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Commercial Prototype Cabinet from Zen

BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·52m 37s·analyzed·Jun 1, 2019
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.033

TL;DR

Zen's commercial prototype cabinet promises E-league integration; mobile app monetization criticized as predatory.

Summary

Chris and Jared discuss Zen Studios' commercial prototype cabinet featuring networked cloud-connected pinball tables with AI-driven table rotation and upcoming E-league integration, testing at select US locations with full rollout planned for fall 2025. They also critique the Pinball FX mobile app's aggressive monetization changes in Volume 4, which dramatically increased the coin cost to upgrade tables (from 1,200 coins earned to 3,900+ coins needed), making full table progression essentially impossible for free-to-play users.

Key Claims

  • Zen's commercial prototype cabinet is network-connected and cloud-based, allowing Zen to change available tables and features remotely without physical intervention

    high confidence · Mel (Zen Studios) confirmed to Chris that the machine is 'network connected basically to the cloud' and 'Zen can change anything they want like that at a moment's notice'

  • The cabinet will use internal AI to automatically rotate tables based on play frequency, bumping underperforming tables without manual analysis

    high confidence · Mel confirmed 'internal AI' functionality and automatic rotation: 'if you've got five machines that are five tables to select from and one of those tables just isn't getting any plays, it gets bumped. Another one gets loaded'

  • The prototype cabinet features a three-legged design (one front center leg, two rear) rather than traditional four legs, which will prevent natural nudging movement

    high confidence · Chris observed 'there's actually three legs, not four. So there's a front leg, which is actually the middle leg' and noted this eliminates the metal leg flexibility that enables pinball nudging

  • Pinball FX Volume 4 Android monetization requires approximately 3,900 coins to fully upgrade three tables, but average free-to-play earnings since day one are less than 1,200 coins

    high confidence · Chris calculated: 'you're going to need something in the vicinity of like 3,900 coins' while noting 'this entire time I've been playing, since day one of release, I think I've earned less than 1,200 coins'

  • Volume 4 introduced a parts accelerator system costing 50 coins per 5 parts, replacing the previous direct table purchase option available in Volumes 1-3

    high confidence · Chris noted 'Volume 4, for one, never gave the offer of buying the tables outright' and instead 'it was a limited time offer to buy X amount of parts' with 'parts accelerator, which costs coins'

  • The commercial prototype cabinet will have E-league integration and networked leaderboards visible on phones and potentially Steam

    medium confidence · Chris reports Mel 'did kind of address that yes, it will be able to integrate a bit with your phone' and mentions 'leaderboards from that might appear on your phone and might be Steam'

Notable Quotes

  • “The whole thing is network connected basically to the cloud. So Zen can change anything they want like that at a moment's notice. And it'll just download into the machine and away you go.”

    Chris Frebus (relaying Mel's comment) @ ~20:45 — Core feature of the prototype cabinet's flexibility and future-proofing

  • “it's going to have that internal AI. So if you've got five machines that are five tables to select from and one of those tables just isn't getting any plays, it gets bumped. Another one gets loaded.”

    Chris Frebus (relaying Mel's comment) @ ~21:15 — AI-driven table rotation without human intervention, enabling data-driven design decisions

  • “Well, that's now not the case because while you can still buy the unlocks for Volumes 1 through 3 at 250 coins, Volume 4, for one, never gave the offer of buying the tables outright.”

    Chris Frebus @ ~50:30 — Key evidence of monetization goalpost-shifting in mobile app

  • “you're going to need something in the vicinity of like 3,900 coins, which is ridiculous in the fact that this entire time I've been playing, since day one of release, I think I've earned less than 1,200 coins.”

    Chris Frebus @ ~52:00 — Quantifies the impossible progression gap created by Volume 4 monetization

  • “It's not just a matter of, hey, we were all playing football, and they moved the goalposts. No, not telling you, oh, we're not playing football anymore. No, we're playing hockey.”

    Chris Frebus @ ~53:15 — Metaphor for the sudden and unexplained shift in game mechanics and economics

  • “having three legs is going to affect nudging because the reason why you can nudge in a pinball machine is because it has the thin metal legs, which allow you a little bit of movement. So having these big sort of pillars, essentially, that the machines sort of attach to, will be zero flexibility and zero movement.”

    Chris Frebus @ ~31:45 — Technical analysis of prototype cabinet design trade-offs affecting core gameplay

  • “Mel said that he'll make sure that he lets me know where the nearest Dave & Buster's is this is going to have one for me so that I can actually get some hands on it and see how it plays.”

Entities

Zen StudioscompanyChris FrebuspersonJared MorganpersonMelpersonPinball FXproductZen Commercial Prototype CabinetproductDave & Buster'sorganizationE3eventWhitewatergame

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Pinball FX mobile app monetization model perceived as predatory; progression gate requiring 3,900+ coins when average player earns <1,200 coins lifetime makes full table upgrade mathematically impossible without spending

    high · Chris's detailed coin accounting: 1,200 coins earned vs. 3,900+ required; parts accelerator costing 50 coins per 5 parts creates insurmountable wall

  • ?

    business_signal: Pinball FX Volume 4 represents significant monetization policy shift from purchasable tables (Volumes 1-3) to time-gated, coin-accelerated progression system with no buyout option

    high · Chris confirms: 'Volume 4, for one, never gave the offer of buying the tables outright' vs. previous 250-coin purchase option

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Negative community reception to Pinball FX Volume 4 monetization; players report connection issues, purchase removals, and progression blocking on Android platform

    medium · Chris reports complaints from Android players; Wayne (community member) documented connection and purchase issues

  • ?

