I'll put us back together at heart, baby. Don't you forget about me. Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't you forget about me. I said, I said, I said, I said, I said, I said, I said, I said. Ah, happy Monday morning, everybody. Welcome to Canada's Pinball Podcast. It's a beautiful, sunny day in November. Beetlejuice is out in the world. The response to it has been phenomenal. It's lived up to the hype. We're going to talk about that. I know what some of them have been selling for on the secondhand market. We're going to talk about that. I think I know what might be. I don't know if it's the next, but it is a theme that I'm hearing that Barrels of Fun is going to be making their next game after Winchester. is a licensed theme game. So if you wait to the end of this podcast, which I know you will, I am going to take a guess, a swing at what I think could be maybe Barrels of Fun's next game. And I haven't spoken to them about themes. The NDA I signed, he told me two themes. It's not one of those games. So we will see. It does seem when you hear it, because I'm going to play the song from the movie. When you hear it, It fits in line perfectly with the kinds of themes that Barrels of Fun is into. American Pitbull's got a new game coming out at Expo, and I hear it's not He-Man. Christopher Franchi confirmed that. But I also had something really interesting happen to me last night. I sent an email at around, I don't know what time it was, like maybe it was sometime at eight o'clock, maybe sooner. I forget what time exactly. I sent an email to Seth and George over at Stern. The subject of the email was, you need to make a move. And the body of the email was something along the lines of, a year ago, I went over to Stern and I explained to both of you that losing the collector will have sort of some serious ramifications for your business. And you really need to sort of double down on making sure the collectors still see Stern as a value proposition that is appealing to them. And if you look at what's happened over the last year or so, maybe a few years, I think collectors are starting to look elsewhere. I think they're sort of abandoning the shores of Stern Pinball. And a lot of it just has to do simply with why would you collect a hugely depreciating item that doesn't have any demand? And collectors don't want stuff like that. It's the opposite of what a collector looks for. And what was really interesting is immediately I get a Facebook message from George just being like, hey, Chris, did you send an email somewhere? Like, where did you send it? So maybe Seth like hit him up and said, hey, I just got a note from this guy. And he ended up just calling me. And I want to talk about this because what's interesting is a lot of us have been seeing a lot of like Stern who? And Stern's in trouble and Stern's dead and Stern's worried about Beetlejuice and Stern's worried about Barrels of Fun. And this company sold 500 games and this company sold 1,000 games. And Stern Pinball better be like quaking in their boots because all the energy is around these boutique companies. and they're going to go out of business and they're on a four-day work week and everyone over there is looking to quit and all this stuff is happening like the whole empire is falling down and yes there's been a lot of that and yes I've been saying some stuff along those lines and it is hard to really find any real enthusiasm or excitement by the die-hard pinball community right now for Stern Pinball. It doesn't mean people aren't buying their games. And I want to talk about what George and I talked about. And I'm not going to share anything that was asked off the record. I'm not going to share anything I'm not supposed to. And there's going to be some good information in here that you haven't heard anywhere else. And that is why I think sometimes just having a conversation with someone is so beneficial. It's beneficial for them. every time I leave a phone call with George Gomez or a meeting with George Gomez, I feel different about his company. And sometimes I think when Stern launches a game and it's the rinse and repeat video with George and with John Borg looking like he's held captive by the company, it doesn't do them any good. That they really need to start being more transparent. And I'm going to give you some of the things I suggested that they do that just begins to build more bridges and more of a relationship between the diehard enthusiast community and Stern Pinball. So he calls me up and we start talking and, you know, we're talking about Beetlejuice. We're talking about the excitement happening with some of these boutique companies. And yeah, they do not see it as a threat at all. They just don't. You know, the volume of games they make. It must be somewhat comical when he sees a game like Winchester come out and sell 525 units. That's going to take them to the end of next year to build. You got to think about that for a minute. And you're George Gomez and you're making that many games in a week or more. And you sell that many games in a day or more on every one of your new launches. And you're going to get those games to distros and to