galactic Tank Force games. And I mean 500 of them in tank format, not the simple cabinet versions, but they ordered parts to make 500 of these tank versions, 200 signature editions and 300 other versions of the game. You know, and if you're Mukesh and you're walking into that factory and all these tank turrets are staring at you and you're like, what did we do? I got all these tank treads and I've got to get these games out the door. They had a custom order, all those legs, because the legs are different on those machines. And I'm just here to tell you right now, how are they going to sell these games, especially a week from now when Jaws is out there. And we're also hearing that Pulp Fiction is finally on the line. And so if Pulp Fiction's on the line and Jaws is coming out and Spooky Pinball needs you to order their two new titles, I mean, just think about that for a minute. That's two titles from Spooky, a new game from Stern Pinball everyone's going to want. Pulp Fiction, which thousands of people ordered already, That's four games that people would rather have than Galactic Tank Force. Would you rather have Galactic Tank Force for or Elton John I think everybody would rather have Elton John I don think anyone wants either game for but that another game you got to throw into the mix. And all of a sudden, we're starting to see at the beginning of 2024, it's going to be brutally competitive in the pinball marketplace. And here's what I think is going to happen, everybody. We're going to start to see instant sales on these games. When a game like Elton John comes out and the orders are not there, what do you think is going to happen? Distributors are giving Jersey Jack around $10,000 for an Elton John Platinum. Now, look, nobody wants it at that price, just a few people. And so if you're sitting on inventory and you wrote a check for $10,000, you just want to get the game out the door. So you're probably going to take stuff like 10-5, show up at the back door of a distributor with $10,500, and you can put an Elton John into the back of your pickup truck. We're going to start to see that. I think in 2024, we know Stern allowed these distros to sell below map pricing in 2023. I think we're going to start to see every manufacturer. I think they're going to have to start having their games on sale within the first six months of release if the game itself is not selling very well. That's another good reason why all of us should just wait and see. When it comes to Spooky's two new games, I think there's two reasons to wait and see. You know, if there's any quality issues with these brand new Spooky games, the early adopters are going to have to eat the issues. But if you wait, they will iron out those issues later on and having it build a little bit later on down the line makes more sense. But the real reason to wait on these Spooky games, you know the answer. I wouldn't order one from Spooky directly. I wouldn't order one from a distributor yet because here's what's going to happen. If you order from Spooky directly, your money's non-refundable and you're stuck and you're locked into it. And here's what's going to happen is distributors are going to get their games in front of you. And those distributors are going to have those games sitting in boxes unsold. And so you could get your game faster if you just wait. But here's the other thing we all know. If you just wait on both Looney Tunes and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you know people are going to buy these games early. you know people are going to play them for a few months and then they're going to want to sell them and when they sell them they will most likely be selling for about a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars less than a new in box game and we saw that with scooby-doo we've seen it with halloween we saw it with ultraman and some of those titles lost a lot more than 1500 and in a world in which pinball is so expensive right now i just don't see themes like texas chainsaw massacre or looney tunes holding much value for very long. We were so used to over the last five years in this hobby, this FOMO, right? This window of fear of missing out was much longer than it is now. Nowadays, if a game comes out and in the first month or two, people are not clamoring to get it, it's really going to be a slow burn. And I don't think these manufacturers are used to that. I don't think Jersey Jack cares because they've got all the money in the world. I think American Pinball is in big trouble. I think companies like Haggis are in big trouble because they've only got one product. And if you only got one product and there's not a lot of demand, how do you forecast, right? Think about if you're Haggis right now. How do you forecast your year? You haven't sold enough Centaurs to keep the line going all year, but you got to order parts. And the more bulk order you put in, the cheaper the parts are. So you want to feel good at night knowing, well, look, we've sold 300 Centaurs with non-refundable deposits and we're good to go for the year because that's how many games we can make in a year. I don't think they're anywhere near that. Do you even think they sold more than 100 Centaurs? Do you really feel like they have? You know, if they have, I would love for them to show us that. But they're another company, right, that refuses to do the Canada Pizza Challenge, open up the door, show us what it's like two weeks from now in the Haggis factory. Do you think there's more than five people there slowly screwing these games together? It's just going to get really tough. And now that Pulp Fictions are apparently on the line, we're going to start to see them very, very