    competitive_signal: Zen repositioning against traditional pinball manufacturers by offering E-sports tournament infrastructure and venue-controlled content libraries rather than competing on individual machine sales

    high · E-league emphasis; networked tournament capabilities; AI-driven table rotation allowing venues to customize offerings without equipment swap

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Zen prioritizing venue operator attractiveness and floor presence (large cabinet, wrapped marquee, bright visuals) over traditional pinball player ergonomics (nudging proximity, leg flexibility)

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.158

0:00
Well, that music, folks, means it's time for the Blockade Pinball Podcast, and I am your host, Chris Frebus, aka Shut Your Trap. Joining me, as always, halfway across the world, Jared Morgan. Hello there. How are you today? Well, you know, it's one of those days, so it's all good. It is. Yeah, it is one of those days.
0:30
We're a bit late in broadcasting today, aren't we? Because we had some late-breaking voice meter routing audio issues to resolve from last week. Yes, we're trying, folks.
0:42
Not necessarily successfully, but we're trying. I laughed at the reason why we had that double audio playing back last week. Yeah, I didn't know what Jared was talking about, and it's something that I'm used to hearing all the time, because I'll have the broadcast podcast open so that I can do chat. And whenever I hear do double, I'm just like, oh, okay, yeah, whatever. And I go and I turn mute the audio. And I was completely forgetting about the fact that my audio now transmits to everybody.
1:14
So essentially we were getting the delayed broadcast of YouTube live playback in our actual live session. So yeah, that explains that. So look, we worked that out. So that's good. some things have been figured out but that's about it yeah i've got other things on the way as well which will be even cooler will be cooler yeah we want to uh i guess you know we need to step into the more modern era and care for the youtube stream a little bit more yeah so we're going to enrich it with things. Enrich it with things. Yeah. That'll, that'll, I don't know. Eventually we might, I mean, I don't know if we get really nuts and crazy, might break the YouTube video up into little chunks also for the people that just want the little 10 minute sessions. Yeah.

  • The cabinet prototype is currently undergoing beta testing at select US locations with a planned major rollout for September-October (fall 2025)

    high confidence · Mel told Chris 'certain locations' are testing but he's 'not allowed to say where' and 'by fall, so call it September, October, round there that's when it's supposed to get the big rollout'

  • Zen Studios will create animated back glasses for the commercial cabinet, benefiting future cabinet mode development

    medium confidence · Chris notes 'this means they have to make back glasses' which will be animated, and observes Hurricane already has 'fully animated back glass'

    • Chris Frebus @ ~38:30 — Confirms beta testing locations and Chris's planned firsthand evaluation

    Hurricane
    game
    Pinball Arcadeproduct
    Garyperson
    Wayneperson

    high · Chris notes cabinet size 'essentially one and a half pinball machines' and wrapped marquee will 'affect their stance' and prevent children from playing

  • ?

    event_signal: Zen Studios attending E3 with commercial prototype cabinet on display; studio operating at peak capacity; planning major commercial rollout fall 2025

    high · Mel told Chris Zen is 'the busiest that they've ever been as a studio' at E3; cabinet display confirmed; E3 giveaways (Zen slippers) mentioned

  • $

    market_signal: Zen Studios repositioning from pure digital pinball emulation toward hybrid commercial arcade hardware strategy targeting Dave & Buster's and venue operators

    high · Prototype cabinet explicitly designed for commercial venue integration; E-league and networked tournament features; venue-specific data collection

  • ?

    announcement: Zen Studios commercial prototype cabinet with cloud networking, AI table rotation, and E-league integration revealed; currently beta-testing at select US locations with fall 2025 full rollout planned

    high · Mel provided detailed specifications to Chris; cabinet is physically in testing; E3 display confirmed

  • ?

    product_concern: Prototype cabinet's three-legged design eliminates traditional metal leg flexibility, preventing natural nudging mechanics that are core to pinball gameplay

    high · Chris's technical analysis: 'big sort of pillars...will be zero flexibility and zero movement'; notes problem would require 'floating leg leveler mechanism' to solve

  • ?

    technology_signal: Industry shift toward networked, cloud-connected arcade hardware with real-time content updates and AI-driven content curation rather than static cabinet configurations

    high · Zen prototype demonstrates remote table loading, automatic rotation, and data-driven design feedback loops