customers within just a couple weeks. And this company launched a game. It's not on the line. And by the time someone gets game number 525, the date on that box is going to be probably somewhere closer to 2026. And if you're George, you've got four more games coming out between now and then that you know you're excited about. I do think within this community, we have a tendency to overplay the hand of a boutique company versus the hand of a Stern Pinball. But there's no doubt about it. There is absolutely no doubt about it. Stern Pinball passing on Beetlejuice was a colossal mistake. That was a huge marketing error on their part. If they had made Beetlejuice, they would have had a lot more sales than a lot of the games they've released over the last four years. It hits all the right notes of nostalgia, the music, the campiness. So there's no denying the fact that there is a lot of excitement for a theme that they said nobody at Stern wanted to make. So that was an issue. It's also a very, very beautiful game. Stern definitely has an issue with the art department and with how their games are being perceived in the way they look, in the colorization of the games. Now, he said to me in person, The Walking Dead looks really, really good. And we hear that a lot, right? It's always sort of like in person, it looks better in real life. The game's going to be great. And this game, I think, is going to be at IAAPA. I'm not exactly sure when that is, but that's going to happen sometime, I think, soon. And of course, I don't think anyone out there thinks when you walk in front of The Walking Dead LE Remastered that it's not going to look colorful and be fun to stand in front of. Now, does it look as good as Beetlejuice? No. Is Christopher Franchi sort of in a really good place with spooky pinball? Absolutely. And I think he's got a lot of excitement and a lot of energy around the stuff he's going to be making. And it's a perfect place to be because he's making these games and the volume's not high. And this is what collectors want. They want something that's scarce. They want something that's beautiful. They want something that's timeless and they want something that they don't want to like keep trading. And they especially want something that they don't feel like is going to lose value every single week after you buy it. And that's exactly what Beetlejuice is going to become for everyone who got one. If you own a Beetlejuice right now, they are selling for $15,000 to $18,000 on the secondhand market. I have verifiable sales that have happened in the pinball black market, if you will. But if you have one and you get it for $9,999, your game is going to be worth at least $15,000, maybe forever. And it's just going to feel good knowing that you have something that is going to hold this value for a very long time. I think Evil Dead is a good indicator of how well Beetlejuice will hold. Once all the games are made, will they go down a little bit? maybe maybe but you in a really good place historically we have not seen a game that has the level of excitement ever from a company like Spooky There way more excitement for this game than Evil Dead and Evil Dead is holding strong You can't find it anywhere. Everyone who's got an Evil Dead spot right now, even if your game is not made, you know your game can now get you $5,000 to $6,000 over MSRP just for your spot. For you doing nothing, you could sell it for that. And guess what? Nobody's putting it up for sale. That's an even better sign. That means the game is good. It's not smoke and mirrors. It's got something that makes people want to hold on to it. And I think the collectors now are looking at their collection and saying, hey, maybe my next sort of approach to collecting is not going to be a row of Sternellese because that was always what people collected for the most part. instead of a row of Stern LEs that are all losing $3,000 to $5,000, I want a row of the next four to five spooky games that are going to be worth way more than any row of Sterns could ever be worth because these are games that are going to be scarce. There's never going to be another run. There's not going to be an anniversary edition of Beetlejuice. This is it. And this is it is exactly what every collector wants to hear. So it does beg the question that when I was talking to George about this, It does beg the question, because we talked about what could Stern do to actually create value again for its LE games. And we talked about this for about 20 minutes. And the truth is this, and I mean this, when you look at a Stern for $13,000, where almost the exact same game is available in premium trim for 10, and they're going to make that premium for an unlimited amount of time, it does beg the question, what's even the point now of spending $3,500 over the premium to get a game that basically is the exact same game, the art packages always look very similar, and there's just going to be thousands of them in the world. What's the point of going in on the LE? And then you think about it. What about the LE is exclusive enough to maintain the value. And I said to George, and he said he's considering it, and I don't understand