Oh, where do we go? Oh, where do we go now? Welcome to Canada's Pinball Podcast. Where do we go now? That is the theme of this episode. It is 5 o'clock in the morning and Canada never sleeps, but now that Pinball Expo is over, right? The show in Chicago. Everybody brought their product. We had all of these new games. We had what? Elton John, Labyrinth, Ripley Edition of Aliens. We had Elements. We had Ninja Eclipse. We had all these games coming to the show. And who didn't go to the show with their new game? Stern Pinball, the world's number one pinball maker in the world, will have sold more Elvira black and white editions without even attending the show. And I've always said this. Going to the shows is not really the best way to sell product. The lines are long. People are waiting forever to get on the games and then they get on the games and the sound isn't the best. They're cognizant that people are waiting. And it still baffles my mind that people go to these shows as the first moment to get sales. But look, now that the show is over, the real battle begins for all of these companies to get sales of these games. I did a poll about Elton John and I asked people out there, how many of you pre-ordered an Elton John? What was the point of revealing this game when it was not on the line? What was the point of bringing games to Expo and making this your Elton John moment? The point is simply this. This was a sales and marketing decision. If we reveal the game now and we bring the game to shows now, we will get orders. We need to get orders in. I'm going to read to you the results of the poll. And as my favorite fan always says, the numbers do not lie. So we're going to look at the actual numbers when I asked a very simple question. Did you pre-order Elton John and which edition did you pre-order? Because in the world of marketing, right, you get one chance to launch your product. And when you launch and reveal a game, that is usually the moment when there's the most excitement. There's the most hype. There's the most FOMO. And I've been in this industry now for 10 years. It's sad to say it, but it's true. I've been in the industry for 10 years. And speaking of 10, I want to give a shout out to our latest Raise the Roof Club member, Anthony Salerno. Raised his subscription amount from $5 to $10. Anthony, thank you so much. The rest of you sitting at $5, just remember who's up at 5 a.m. I'm going to hit the gym at 6 a.m. Just remember, I think you got an extra five bucks in you. but I'm not going to pressure you. I want you to do it because you just feel good about doing it. So I've been covering this hobby for 10 years and in 10 years I've seen a lot of game launches. I've seen a lot of reveals. I've seen a lot of hysteria to get the new product when it launches. I'll say this for the record right now. It's not as much fun now as it used to be. It was a lot more fun because A, the themes were a lot better. They were a lot better. I've seen stuff like Ghostbusters and Batman and Guns and Roses. is, you know, there were just certain games that were just like day one sellouts and you couldn't even get one. Even if you wanted one, you couldn't get one. And the prices were so much more affordable and the LEs were actual LEs. Nowadays, it's so much different. The prices are through the roof. Everyone's hesitating because everything is so expensive. Nothing is rare. Nothing is scarce. And now we're seeing like all these different limited edition machines being dropped on top of each other and it just ruins a lot of the fun we used to have when there was a new pinball machine dropped into the world and really what's happened is a few things there's a lot more people in the hobby now and there's a lot more companies and there's a lot more games I would argue it's kind of like quantity over quality in the world of pinball and so in the 10 years of watching games come out and watching reveals and watching people sort of wanting to celebrate that they ordered one I mean, that's something, right? When Pulp Fiction came out, in two days, they sold all of their LE editions of the game, and everyone who got in on an order felt good about the game. And I would argue that Pulp Fiction might be the last great theme at a great price that we're going to see in the history of pinball. Remember, that game was less than $10,000. They're making, what, 1,000 or 1,250 LEs of the game. They sold out instantly. I don't even want to go into when these games are going to be built because we all know it's going to be a year from now. It's not going to be this March. It's going to be next March. And CGC is lame and they had no answers at Expo for anybody. But what did we expect? This is what this company has done for the last four years. Why would we expect it to be any different right now? I'm ashamed of Doug. I'm ashamed of Ryan. I don't know how they can look in the mirror and not answer their customers. But complaining about it is not going to do anything. If you want to see people complain and act like grown babies, just go into Pinside and read the multi-morphic thread. It is the ultimate four-page, five-page exhausting example of what a dumpster fire Pinside has turned into, and that's not why you listen to Kaneda. So in all of my years of seeing people happy they got one and secured one, let's talk about Elton John. Let's talk about the fact that this game, it is beautiful. There's no denying the fact it is a beautiful game. It is very visually arresting. If you're an Elton John fan, you are happy with this game. There's no denying the fact, right? Because think about it. If you're an Elton John fan, first and foremost, you did not think you were going to get a pinball machine. And then the company that made it, made it perfect for the theme. This is Elton John, the bright colors, the