    • 2:13
    Who knows? I really doubt that. a pinball podcast will ever go viral. No, probably not. If it does, we will be ready for it. That's right.
    2:27
    I see it working well for the interviews. When we have Mel on the show for just the interview component, that would work well potentially.
    2:36
    Potentially. We've got to schedule a time so that you can be there too. Yeah, it's tough. 2 a.m. in the morning is no bueno for me. No bueno, not so much. And timing it with when Mel is available. I mean, it's one of those things where it's going to have to be either we record on my stateside Friday so that it's a Saturday morning for Jared or we're going to have to do another Saturday recording like we normally do and just have Mel come in on this day off.
    3:09
    Oh well, he may like it. He may because we're good. We're good friends. We'll see. So I have a feeling We haven't discussed what we're going to do on the show today, which is... We haven't. Here's the rundown for you, Jared. I have a feeling I know what it is.
    3:26
    No, I don't think you know what it is. Oh, okay. Because we didn't get to last week, was talking about the pinball cabinet. Oh, that's right. We left that hanging, didn't we? We did leave that hanging. So we need to talk about that. I know what you think I'm going to talk about, which is the mobile app. And we're going to touch upon it, folks. But here's the thing. I still don't have volume four on my phone. It got delayed for iOS. Uh, somebody said, you know, past certification. I'm not sure what the, what the deal was anyway.
    4:00
    Yeah. It's only been on Android. And so I've not experienced firsthand the absolute collector that everybody on Android has experienced.
    4:12
    And as we all know, how I've been dealing with the game and monitoring the game and tracking the info is different than what probably the majority of people are experiencing. So one of the things I really will go over what potentially is the problems, but I can't really go rage and on it. Because you've not literally touched it yet. Exactly.
    4:38
    Maybe they're using Android as the alpha test for the new thing and then quickly back it out. Or maybe not. We can only. Or not.
    4:49
    But I just, today is my 17th wedding anniversary with the wife. So just. Oh, wow. She's lit you up to do a podcast in the morning? She's very good.
    5:02
    Dude, at this point, and you probably know this too, the wives are just like, can you just get away from me? Yeah, true. Look, it's my 11th anniversary this week as well. And it was on Thursday. And, like, Kim was just saying, so are we doing anything on Thursday? And I said, well, no, look, I haven't really had anything planned because I think it's better if we actually go and do something today, like take the kids out for lunch and, you know. And she goes, well, in that case, can I go and do trivia tonight? I said, of course you can. Off you go. You know, it's like it's just like it's still a good thing to celebrate. And I did make a neat little present. I got all the anniversary colors, which are turquoise and yellow. and I basically got a whole lot of flowering plants and in those colours as best as I could because it's a tough time of year by plants and being sort of autumn into winter. But I still managed to get some yellow plants and put them into like a steel coloured pot, which is another colour for Limp's anniversary. And yeah, I did that instead. So that was kind of neat. Ta-da. She liked it. But it was one of those things you had to do on the day. because hiding a plant is a bit hard.
    6:16
    No, it's like for us, it's always this time of year. We just had my niece graduated. My son just finished school.
    6:25
    The anniversary. What else is going on? I don't know. It's always just kind of like this busy part of the month. Elimination of things and the anniversary always just kind of winds up being oh, yeah, that. Oh, yeah. December is like that for us because all the Walker side of the family, so my wife's side of the family, they've all got their birthdays in December, including my wife. So it's just – and also, like, our kids, like, Sienna's birthday is in December. So it's, like, just ridiculous.
    6:58
    Often what happens is, you know, we actually have a merged birthday for Sienna and Kim because it's just not much fun doing it, like, separately. I'm also one of these people that is completely unromantic I am too the amount of effort it took me to work out what to do with the plants it took a lot of mental effort for me to do that which is terrible I know but yeah I used to take pride in doing the gas station valentine day card yes and the gas station bouquet yeah what else is going on let's see okay so for those of you that are at all curious yes I did manage to watch all of Game of Thrones in the one week that I had HBO for free and I should say not all I own all seven seasons I didn't own the eighth season. I watched the AC... I honestly have no problem with it. I think it's a fine ending and I think that people are so wanting this amazing transformative experience that I don't know where they possibly think that's coming from because I don't think there's been a single series ender that's ever done that.
    8:26
    But yeah, it was kind of fun. I was so thankful to finally be able to avoid or not have to worry about spoilers for that and spoilers for Endgame.
    8:36
    Because that was really difficult. That was really tough. I have not seen Endgame yet, but again, I think I don't really follow things on Twitter that would spoil that. And most of the people I follow on Twitter are actually pretty respectful of the no spoilers thing anyhow.
    8:51
    It's not even that. It's as soon as that movie came out, they came out with a new trailer for Spider-Man Far From Home. that is full of spoilers to what happened in it. They couldn't properly advertise that movie and tell you what was going to happen in it because so much of it is dependent upon what goes on in Endgame. Endgame? Oh, wow, okay.
    9:12
    That's why I said it becomes very difficult to avoid things because it just starts permeating in everything else that I look at. Just accident by pure accident. I think they expect that if you care enough about spoilers, you go and take care of that pretty quickly. I think it's what they're saying. And I think really that's probably a fair thing to say about a lot of movie spoilers. Like if you care enough to actually worry about spoilers, then you go and actually take care of that as a priority. Because you can't help what the Internet does. It is an organic piece of thing.
    9:45
    Yeah. So regarding the micro cab back there, all I'm doing. So I had the electronics, the board, if you will, mounted vertically on the back wall as well as the accelerometer. The thing was I was never getting good nudges. It just seemed to nudge in whatever direction it wanted to go. There was no rhyme or reason to it. And how many times I went into Windows and into the controller settings and tried setting the nudging, having it remap it, It never mapped it. It just looked like a compass that you were just doing massive tilt on. It was like any which direction it was going. I'm like, okay, that's weird. So I started wondering, well, maybe, just maybe, this accelerometer doesn't account for full three-dimensional space. Maybe it's only a 2D one. So I glued a piece of wood in there so that I can mount the whole thing flat. Yep. and I'm just waiting for the glue to dry so that I can probably... I think you'll find it's going to be a lot better because I think you're spot on with your diagnosis there. Because it was kind of a bummer. That was the one thing that was kind of a bummer with it not working properly was the nudging. And so then I wound up assigning one of my two flipper buttons to be nudge, which is fine for left and right, but I had no nudging forward, no nudging up. and on some of these machines, you need that nudge up.