why this is taking so long. And I said to him, George, for $13,000, every Stern LE needs to come with a topper. Your competitors are all doing it. Spooky's doing it. JJP is doing it. Barrels of Fun offers a topper. I mean, they're not exclusively on it, But they're all going to give people something that is exclusive to that special game. Now, look, when it comes to a game like Winchester and Beetlejuice, those are all LEs. There's no separate trims. When you look at a game like Harry Potter, you know, for $15,000, you get an exclusive topper on the CE. You can't get that topper on any other version of the game. And if you think about these Stern machines, they're $13,000. and then the topper is either like $1,600 or $2,000. That's basically a $15,000 machine if you get a topper. But here's the problem. If I buy an X-Men and this new X-Men topper is $1,600, it's not exclusive to the LE. So it doesn't make the LEs special. Anyone who has a pro and a premium can put the exact same topper on their machine. That's a problem. Why is it taking Stern so many years? And I said this to George, why? If I'm spending more than everybody else, I wanna know that my machine looks unique and nobody else can replicate it because you're only gonna give the best topper. It's like, to use a cargument, George is in the Porsches. If you have a spoiler on the Porsche GT3 RS, which is the creme de la creme car, imagine if they put that spoiler on the base 911 that anyone who ordered the base model could also have the most magical rear spoiler on the base level car. And that's the problem. Someone spending $6,500 should not have access to a magical topper. It should go to the person who's got the freaking $13,000 machine exclusively. And here's the other kicker. It should come with the machine for $13,000. dollars. Your game does not look apples to apples with a $15,000 Jersey Jack machine. You've got to look at it like that. And the other part is this. It takes almost a year for the damn topper for the game to even become available. Why is it the biggest company with the most resources would have a year delay between a topper and the game coming out? That absolutely makes no sense. Everybody else can figure it out. Spooky is going to have this amazing topper, which is also, by the way, 1600 bucks available on day one when these Beetlejuice machines go on the line. So you should not be suffering such a delay if a boutique company that's building this game in a barn can get it together and you can't get it together with 60,000 square foot facility and 400 people on your team, you can't like delegate a topper team to make sure the topper is ready when the game is revealed. And the other thing I said to him is this, besides exclusive topper for 13, the other thing that makes absolutely no sense is that an LE machine doesn't have any exclusive gameplay features. You're telling me that you can't incorporate into a $13,000 product a few modes that are not available in the $6,000 product. They did it with Tron LE, and it's why everybody loves the Daft Punk multiball. And they've never, ever done it another time ever. And that was like 12 years ago. And so now, if they're looking down at their $13,000 item, they really need to think about whether or not it even makes sense anymore to even try with these LE machines. And here's the thing when I was talking to George, I get the sense that they don't care. They really don't care if they lose the collector. I don't think they care how well the LEs sell. I don't. I think they don't care at all. I think, and he said this many times, Chris, he's like, if you knew how many new to pinball people bought games like Star Wars, I mean the new Star Wars, games like Dungeons and Dragons, He was saying that D&D is selling really well. And he was saying that if you saw the orders we get for D&D each week, you would be shocked. And I did say to him this. I said, George, I think there's something that you guys should do. Because I'm tired of speculating that you guys are not doing well. I think people are tired of slamming Stern for being like in trouble. I do. I don't think we wake up and we want to see Stern Pinball in trouble or fail. I don't. What I also think would be helpful, and I said this to him, it would be helpful if at the end of the year, you guys would actually let everybody know what numbers each game did. Why not? We know exactly what the numbers are on Beetlejuice. We know what the numbers are for games like Winchester. We know what Medieval Madness numbers are. Why is it that you can't let people know we sold this many games? Is it because you don't want to diminish the value of those games? Because if we know that there's 15,000 Godzillas in the world, does that mean they're all going to be worth nothing? I don't understand, though, because what I think would be helpful, it would be beneficial too, is if they just release the numbers. Because then, you know, again, it's like the best way for them to flex a little bit on all of these boutiques that keep bragging about tiny, minuscule sales numbers. So imagine if we heard that Stern Pinball sold out of every single D&D LE, and they also sold in total, let's