glitz, the glamour, it's all in this machine. So if you are an Elton John fan, you are super happy. But here's the problem. There just aren't that many Elton John fans that want a pinball machine. And there's a lot of pinball fans that want a machine, but they don't want an Elton John machine. And we talk a lot about that, right? Is how popular is the artist? How popular is the movie? And is there actual crossover between this and pinball? And I would also argue that the other huge theme, like way bigger theme than Elton John is Pokemon. And I'm not so sure that the Pokemon audience is crossing over with the pinball buying demographic, especially at these prices. I mean, Pokemon fans, for the most part, are able to engage with that brand for so much cheaper. And I just have a hard time believing if you make a Pokemon game, it's going to sell like 5,000 units. Again, as popular as the brand is, does it cross over to the major pinball buying demographic? That's a topic for another show. Okay, so Jersey Jack wheels this game out, and they don't have that many to play, and that's the other thing. I heard from a lot of you who were at the show, you weren't actually able to jump on the game Like a lot of people just watched people playing the game Now look I heard from a lot of people that the game is fun the game shoots great it got a great light show it does everything well that Jersey Jack does well All the things that we don like about Jersey Jack are still in this game The call are horrendous, the slot machine sounds are horrendous. When you're listening to a song, you've got this iconic song playing and then this woman's voice interrupts with the worst call-outs maybe this year in all of pinball. You know, look, it's Jersey Jack, right? They never can quite get it all together. It's because they don't have their George Gomez. They will never have their George Gomez. I do question why they're not changing some of these things after getting all of this feedback. But keep in mind, this is a company that doesn't finish code on games ever. Even after everyone complains year after year after year, where's the finished code of Guns and Roses and Pirates of the Caribbean? They still refuse to just finish the code. So I really do question why they allow all that negativity to permeate through the company. So they reveal the game. It's got this star studded moment. They talk about the game. Jack's wearing Sequence Elton John costumes. People are saying how beautiful it is. And none of that matters unless it translates into sales. This is a sales and marketing moment. And so did all of what Jersey Jack did at Pinball Expo. Did their snazzy reveal video. did it translate into you seeing enough from a distance to order a game? And there were also a lot of people at the show, and I've been reading the thread, and I haven't been seeing a lot of people say, hey, I jumped on one, and I ordered one. Now, I've heard people say it's pretty. I've heard people say it shoots great. It's Jersey Jack's best shooting game to date. But I have not heard the words, I have ordered one. And now that Iceman is backing this game heavily, we know sales are going to be terrible. But let me read you the poll results. And this is just a smaller sample size, but I asked this twice on my Facebook page. And I got 271 people responded to the question, did you order an Elton John? 96% of people in that sample size said they did not order the game. 2% said they ordered an LE and 2% said they ordered a collector's edition. When I dug into the numbers deeper, it basically was like four people ordered an LE and three people ordered a collector's edition. So seven people out of 271 people. Now, look, there are thousands of people out there in the pinball world and they need to sell a thousand collector's editions and they're making, I don't know. They didn't say, I think, 5,000 platinum editions of the game, but we all know they'll make as many platinum editions until they run out of orders. But for the most part, if you look at it through this lens of this was the moment, this was their reveal moment, this was the moment. Remember when Guns N' Roses was revealed like this? Guns N' Roses sold out instantly. Instantly. Toy Story 4 came out and they raised the prices, but it still had a much better day one sales than this. We saw better day one sales on Godfather, especially that Godfather CE edition. And so I'm here to tell you right now, if I'm just looking at these numbers and I'm looking at the response from the community, as beautiful as Elton John is, how do you not declare that this is Jersey Jack Pinball's worst launch ever, maybe next to dialed in? This game did not launch with a boom or a bang. Like, where are the orders on this game? Where is the excitement? And here's the thing is we all know why. There's only one reason why this game has such horrible sales. People don't see the value. They are worried if they order the game today, they are going to lose a lot of money. And can you blame them? If they simply look at the last two launches from Jersey Jack Pinball, going in on day one right now is just a recipe for financial disaster. The moment you unbox the game, you are going to lose thousands of dollars, not hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars. And now that we see the demand for this game is so weak and people don't really want it and there's zero FOMO. I mean, this is the greatest example in the 10 years I've been in this industry where there is just zero FOMO on the game. And I feel bad because Jersey Jack's mistake is their inability to make changes to how they market their product. Their inability to adjust how they release this product to the world. Think about it. How lazy is it that you're not going to adjust the amount of collector's editions of the game? You saw what