    11:15
    You do indeed. I mean, take, for instance, Whitewater. If you miss Insanity Falls, and the ball comes rolling back down the little ramp, it's going to go right down the drain hole, right past the flipper, and you're in lane. But if you time a properly nudge up, it'll bounce the ball up to your flipper, and then you can hit the flipper again and have another go at it.
    11:39
    Yes. So side-to-side nudging ain't going to work for that. You need the up-nudge. So like I said, we'll find out. Now I've noticed something I did actually deliberately. I forced myself to go and find a little bit of time to play each of the tables that are part of the general availability release of Volume 3.
    11:57
    And I still notice that Whitewater's got that weird audio for the cymbal still in there. Apparently that's not the only weird audio. There have been quite a few people that have even been commenting that the audio is just not right on it. I certainly know that from a timing perspective, the cymbal noise can often get out of sync with the regular sound effects, like the regular background music. So it's like they've multitracked the audio and they're having trouble merging it back together. I don't know how they're managing the audio because it sounds like they're emulating it directly from the game, unlike Fastlight who actually recorded WAV files. Right. but what I have noticed though in whitewater is it's far less lossy than pimple arcade like it's when you're listening in three headphones you're going wow it doesn't sound like it's 96 kilobits a second like it actually sounds rich there's good there's good um um breadth to the audio and it actually sounds pretty clean so I think they've either done a lot of cleanup on it Or and this could be the problem but they done that much cleanup on it that like the symbol noise is one They actually had to add in or something I love to That would be a question I ask Mel next time about what challenges I had with Whitewater's audio because I think it's a... I reckon it would have been a bit of a challenge cleaning that one up because we know the ROM is terrible. Just natively, it's bad.
    13:27
    See, right now, I'd love to be able to just fire off an email and ask Mel these things, but they are at E3 right now.
    13:36
    Which starts next weekend. And apparently they said it's the busiest that they've ever been as a studio dealing with all this. So I have a feeling they're doing a pretty good booth. I don't know. I'm hoping for some interesting booth pictures. Yeah, some booth pictures and more juicy info. The giveaway that they're giving at the show are Zen slippers. Oh, nice. With the Zen logo on them. Oh, nice. If you want to see what they look like, they're over on Twitter, on their Zen account. I'll have to check that out.
    14:10
    I'll have to go check that out. So no doubt one of the things they're going to be bringing over to E3, I imagine, is that behemoth of a table, of a machine that they have. The official name of that that Mel said last time was something like the commercial prototype cabinet or something like that. I've mentioned the name discreetly in the show notes because it sounded very specific in what they were referring to it as. But yes, the big, shiny, marquee-surrounding video cabinet that Gary seemed to like. so it did seem like from what Mel was saying that some of the things that you were hoping for are going to be happening in this they're taking the smart approach it's not going to have all 91 tables that Zen has made right now available to you it's going to just be totally overwhelming how would you choose I don't know what any of these are and fine, you choose a couple and you're like, wait, which ones did I pick? I don't know. The one at the show, it had all 19 Star Wars tables. But that is more than what they're going to have physically on the machine. They're trying to figure out what the ideal number is. But the beautiful thing about it is it's not the machine. The whole thing is network connected and basically to a cloud. So Zen can change anything they want like that at a moment's notice. And it'll just download into the machine and away you go. Yep.
    15:56
    Pretty cool, right? That is very cool. And especially since he said also that there is basically, it's going to have that internal AI.
    16:05
    So if you've got five machines that are five tables to select from and one of those tables just isn't getting any plays. It gets bumped. Another one gets loaded. Yeah, bumps it up, puts in a new one without anybody at Zen having to analyze it. Manage it. Yeah. So it just, it looks for, it was going to be interesting to see what that ends up resulting in, like as far as how it swaps things out. Because I think that it was like three tables or something was suggested, I think, as the running. Yeah, yeah. which you know if you had three tables in one cabinet that's a very easy choice to make and you know decision decision um uh fatigue is the biggest problem um for for players like that so having a day enough three i think doesn't immediately sound like a good idea but when you think about it more it makes total sense well and if they're rotating every two weeks that's going to encourage people to keep on coming back and checking or even if they're not necessarily specifically coming back to play your zen but as they're walking by they go like oh hey there's new, okay, you know, let me check those. And then... Like, how good would it be if, as part of the attract mode, they had, hey, newly loaded this table and this table. Play them now. You just basically use the back glass for more than just background stuff. So when it's in the attract mode, you're basically having all this extra messaging on there that grabs your attention.
    17:33
    And then, of course, it's going to be what one machine on one location is proving to be popular with certain tables another location may like a completely different you know the people up there may like a completely different set of tables so what's going to be interesting like thinking further with this the data they're getting back from the um the machine's ai selective system might actually inform future tables that they're going to build because they know that based on the data people like to play this style of table this type of table. They can analyze what features on that table are there and then use that to guide their design decisions in the future. So the ability for them to extract more rather than just arcade play statistics is quite deep in this product, I think.
    18:25