just say a number, like 3,800 Dungeons & Dragons machines broken up by this many pros, this many premiums, and this many LEs. Why would that be problematic for them to communicate? Can someone explain that to me? I'm just curious. What would that do? Would it change the secondhand value of the game? I don't think so. I really don't. And I actually think it would help us sort of understand where to put praise and where to put concern. So he said that the new Star Wars game is selling really well to first time pinball buyers. OK, well, look, you got to kind of be a newbie to go in and buy a Star Wars L.E. because we all know it's not going to hold value. We've seen what's happened with the last L.E.s. And so yeah I think this is where there a tug of war happening within Stern own marketing department within their own company strategy How many new people can we attract to pinball And you going to get that with theme like Star Wars does that And are we okay losing the old guard? Now, if you were to ask me, I think the reality is somewhere in the middle. I think Stern does have an issue and a perception issue with the OG pinball enthusiasts. I don't think they can lose them and everything will be fine. I think they definitely have an issue with us seeing value in all of their products now lately. I don't think the themes have been there. I don't think the mechs have been creative enough. I don't think the artwork's been great. I definitely feel like we're looking at their products next to the competition because to us, we don't care about volume. To a pinball buyer that's an OG enthusiast, you can decide where to spend your money. And if you have five options from five companies putting five different games in front of you, you're going to buy the one that feels like it's giving you the best bang for the buck, the best creativity, the best theme integration. You're going to go in that direction. We talked a lot about this. And I think Stern for too long has abandoned those enthusiasts in favor for trying to find newbies to sell their products to. Now, look, if you're a newbie and you come into pinball, you have to buy a Stern. There's really no other options because you don't want to wait forever. And think about it. What games, if you walk into a distro and you want to buy a game, you're looking at a lot of Stern machines in boxes that you can have today. you're looking at some Guns N' Roses, LEs you could have today. You're looking at maybe a few labyrinths you could have today. Did John Youssi the Barrels factory tour? There was like a ton of labyrinths on the wall there. Yeah, you could have it today. And so like, if you want a Beetlejuice, you can have it. If you want a Winchester, you can have it. If you want a Medieval Madness, you can have it. I'm watching Brenda back up with the minivan right now. And if she touches my demon, I'm flying out of this window right now and saving it. You know, if you get new to pinball, Stern Pinball feels like the one you're going to go with. And I'm sure they're selling a lot of games to people that are not on Pinside. They're not on Facebook. They don't care to sort of jump into the ring with all of us hooligans. But there are thousands of OG enthusiasts out there. There are thousands of people that used to buy Stern LEs and Stern games that must be saying to themselves, no more. Like, I'm waiting. And so you want a little bit of an exclusive? We talked about the X-Men topper. And I was like, George, what happened there? On the day that like you were supposed to stream The Walking Dead, you just bailed on that stream. And then this leaked. Like, you're such a big company. How do you make these mistakes? Like, whose fault was that? And he said, Chris, I know I sent a note to our people like WTF, like how did this happen? He's also like, you know, everyone's complaining about the price of that topper. And what they don't know is that topper is a lot more interactive than they realize. It changes. Those panels change not just once. There's three different times those panels rotate. And on one of the rotations, he said, it turns into like UV lighting that lights up your entire game room. So it kind of probably gives you that sense of going into the future's past and it completely transforms the gameplay experience. And I'm like, that's really cool, right? None of us got that from the static image of the topper. Everyone's complaining it's a ripoff. Now, whether or not that's worth 1600 bucks, we can decide that once we see everything. And the same is true with the shooter rod handle thingy, Bob. Like, you know, John Youssi it for like 150 bucks. You're like, this is a total ripoff. But that also has a lighting system in it that adds to the effect of what's happening with the topper. So, you know, imagine the whole game goes into this mode that becomes a major pinball moment. But again, it all feels like a day late and a dollar short because X-Men Ali is now lost like $5,000 in value. This topper is not exclusive to those LE owners. And again, it's like you can't get hype back on a game that's been put through the mulcher with people's like opinions about it and then win people back with