happened with your last two releases. you know the Elton John theme is not lighting the pinball community on fire and instead of doing any market research you put your head in the sand and you just said we're just going to do the same exact thing and as Einstein said that is how you get to insanity because it is insane ostensibly what they've done with this launch and why it's gone so wrong for them is the prices are too high they had two ways to go with this game to make it more of a successful launch because they needed to create some FOMO and some hype. What they could have done was they could have lowered the amount they were going to make. They could have said, look, we want to protect our brand and its premium nature, so we're not going to touch the price. If we touch the price, we're going to upset everybody who bought Toy Story and Godfather. And if we lower the price now, we'll never be able to go back up again because people will just crucify us. So they could have said, look, let's keep the price the same, but let's play with the volume. Let's cut the number of CEs back down to earth like we did with Guns N' Roses. Let's only make 500. Let's add some scarcity there. Let's put the nicest art package on the CE, the Christopher Franchi art package, and let's not get cute and try to put the nicer art package on the Ellie just to force Ellie sales because Ellie sales of Godfather and Toy Story are abysmal. But they needed to do something like that. And they also should have said like, hey, maybe we're only going to make 1,500 platinum editions of the game. And moving forward on themes that aren't lighting the pinball world on fire, if we control the volume, we can give perception of value. Just think about it like this. Look at what happened to Pirates of the Caribbean. The reason why it's selling for so much money is there are only 1,000 of them in the world. And I think if they said there's only going to be 2,000 Elton John machines and they are this price, they would have sold much better than they did. They had to try something and they didn't try anything. They didn't do anything different. They kept the price the same. They kept the volume the same. And people's feedback is damning. It's damning. So let me ask everybody there, what do they do now? What's Jersey Jack's next move? How are you going to get people excited about this game When is this game going to be on the line And we all know that Jersey Jack machines they don go on location very often How is an operator going to spend on this machine when they can buy a Stern Pro for Like, I haven't even seen a Godfather on location anywhere. So where do they go now? Like, how do they reignite people's excitement in this game? I'm sorry, but some 20-minute video made by a distributor is not going to be enough to get people excited about this game. There's no behind-the-scenes featurette. And that was also a telltale sign. Like, where was the straight down the middle video that gets people excited to order the game? Where was it? Where was it? Usually that follows like a day or two after the reveal of the game. We saw it with Godfather. We saw it with Toy Story. Those are great videos. They were nowhere to be found. Look what that video did for Pulp Fiction. I mean, that is the single reason Pulp Fiction sold so many games was because of that video. And yet seemingly nothing on Elton. And so I'm worried about Jersey Jack Pinball because I don't know how they recover from this. And it's worse than people think. I mean, people are not blinded by the lights. They're not ordering the game. You know, it's the same thing with Galactic Tank Force. That game is still dead on arrival. It doesn't matter how many people they bring to the show or the cast of characters is having lunch with you. It doesn't matter. And I hear the same thing when people play GTF. They walk up to it. They say it looks pretty. It's fun to shoot. and then you ask, did you order one? And they say no. And really the number one reason why people are not ordering these games, it's not even the price, it's the theme. When you walk up to a game and you know, I'm never going to own this theme, you play it with much more of an open mind. You know what I'm saying? Like you hook up with the machine. It's like hooking up with someone that you know you don't have to date. You're a little bit more open-minded. You're like, I know I don't have to take you home. I know I don't have to invest any more time in you. It's like a one night stand with a machine when you're kind of drunk. Like you don't really care. You're like, all right, I'll give this game a whirl. And you're like, oh yeah, it was fun because I know I'm not going to have to write a check for 11 grand or 12 grand or $15,000. And that's why people's responses are always like somewhat positive when they're already never going to be a customer. And if this was matrix at 15 grand and 12 grand, it's an instant sellout. They would have sold 4,000 units instantly, instantly 4,000 units. and they probably struggle to sell 400 units of Elton John globally. And that's that. I think this company is in real trouble. I don't think they have a plan B. We know they don't have another game ready to go. And now I'm just like, all right, if this is the New Jersey Jack and you're going to show games without them being ready, you might as well just show us Mark Sadan's game and just rip the Band-Aid off what's in development because you better show something soon that people want. And I think Elton John is going to be a sales disaster for them. I think people are just going to wait and buy them when they become used. And here's my prediction is that the Abbott's family is going to get fed up and be like, fine, forget it. We're not making that many. And then Elton John will become in demand. It'll just be like pirates