    One of the side effects that I think is cool too is this means they have to make back glasses. They do, which will benefit cabinet mode. yep so for all those Zen originals that get put into the thing they're going to have to do back glasses conversely and I never really checked it out until Hurricane but obviously Hurricane has the fully animated back glass they're not skimping on that stuff either it's none of the static back glass and everything going on with what the ROM built it to everything we wanted in Pimble IK that we never got for cabinet audits and yeah so just imagine if they applied the same sort of logic to the Zen originals and actually put flashing lights in the back glass and animated it just as the Williams Pinball ones did it's going to be great. Think of Safecracker displayed with the back glass in view all the time and how much difference that would make to playing the game. It would be huge I do wonder and this is the size issue of that machine, and again, that machine is also the prototype. But how do you think nudging on that thing is going to be? Interesting. Because basically, for those who haven't seen it, the top call it, I don't know, three inches or the standard width of a regular machine. But then below it is where the video screen starts. And it starts out probably two inches. So it's going to be a little weird on the hands, I would think. I don't know. Depends on how you nudge, I guess. It will. And if I remember correctly, the marquee wraps around the front of the cabinet too, doesn't it? Yes, it does. So for those people who prefer to stand quite close to the pinball machine when they're playing, that's going to affect their stance.
    20:20
    And also for children who want to play it, that's potentially going to be a problem because they're not going to be able to get up close to the pinball machine. You might also find that kids will start climbing on it as well, which won't be good for the displays unless they've really ruggedized that part of the machine. Yeah, from what I'm guessing, that specific machine is going to be what gets plugged into your Dave & Buster's because Dave & Buster's requires bright, shiny, something that really attracts you over to it. If they are intent on putting machines into just regular commercial areas, I'm wondering if they're also going to be doing just the regular cabinet to wedge in between for slightly smaller footprints.
    21:08
    Yeah, because that size is essentially one and a half pinball machines. So from a floor space perspective, that's going to be a concern for regular operators. The other thing I noticed with the machine, there's actually three legs, not four. So there's a front leg, which is actually the middle leg. So it's like a single leg at the front.
    21:26
    So that's, again, going to affect nudging because the reason why you can nudge in a pinball machine is because it has the thin metal legs, which allow you a little bit of movement. So having these big sort of pillars, essentially, that the machines sort of attach to, will be in the zero flexibility and zero movement. So the way they need to work around that is to put some sort of floating leg leveler mechanism on the game that sort of sits in the legs, but allows the table to actually float and move. that would be the only way they could work around that. So that's another question I would be asking Mel as well. So how would the mechanics of tilting work on the big tables?
    22:10
    So apparently this stuff is out in the wild right now. They're testing it. In the United States, it's, Mel told me certain locations, but I'm not allowed to say where. It exists. It's out there. and so some of you might come across them they're just kind of they want a beta test and see how it handles real world because it's in Dave and Buster's it has locations right basically that's where you wind up it's in all manner of different types of venues basically where it plays best but by fall so call it September October round there that's when it's supposed to get the big rollout and so Mel said that he'll make sure that he lets me know where the nearest Dave and Buster's is this going to have one for me so that I can actually get some hands on it and see how it plays cool that would be very interesting so if you happen to know off the record where those locations are you should maybe go and accidentally go and check one out if there's one near you yeah unfortunately there isn't one near me bummer dude bummer but again if any of you see one make sure you take pictures and post it on twitter and share the location so we can go and you know hack it well at least try it out of some sort the other thing was that he did kind of address that yes it will be able to integrate a bit with your phone I think that stuff is all kind of tentative what they're planning on having it do but it certainly sounds like you know leaderboards from that might appear on your phone and might be steam or whatever because again this thing just hooks up to a network also they have the ability to have those machines talk to other machines so you can and you can have real-life scores popping up. Imagine how easy it would be to set up some sort of selfie-style league on these tables if they're networked and you know the locations. You could actually have up on the back glass during a track mode, you could say, hey, this machine's quite up a tournament. Get in now. Tables in the tournament are this and this.
    24:40
    That's the point. They're pushing the E-League thing. I think they want it I mean everything's kind of in place but all these other games are kind of exploding with E-League play and I imagine that they want a piece of that, they want to get you know well we all know that pinball is more fun when you're playing against someone else so it's very natural to assume that they want to capitalize on that style of gameplay and you know we've seen what happens where you're in game and you get your pop-ups about who's beating you, how close your friends are, that'll be a very short jump to saying, hey, location in this Dave and Buster's near you has got good players at it all. You're close to their high score and stuff like that.
    25:34
    I'm just hoping that it becomes a professional sport and I can try out for a team. Yeah, that's right. That is the thing with E-Leagues. It's the ability to... Everybody's playing under the exact same conditions. I mean, this is different than any of your pinball tournaments, where you have to physically go to it and everybody plays the exact same machine so the conditions are the same. But with any of these eSport games, hey, you download the program. Everybody's facing the same conditions. You can play it from anywhere. You can practice at home for as long as you need to practice.
    26:09
    You know, all that jazz. That's right. But yeah the great thing is you need to go to the location because that where you get that consistent cabinet experience which would be part of the terms of the tournament Like it a right Yeah Cause you have to otherwise if you playing at home you on a controller it's easy to tell, et cetera, you know, but in a physical cabinet, those conditions change. So it would definitely be a, you must visit a site. And then of course that's what they want. They want you to visit a site so you can support the site and, you know, buy some food there or whatever, meet your friends there, you know, all that sort of stuff that sort of is part and parcel of tournament play. In fact, I think in some ways that aspect of tournament play and going to a tournament is, in some respects, better than the actual gameplay itself, depending on the circle of your tournament friends that you hang out with and stuff like that. It's just good to catch up with them every fortnight, for example, and just say g'day and have some nice food, for example.