accessories. All this should be ready on day one. You are the biggest pinball company in the world. You need to start launching games with statements. And I don't think people should have to like wait a significant amount of time to know everything that's going to be available with your $13,000 product. So there's some exclusive information about the X-Men topper. You know, we talked about King Kong. We talked about like what happened there, right? You know, it was their creative choice not to go with the movie clips. That's what he told me. He's like, we decided creatively not to go get assets from the King Kong movie. And I said to him, I think that's a creative mistake. You got Godzilla. You went and got all the assets from the Godzilla movies and TV shows. And that's what everybody loved. It's the number one game in the world. Why would you creatively make a decision that changes what worked so well with Godzilla? So I think that was a huge mistake. And again, like who's making these decisions? And probably is it being made because of financial reasons? Maybe. I don't know. But you got it done with Godzilla and you should have got it done with King Kong. And that's why King Kong, I think, has underwhelmed people. We talked about the King Kong art package and he told me there was a third art package that was supposed to be on the pro and they didn't like it. OK, so what did they do? They then took the art package from the $13,000 LE and put it on the pro. So then all of a sudden, the person spending twice as much money doesn't feel special. So look, it was a really good conversation with George. I got the sense when I was talking to George, he wasn't worried at all. He says fun stuff to me. He's like, Chris, sometimes I feel like if you were positive, your audience would leave you. And I'm like, I don't think it's like that, George. I think I'm calling it like it is. I think the feedback I'm giving you is pretty sound. And he's always kind of like, I know you're a shock jock. I know you're just trying to entertain and you just don't know really what's happening. And I say to him all the time, then just tell me. Tell me where I'm getting this wrong because I think I'm reading the room better than they are. But then we started talking about 2026 and he's like, I'm not worried. With what we have coming down the pipeline, I'm really excited. And I did ask him, are you telling me, George, at age 70, you're designing Pokemon? and he said, Chris, who said I'm designing Pokemon? Wow. Okay. So I think Pokemon is either going to be Jack Danger or it's going to be Keith Elwin. So I think you heard it here first. I don't think George Gomez is finishing Pokemon. I'm not even sure he was ever even on it. So that's some news. I do think Pokemon is next. And I think, you know, between Pokemon, Transformers, and then, you know, I didn't ask about Fallout. He sounds very confident about what's coming down the pipeline. But I also am a little bit worried. I'm just always a little bit concerned that Stern isn't making the moves to win anybody back. That's like the enthusiast. I did talk about the CMO, What is he doing? And you know what George said to me at the end of our conversation? He said, look, Chris, I think we have a perception issue. A public relations issue is what he said. And I was like, oh, if only I knew a guy that works at a public relations company. But he's right. They might not have the sales issue we think. They might not be in as big of trouble as a lot of us think. But they definitely have a PR issue. And he said, we have a PR agency. But the PR agency working for Stern isn't on Pinside. They're not on Facebook. They're not listening to Kerry Hardy and Kaneda. They don't know what the real public relations issue is with Stern. They are probably just sending IGN assets when a new game is out and getting some media coverage for the new product. But the real public relations issue that is impacting Stern is all of their energy has gone towards Insider Connected Stern Army location tournament play operator stuff They abandoned the collector And they have a public relations issue with the collector and the enthusiast and they need to make that a focus So you know coming out of my conversation with George last night, I still think that's their number one problem. They don't have a problem with manufacturing. Yeah, they need to get better themes. I think they're going to. Yeah, they need to put more magic into these games. They need to. You know, he talked a lot too about margins and he's like, you know, I could make a product like spooky with barely any margin and we could do it and we could load up games more, but we'd go out of business. You know, you got to remember like they're got 400 plus people working at Stern, that big factory. So that's just the thing though. And that's the question I just have is I know Stern needs a better margin. We know Stern's bomb is lower than everybody else's. Should they even be making LEs? Think about this for a minute. Why? Maybe they just give up this whole LE market. I just don't think they can offer a product next to what we're getting with these boutiques. Because if you think about