all over again. They're not going to get a lot of orders. And then I think they're just going to say, all right, we didn't make many. And then they're going to be in demand. But Jersey Jack won't see a penny of that money because it'll all be secondhand money. it's the only way there will ever be any hyper frenzy to get one is if the supply of this game is cut short and that's a marketing failure it's a marketing failure when that's the only lever you can pull to create a demand for a game you got the theme wrong you got the price wrong like when stern shows jaws like it's going to sell out instantly like it's going to sell out instantly jaws is a theme that a lot of people love and it's being made by a designer that everybody loves like it's going to be a great moment and i think jaws is going to have a lot of toys in it you know i I didn't even talk about the fact that there really are no interactive toys in Elton John. It is all lights on top of lights on top of lights. And I was just thinking about this too today. What does Steve Ritchie do when he goes in today? Like, what does he do? He walks into Jersey Jack's office on a Monday and he said, hey guys, how are sales? And they know that it is a far cry from what the vibe was the Monday after Guns N' Roses launched. And they have to be looking around the table. And if I'm Leonard Abbas and Brett Abbas and the people over at Jersey Jack, you know, when Steve says, how'd it go? Ken Cromwell's like, how'd it go? What kind of sales are we getting? How did it go? There's not going to be any spinning this. And then what does Steve do? Now, what does he do? Is he given another theme to work on? Are they going to talk about maybe this is it? I don't know. I really don't know what the future holds for Jersey Jack pinball, but it definitely feels like three strikes in a row. And I just want to say something for the record. Someone said on my Facebook page, you're beating a dead horse. Stop talking about it. Like, this is what I do. This is a pinball podcast. This game just got revealed last Thursday. So don't tell me to stop talking about Elton John. I wait all year for moments like this when games are new. If you ordered one and you're upset by this conversation and now you realize you just lost a few thousand dollars and you should have listened to Kaneda, I'm not making anybody sign up for this show or join me on Facebook. but I'm not going to stop talking about this. This is what I love to talk about. The marketing decisions these pinball companies make, how these games are received by the community, the conversation around these games. That's what I love capturing. All right, so let me put a final bow on this whole Jersey Jack, where do they go? Because I'll tell you where I would go if I were them. Let me give them some advice, all right? Listen up, Ken. Listen up, Brett. Listen up, Leonard. You've only got one direction to go in now. All right, you got one direction to go in now. You've outpriced the perceived value of your own games. The reason why people are not buying these games is because Jack Guarnieri has selected themes people don't really want. Theme is everything. It's everything in pinball. You took a company in a direction where you picked themes people didn't want. You removed stuff from your games and you raised the price and you raised the volume. It is a recipe for disaster. So here's where you need to go. You need to do two things instantly. instantly, instantly. Like walk into the room today, Ken, and be like, look, I have an idea. Canada's going to give you this idea. You need to do this instantly. We need to win people back. We need to win people back and start to do moves that are unexpected for the better. We need to say, hey, I didn't think Jersey Jack was going to do that, and they did it. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to finish the code on Guns N' Roses. We are going to announce to people that we are going to finalize the Guns N' Roses code in the next six months, and we are listening to all the feedback, and we would like to hear your feedback if there's anything you think we need to address in this game before we get to the final code in the game. Announce that. If you need to hire some people to do that, hire some people to do that. But whatever you do, you need to stop telegraphing to people that you're a company that's not gonna complete its products. That's what people are feeling. There are a good number of people, more people will have bought Guns N' Roses than Toy Story and Godfather and Elton John combined More people own your Guns N Roses product And for each of those people who owns one you made their experience somewhat incomplete because you won't complete the code and there's no excuse for it. And our competitors, Stern, not only do they keep working on their code, but they don't stop until it's damn near perfect. I mean, talk to James Bond owners now. Look at the improvement they've been doing. And it doesn't matter. And you got to let go of the arrogance jersey, Jack, that like when we launch a game, it's code complete because it's not. Nothing is ever code complete. There's always room for improvement, Jersey Jack, and you need to understand that. The other thing you need to do, and you need to just do it now and figure out how to make it work, you need to make more Pirates of the Caribbean games. You don't have to make a ton of them, but I would announce another run of Pirates of the Caribbean. And you could be honest. We're only going to do a limited final run of the game, but we've been hearing from you people that you want more Pirates. I mean, heck, Stern is making 15 versions of Elvira. People will not mind. And then you need to say, look, we've been going about this whole thing all wrong. We're trying to compete with Stern. It's not the