    27:05
    Okay. So let's touch upon the mobile. what I'm hearing is once again they've moved the goalposts if you will and devalue the currency so if you remember from volume 1 to volume 2 well actually those all both came out at the same time volume 1 and 2 both came out at the same time as mold but iOS came out a full month before Android started playing with a whole different value if you will accelerated for how much it cost to do upgrades and collect parts and stuff like that eventually iOS went and matched it so things got a little bit more difficult for iOS match that then Vault 3 comes out and once again things got changed this time midway through the whole season, where parts went from being able to earn 20, I think it was, wait, I think I had it at 36 parts a day that I could earn by playing all four challenges, and suddenly it got knocked down to like 24, 23, something like that.
    28:28
    Coins were not as abundant either. I mean, they dropped from me averaging 7 a day down to 3 a day. And it just really made it one of those things where it was just like, oh, my gosh, how is anybody ever going to be able to make collections? That being said, once I had maxed out my final table, instead of getting table parts, I was getting coins. So I was really able to amass.
    28:59
    What you thought was a huge amount of coins. I've got 450 coins in reserve now. Yeah. Just waiting. and I thought, oh, this is brilliant. All I have to do is collect parts. I figured parts, based off the charting that I'd done, would take roughly 26 days of play to get all the parts needed and then blammo. I just lay out that 100 coins for the final upgrade and away we go. And the rest of the time, I'll just be collecting coins again.
    29:31
    Well, that's now not the case because while you can still buy the unlocks for volumes 1 through 3 at 250 coins,
    29:45
    volume 4, for one, never gave the offer of buying the tables outright. This is what people on Android are saying.
    29:53
    So there was no limited three-day time offer to just buy the tables. None of that. Instead, it was a limited time offer to buy X amount of parts for the three tables.
    30:12
    And here's where I'm not quite understanding what's going on, but I guess the new challenge also got implemented.
    30:21
    So you could specifically earn parts for, and I don't know if this might be weekly, but like for Hurricane or earn parts for... It's like a parts accelerator, which costs coins. doesn't it? Well, on the one hand, earning parts specific to a table, hey, that's great, because then you know that's the table that I want parts for. But on the other hand,
    30:42
    it was... So now you needed to spend 50 coins in order to get 5 parts. But you still are going to need 170 parts total to get to your level 4 upgrade position. Well, that now means that for all three of those tables, for Rojo, for Hurricane, and for Whitewater combined, you're going to need something in the vicinity of like 3,900 coins, which is ridiculous in the fact that this entire time I've been playing, since day one of release, I think I've earned less than 1,200 coins. And that's with, at one period of time, going, I think, 42, 45 days in a row of playing.
    31:33
    Ross. So that's just silly. You're never going to get the table fully upgraded. You might get stage two upgrade, and that's about the extent of it.
    31:47
    So it's like they keep – it's not just a matter of, hey, we were all playing football, and they moved the goalposts. No, not telling you, oh, we're not playing football anymore. No, we're playing hockey.
    32:00
    You don't have an ice rink? You don't have hockey pads? What have you been doing? What's going on? Exactly. Well, buy them.
    32:09
    Well, why would I want to go buy them when Volume 5 comes out? You're probably going to change it all again. Yeah.
    32:16
    Yeah. There needs to be at least, like, responding to the data they're receiving is fair play from the perspective that it's a mobile app and that's what they're using to drive their decisions. But from a gameplay perspective, it just blows, like I haven't touched the thing. I have not touched the thing since, well, geez, volume three, so I didn't mess around with the game dynamics. I just went, no, this isn't for me. And it's still installed. In fact, I'm loading it up right now just to actually have a live discussion about the coin pricing because I've got it. and unfortunately because I haven't I have not spun it up since I downloaded the update for it so it's now updating all the things but all the things like my computer did this morning jeez I took the latest Windows 10 upgrade while it's loading and I'd left it and okay that's cool it seemed to finish downloading and then this morning before we started the podcast it was like something like 20 updates it was just queued there waiting for the computer to shut down so whoa okay I should be okay for the podcast because you know what happens. Windows updates programs and then sometimes they start to behave a little bit strangely until you restart. Remember when it did that to me during the middle of an interview? Oh, yes. I had to carry it forward, didn't I? Because it was like... During the middle of the interview, Windows went, oh, by the way, we're updating you right now. Yeah, and just turned you out. It was terrible. Well, I'm going to just restart the game because it's done all its updates and now I should, theoretically, just be able to go back. maybe, possibly, just be able to go back in there. I was having trouble connecting.
    33:53
    Which I've heard has been a bit of an issue on the latest Android from what I've read in the forum. Like people are having trouble connecting back to the servers, etc.
    34:04
    I think Wayne, a friend of the show Wayne on Twitter, was saying that he was having a lot of trouble with that. And also purchases getting removed that had been made before and stuff like that. So strange stuff. to me unfortunately it feels like whoever is deciding this whole pricing model and whatever nobody there is actually playing it and seeing the feasibility of this if anybody actually was playing it they would realize how futile this all is going to be it's just like the worst experience So if you're actually actively using the product and experiencing this day in, day out, it's no good. No good. This thing is, I think this thing, this app is hanging. It's not connecting. Actually, I was on mobile data before, which is usually pretty good here, but I switched off to Wi-Fi, and it appears to be behaving the same way. So I've updated the tables, everything's there and apparently ready to go, and then it just hangs there for way longer than it normally does when it tries to connect. So unless something else is awry, like I need to restart the phone or something drastic like that, it's actually not playing very nicely as far as connecting to anything, which means you can't play the game. So I will basically say this. we're supposed to be getting it on iOS this week. If it does indeed turn out to be as horrible as everybody is saying, then I'll have a nice rage fit on the next podcast. That being said, the whole reason why I did my data collection last time was to cut through all of the feelings of people getting hosed. And actually, here's how you are, here's how you aren't. so that we can approach it a little more fact-based rather than just feeling-based. Yeah, feeling-based. Nothing drives me more nuts than, well, I felt that was the truth. Yeah. Showing you hard evidence that it's not.