soon. But that's another company. I would love CGC to take the Canada Pizza Party Challenge. I would love to see what's happening over there. Another company that's always keeping us in the dark. And the company that's not going to keep us in the dark is Stern Pinball. You know, it's going to be interesting. It's going to be interesting to see if they make 1,000 Jaws LEs at 13,000 a pop. Do you think there's going to be room to flip this game for money? I'm telling you right now, I think there is. I think Jaws LE is going to sell out instantly and I think we're going to see people waving about two to three thousand dollars over MSRP. I mean this I mean look at where Godzilla is right now You really can get a Godzilla LE for less than like fifteen thousand dollars And I think Jaws is a more popular theme for people in America I think Jaws is going to elevate I think Jaws is going to be a more interesting game than Godzilla. I think Jaws has more appeal to the pinball collector base than Godzilla does. And look, it doesn't take away from how good Godzilla is, but all I'm saying is this. I think we're going to get a game as good as Godzilla with a theme people want even more. The big Achilles heel is that Brody might not be in the game. The main character of Jaws, right? The main actor in the movie might not be in the game. That's like Godzilla without Godzilla. That was Alien without Ripley. So we shall see. All of these questions are going to be answered really soon. And I can't wait to see what the next week and a half holds for us in all of pinball. Will we see some pinball companies close their doors in 2024? I think absolutely. I think companies like American Pinball, Turner Pinball, Pinball Adventures, I think companies like Haggis Pinball, I think they all have to be worried, especially when we see companies like Spooky Pinball might be downsizing a little bit because the demand is not where it was a few years ago. And a lot of these companies are just not understanding something. if you want to make a game, if you want to succeed in pinball, it still comes down to one thing at the beginning. You need a theme people want, right? You need a theme people want. And I think when you look at all of these themes, it's still just Stern Pinball making the themes that people really, really want. You know, I put themes like Labyrinth and themes like Texas Chainsaw and Looney Tunes. these are B themes at best. They're like B minus themes. If you think about those themes long enough, you can talk yourself out of it. But there's no talking yourself out of themes like Back to the Future. There's no talking yourselves out of themes like The Matrix or Harry Potter. And that's what people really want. And we know those themes are on the horizon. And just knowing that, right, just knowing that and you're looking down at your collection and you already have themes like Metallica or Stranger Things or Ghostbusters, you're in a position now where like it's easy to wait until something else comes out that you truly desire and want. The days of just being able to wake up and absorb every new pinball machine that comes out, leave that game to the newbies who are being foolish. And I see them on Pinside every day, like guys with less than 100 posts who are ordering every single new machine. Cool. Let those guys do that because what's going to happen to those guys is they're going to take the biggest hit ever on these machines and then when they want to go get the new stuff because they're addicted to buying everything new in box guess what that's when you can swoop in and buy their game for much less let them lose two to three thousand dollars per machine don't let that be you i tend to think that most people who listen to canada spinball podcasts have been in this hobby for a while I've been doing this show for eight years. And I think my show is geared towards collectors who have been in this hobby for a while. And I think we're all on the same page. I really do. I think most of us get it. And that is why 2024 is really exciting. Because if these games are as good as I think they're going to be, they're also going to cause the price on these last two years of games, they're going to go down even more. You're going to be able to get a Toy Story 4 for like $6,500, like an Ellie real soon. Godfather LE, another game, $7,000 is the next price point for that game. You're going to start to see Elton John's drop like a lead balloon real quick. I mean, Elton John Platinums will be going for $9,500 by April, people. By April, you know this. It's going to happen. And so I can't wait to see where it all transpires. I can't wait to see if this mechanical shark is going to be awesome or if Stern's going to fill this game with flat plastic. but I'm going to be on this ride with each and every one of you. Everybody, have an amazing New Year's. All right, it's a new year. It's a chance for all of us to become better versions of ourselves. I'm going to do my best to make this podcast even better, and I look forward to calling out the next names of people who are going to raise the roof, but this is it, people. So let's all go and enjoy the New Year's, and who knows, an hour from now, we might have a teaser for Jaws. If I was a betting man, I think it's going to be next Friday, so we'll see what happens. I don't know. It feels like Stern might reveal this game next week because they normally reveal a week before CES. I'm so excited. Let's see what happens. If my predictions are right, everybody, Kaneda out. Go drink some champagne and let's just celebrate that we're all still here, we're all still alive, and most of us didn't buy Galactic Tank Force. Later. On the right