way to go. I think moving forward, Jersey Jack needs to set a limit on the total number of games it will make for all of its future releases. And it should not be 3, 4, 5,000, all right? I think you're looking at something like 2,500 total games moving forward. We want all of these games to always be sought after collectibles. You are making these machines for the home collector jersey, Jack. Nobody's putting these machines on location for this much money. They're just not going to do it. So stop trying to accomplish that. And then what happens? You build in scarcity. You build in a community. And then there would be a wait list to get each of your future games if you get the freaking themes right. Because you know what will happen if you actually have Harry Potter or only making $2,500? Cool, that's what you want. You want those things to instantly sell out, instantly give extra value to your customers, and then you move on to the next great theme. But you need a great theme after great theme. There's no point in making pinball machines that people don't really want. But again, it's not my company. This company feels like it's just like a byproduct of a multi-billionaire. There's nothing at stake for this company. The Abbott's family will never even see this on their bottom line. They won't even notice this. I mean, think about just the interest alone you make on $1 billion and they've got multiple billions of dollars. So what's this little line item? Like, is this our catering bill? No, that's our Jersey Jack pinball costs. Look, and I think it's almost at the point now where if they don't start doing some of these things and their marketing department needs to wake up and they're not going to wake up, you know what they're going to do? They're just going to keep pushing out the same Elton John content over and over and over again. We're going to get spammed by distributors nonstop because they're stuck with Elton John inventory. And we've seen this with Godfather. It's like they just keep pushing. Push marketing is not what you want. You want pull marketing. When marketing is done right, it pulls people in. When marketing fails, it's just pushing stuff out there and nobody's on the receiving end. We don't want it. Like I'm not buying Elton John for $12,000 or $15,000. I'm sorry, all of my distro friends. It's not happening. So you can put as many for sale ads as you want in the world. The only way you're going to sell this game is if you discount it to people. Nobody's paying this much money for this game. All right, everybody, I'm going to wrap this show up. I just want to say a congratulations again to the folks over at Barrels of Fun. I said the name on Labyrinth winning in my book, the best showing at Pinball Expo. And I heard from a lot of people, you played it and you ordered it. It's a much different vibe over there. I bet the mood over at Barrels of Fun today is a lot better than the mood over at Jersey Jack Pinball. And again, it's like, this is what it comes down to. Like everything is different in pinball. All these companies are different. The products are so radically different. What kills me is like looking at this hobby and why is it so hard for so many people why is it so hard stern gives you the playbook on how to do it and i just think everyone needs to learn a lesson here launching all these games on top of themselves is a mistake it should not be the way these games are revealed and i think jersey jack is going to sorely regret sorely regret going out so early with elton john i think they're afraid of Keith Elwin's jaws and i think they're going to really regret this because now there's not going to be another moment to make a first impression and they never were on stage by themselves. Why did they do this? Even if they just waited to this week, it would have been a much different reception. And again, what do I know? I just do marketing for some of the biggest brands in the world and we would never do this. And I think the ultimate lesson is this. All of these major companies, they should act like Apple. They should have their own show in which they invite consumers and media to attend and do the big reveal of the product. Why would you want to share the stage? Stern should do its own show. Jersey Jack should do its own show. Spooky Pinball could do its own show. And we know the pinball buying demographic. You know, these guys will travel for anything. Neil McCrae's at everything. He's at multiple places at once. Like it doesn't matter. They've got money. People would travel to your once a year show, like just have a once a year showcase in which you're going to reveal to the world what your plans are for pinball. I think it would work much harder for these companies and do it at your company, right? Because if you're doing the reveal at your factory, we know people love factory tours. And if you're revealing the new game at the factory, then you don't have to hide the fact that that's the next game because that day you're revealing it. And then here's the crazy part. You could have a special offer for the people that travel to buy the game and everyone who traveled there would order one. I mean, come on, that's so much better than launching it with this panel discussion at like eight o'clock at night with a room full of people that are hungover like really that's the best way to do it everybody thank you for being a member of canada's pinball podcast we have the most subscribers we've ever had and it's just gonna keep getting better i'll be back this week with more shows never a dull moment in the world of pinball and we're getting closer to jaws can you hear it like no no no no elwynn's coming people Elwynn is at the gates, and all these companies better make as many games as they can before the next Keith Elwin machine. Talk to you soon.美