    36:18
    Exactly. Yeah. No, it's important to at least have some basis for your argument, and that's all it came down to, right? You wanted to be able to say, look, this is the tracked data that I'm working from to formulate my opinions of the app this month as it turned out because it changes month to month right so believe me i had like i said i had an entire article written ready to go i was just waiting to hear back from zen as to if there were going to be any other changes i need to be aware of because i wanted to put out a guide basically it was hey here's what you need to do this is the approach that you need to take depending on what your goals are uh and here's how you can you know do it and i was like boom great done and then they made their first change that kind of negated everything that i'd written and now there's this change which makes my article look like it's for a completely different game yes well the fact that i've introduced new a new like premium game type in there which requires 25 games to reset, 25 tokens to reset. Tokens? Yeah. That's a ridiculous amount of tokens to spend based on the current currency model. Like, it's just preposterous. I would never do it.
    37:36
    Every single change that's been made, it's made it worse for the player. Nothing has made it better. There's not one thing that's happened that we've gone, oh, thank you. Okay, great. That I can, you know, like, fine if you want to introduce a negative, but introduce a positive at the same time. And instead it's just been, well, here's more negatives. And more negatives. No, I'll tell you this for a fact that Williams Pinball on Android is broken. I cannot connect. Cannot connect. Impossible to connect. Game is dead. So if anyone's listening, they're in bad luck.
    38:11
    Yeah, well, maybe. Those have been popping up frequently. Hmm. So not great, though. The fact that, you know, you have a mobile game that's dependent on accessing the server to play. So if you can't access the server, the game doesn't even load to the front screen. So even if you're paid for offline play, you can't get into the game. I'm checking my now right now just to see if it's the same on iOS, and I'm hung up on a connecting right now. Ah, yeah, so they must be doing server maintenance. Yeah. It'd be nice if the app had the connecting screen that could actually display where we're doing server maintenance while the game is actually loading and actually just return a value for the connecting. Well, and here's the other thing. I've got all these tables unlocked and they do not need an unlock. The network. Network. That's correct. They need to do the network check after your game has loaded and then activate the network-based. Wait, there. Okay, it actually did. It gave me a hung up. It said network is not available. I pushed cancel. It let me get into the game. So yes, I can play offline all my tables. Oh okay Maybe I being impatient It fun to diagnose things real time on a podcast
    39:33
    It's fun, boys and girls. I will give one bit of positive, though. So, the feedback that I've been reading on the forums about the Volume 4 Flipper Physics, people are loving it. They're thinking, oh, yeah. And everybody's just like, when can we get it in the other volumes?
    39:52
    I read one piece of kind of negative feedback today, and I was more or less just kind of like, well, remember the era that this is coming from. Because my 8-Ball Deluxe, they were basically saying that they felt that there wasn't enough snap in the flippers. There was too much give.
    40:11
    And my thought was, well, if you're comparing it to a Modern Stern, that might be the case. Compared to my 8-Ball Deluxe, these things are way snappier than what my 8-Ball Deluxe is. This has a lot of give. now compared to an EM and those things are downright sloppy in comparison. So I'm trusting that again, since they were photographing those physical machines seeing what the flippers actually did on those machines, that they've mapped them accordingly to that era. So like I said, right now they're waiting on basically everybody's feedback, making sure that there's no severe, horrible bugs before introducing it to the other ten tables.
    40:53
    But, as usual, just as we were asking, hey, can we get the Williams physics thrown into Zen Originals? People were asking, hey, can we get at least the Flipper physics thrown into Zen Originals? Some people were even asking, can we get the Flipper physics thrown into the Zen single-player mode? So it's still easy, but it still has those characteristics. And my thought was, well, but then there's not a large difference between the easy mode and the harder mode. I mean, that's Zen for you. But I made a post and tagged Deep in the process, and I said, hey, when you guys make your next Zen original tables, can you please implement the Williams flipper physics into them in your design process so that it's just like what we have now where you can play single player mode with the flippers the way they are and then you can play classic single player and it'll have the Williams physics and Deeb basically responded that that's what he's gunning for, that's what he's pitching that's what he's hoping can be pushing that can be done which would be that would go over like gangbusters for anybody that has about Zen originals. If those things actually started feeling like real pinball tables, people would lose their minds. Oh, it just imagined it would change the entire game experience on things. It would just be, well, it would basically quieten all the naysayers about Zen originals being fantasy for pinball tables. Exactly. Yeah. And that's essentially, that's quite a large audience with the diehard pinball fans. And I get where Mel is coming from because it's the same approach that Farsight said. Look, if we go and remaster, if you will, all the old tables, we're not going to charge you all over for them, though. It's just going to be rolled into it. Well, that's a lot of expense on our part and not really getting anything back out for doing it, except from the standpoint of they recognize how many new players they got because of the Williams collection.
    43:19
    And those people have not necessarily bought Zen originals. So if those physics got put into there, there's a potential huge influx of people that would be buying all that stuff. I don't think they should just do a poll list all their tables and go you have three dollars to spend what tables would you like to put your dollar coin in for upgrades you know I honestly think that a lot of it has to do with some of those early Zen tables there's a lot of what we call railroad physics as they could and the second you put in real world physics suddenly the table no longer will work the way it was designed. Because there's some ridiculously steep ramps. Think of Earth Defense, for example. That ridiculous ramp that would defy... It would need an accelerator magnet on it for the board to actually get around it. So those ones would cause problems, for sure. But things like Aliens... Aliens would be perfect. And Bethesda. Those would work perfectly fine with the Williams physics on them. I suspect that that's what they would do. That they would take care of some of the newer tables. Because the newer tables designed a little bit more with real-world aesthetics in mind, it seems. Correct, yeah. Start with, and basically you just start with one of those packs. You'd be like, boom, now with Williams Physics, and see if the sales suddenly jump. Because if the sales suddenly jumped on that, then I think that's off. Then that's a clear indication. Yeah, fine, we'll do more.