what collectors want, I'm just not sure Stern is even capable of it anymore. because if they're playing the margin game and they're playing the sort of like quantity over quality approach, that's just not what any collector wants. And so if all of their games are gonna lose value if you own them, then maybe these games are meant mostly for operators because they're not losing money on it. They put every new game on location and they're making a lot of money back. I mean, we have people that open up Godzilla Coindor and there's like 30,000 plays on a game, 50,000 plays on a game. Like they're making thousands of dollars off of that machine where everyone who bought one for the home is losing thousands of dollars. So maybe they just become a more mass produced operator friendly company. You know, if we buy one for our home, maybe get rid of the LE because then maybe you start to stabilize the prices more if you don't have such huge losses on the creme de la creme version of the game. It still makes no sense to me that the creme de la creme version of the game is losing almost the amount of money that the pro machine costs. Like that just seems crazy to me. So it was a really good conversation. I think Stern is going to have an interesting 2026. I think the next title is going to be important. You know, we talked about Spike 3 too. And again, what John Youssi is what you get with Spike 3. It was never going to be a game changer. They know that. I think they did a bad job also with Spike 3. kind of communicating what we should expect in it. But I think everybody, if we were to just like look at the pinball market today, everybody just wants to feel what we felt with Beetlejuice. We want to feel that with every new game from Stern, with every new game from Barrels, with every new game from CGC. I mean, who doesn't want to feel that level of excitement and giddiness? And I think that's where everybody is at. These games at these prices need to deliver that. You're not going to find enough newbies to the hobby to keep you going if you lose the people that actually have the right level of expectations of what should be in a machine at this much money. So speaking of that, to conclude this podcast on a money, I've gone a little long. I haven't really talked about the Beetlejuice. We'll talk about it more this week. I haven't talked about all the babies that are complaining that Spooky should make more. These guys all need to realize you don't get a participation trophy in life. You don't always get what you want. Everybody had a fair chance to get a game. Joe Newhart put an email blast out into the world a month ago. First come, first serve. Whoever replied to Joe's invoice and put a deposit down got a game. He sent that out to hundreds of people. So there's no excuse that you were not able to get one. Joe has been publicly facing one of the biggest distributors for spooky pinball machine for years So I don't want to hear it I don't care what any of these babies say and I love seeing people flip these games for 15 to 18 thousand dollars It's healthy to see that and if you missed out because you were too lazy and not proactive enough Then you got to pay the tax You got to pay that laziness tax and you got to pay over to get your game And I don't think these games are ever going to sell for south of fifteen thousand dollars and it is what it is and it's a great day for spooky and then we get to what do I think could possibly be the next licensed game from our friends over at barrels of fun all right so I'm not sure if this is true I'm not sure if this is definitely happening but I heard from one of my best sources that this is one of the themes that is in the development cycle over at barrels of fun and when you hear this and you think about this it makes total sense it feels like exactly like the kind of theme they would make i think this would be a good theme for pinball i think this would sell better than labyrinth and dune and this game is coming out next october which is exactly when we're going to get back to the future and we're going to start to think about the next game from spooky pinball so barrels knows they need a game that is licensed they know they need a game that has nostalgia and they know they need a game that can be a world under glass that would be a lot of fun so without further ado is this a canada exclusive it's an exclusive guest from canada here's what i think could be possibly the next game from barrels of fun have a great monday everybody talk to you soon Look at what John Youssi in the face, the mirror of your dream. Make believe a memory when hidden in the night, written on the pages. There's the answer to a never-ending story Reach the stars, fly a fantasy Dream a dream And what John Youssi will be Nights that keep their secrets When I'm told behind the clouds And there upon the rainbow Is the answer to a never-ending story Ah, story Ah Please show your fear For she may fade away In your hands The birth of a new day. The rhymes that keep their secret. The road behind the clouds. And there upon the rainbow. Is the answer to our never-ending story. Never-ending story Never-ending story Never-ending story