    44:55
    The interesting thing, though, is how many people would be new to those tables? Because they've been there for a while. So imagine all the people that would have purchased those tables would probably already have them. So would you see an uptick in sales or would you see? That's what Mel was saying, that as soon as they added Williams Pinball, they had a very large influx of new players to Zen in terms of the platform. Right. So you're saying that those new players may not have gone through the back catalog just yet. they might have purchased a table a long time ago and gone, Zen's not for me. And they still have that table then within their collection. And they probably gave it a try again and went, yeah, Zen's still not for me. I like these William physics. I'm only here for the Williams pinball. But if you have a table, this is an original that has that.
    45:49
    And, you know, let's, and they buy that. Like a, like a banner on there saying now with Williams physics, for example, like that would be an impetus for someone to buy or like run a advertising campaign and say hey guess what Williams physics are on these like send out the newsletter or like up in the app for example easy right easy way of advertising I believe that when we get this new pack of Zen originals in 2020 if they have those physics on them I would encourage everybody that wants this to happen to the old ones to make sure and show that there's mass support for it like beyond what they're used to with you know because obviously by this point they know how many table cells I can probably expect right off the bat so if that exceeds their expectation then and that would be let's be serious that's like an obvious thing they're probably already engineering it now in the games have actually load those physics as part of the game because why wouldn't they they've got the opportunity to just add the package in. So, yeah, it makes sense to me. It wouldn't be hard to... It's one thing to reverse engineer, and there's been some problems, folks, in the beta when playing some of these Williams tables with Zen physics where the ball doesn't roll the way it's supposed to roll. It's hitting posts or not going off the flipper the way that it should because they're applying the Zen physics to it instead of the regular Williams physics. so then they go and they have to tweak and make some adjustments so the ball flows the way it's supposed to flow. While it's easy to do it that direction, it'd be much more difficult to do it the other direction, taking it as an original and applying Willem's physics. They'd probably have to redesign some ramping trees and stuff like that. There'd be some absolute redesigning going on. Not necessarily visual redesigning, but coding. Saying, hey, the ball's going to come this direction, you need to allow it to... So there might be some hidden railroading, if you will, or whatever. But yeah, if indeed, though, that that kind of stuff gets announced, you know, we'll mention it here. I would hope that there is a large show of support for that. Yeah. And that's the best indicator to make Zen go, OK, we'll go ahead and start applying this to other things, too. Yeah, exactly right.
    48:17
    I'm still seeing if it's still still connecting. Oh, my God. Yeah. I've tweeted Zen, by the way, to report the bug. So we'll see what they come back. Probably not within the duration of the show, what we have left, but at least it's out there. And that's what I've been also kind of saying. Look, guys, if you want to get a response out of Zen, tweet them. They've got more people watching Twitter. I sent an official request through the sport app, and my response came four or five days later. Yeah. It took a while. And they apologized for the delay, but I actually ended up resolving the problem before they even responded.
    49:01
    But meanwhile, when I've sent requests on Twitter, I've gotten a response within hours. Exactly. And the key, too, with that is applying the proper hashtags. So like right now, if you're having a problem with the Williams app, it's hashtag Williams pinball. that's actually what is tagging and letting them know what you're talking about if you're talking about FX3 make sure you send the tweet out to the pinball FX3 twitter account as well as the zen account so I mean there's different areas that you can attack and kind of point to and then of course you know make sure that we at the blockade know what you're sending and sometimes we'll piggyback on that and join in Yeah, so. Totally will, yeah. And how do you do that? Why it's real simple. All you do is you just go at Blockade, and that'll also include us in that for Twitter. That's right, which some people have been doing this week. They have been. Yeah, we've had a fair bit of interaction on Twitter this week with stuff that's going on with Android.
    50:09
    And, you know, it's been good. It's been good to actually have that live conversation with folks. Yep.
    50:15
    Yeah. All right. well at that folks we're going to let you go we've talked and yapped enough but we'd love to hear what your thoughts on volume 4 are I know that I've been entering a whole bunch of tournaments on FX3 that have been featuring those tables because why the hell not they seem like fun and I gotta say I've been playing so much of the mobile app that it's kind of shocking to me playing FX3 and going holy crap the lighting is really much better on this, isn't it? Yeah, it really is. So I've got a bit of an interesting thing happening this week. I've decided to get a gaming laptop. So I'm getting one with an RTX, NVIDIA RTX card in it, which is like the successor to GTX.
    51:07
    So it's going to be a bit of a beast. It's going to have a 160-hertz screen on it, so it should be butter smooth. and I'm going to see how that affects all the pinball game titles that I've got and work out whether the satisfaction is greater, which I'm sure it will be. So, yeah, that'll be fun. It should be arriving Wednesday or Thursday, I think.
    51:29
    Good times. Yeah, so I'll get rid of the silly service book too, which is just starting to dissatisfy me more and more as I have to use it. So this computer will also be my work laptop. I'll petition it. So it'll have my personal on one profile and my work on the other. So it separates the concerns and just set it up right.
    51:50
    So, yeah, it should be good. Looking forward to it. All righty. Well, with that, folks, we'll chat with you next week. I'm going to try something, Jared. I told you last week I'm not going to try it anyway. Oh, hey, look at that music. Yeah, we're going to use this for our outro for the moment. So, yeah, thanks for listening, folks. We appreciate it. and be sure to comment and let us know what you think of the show if there's any topics you want to hit upon we will do that being said I have no idea what we're going to talk about next week but I'm sure we'll figure it out hopefully by that time they have the IOS released out oh yeah that's probably what we'll be talking about yeah alright well with that we bid you adieu and talk to you next week bye bye sayonara