No, it's just I like Spooky because they did so many things right that other boutique guys did wrong. They don't take big money deposits up front. They don't make you pay for your game up front. They actually can hit a schedule. They scaled organically. They've stayed, you know, everything's sourced in their little small town and everything. So there's a lot of stuff I really like about them and how they handle the company. They've also made some really good games, some really pretty games, some that might be both. But, you know, that's all up for debate. Everything's subjective. but at the end of the day um the objective things you can look at about spooky are very good the subjective things you know not everyone might like how their games play and sometimes the code can take a little while to get there or whatever but you know they're you know they do stand behind their products i think at the end of the day and it's like this customer service they've been making scooby-doo so for full disclosure i own a rick and morty which was the first new inbox pen i bought and i own an ultraman which was the second new in box pen i see raving spooky fan ultraman and and ultraman uh the code it's still i mean you had to be talked off a ledge from buying a scooby-doo new in box as well that's true yeah it's safe to say that when spooky releases a game you want it unless they can they can prove to you otherwise why you don't need it yeah which is very different than any other company releasing but but and so but that's a big part of that for me is that i like owning games at home and i've said this since we first met i like owning games at home that i can't play everywhere on location sterns actually work when you see them most of the time spookies when you see them on location traditionally don't have such a good reputation and so you don't see them as much and so it's one of those things where it's easy enough to keep any pinball machine working at home anyone that complains about maintenance on a home use pinball machine oh that's that's 100 true there's i mean maybe if you're troubleshooting an old pin or something troubleshooting can be difficult but the kind of stuff you have to do on a modern pin with factory support is so easy that it's just laughable you just might have a pin that's down for a week while you're waiting for parts but to go back to that yeah you don't see the spookies on location so i do go into every time they release a game i kind of you know i'm already excited i'm a potential buyer i guess immediately so it is kind of funny when you say like that i guess that makes me you're a fan boy okay i still don't consider because i think i'm pretty hard i'm pretty critical on the i think you're invested though i think the thing about it is like i am what makes this boutique thing interesting is like stern's stern's a monolith they're they're a mega corporation even jersey jack is now so like but spooky you're like oh it's charlie and it's his whole family work there it's like a literal family business in a small town i mean it's literally it's like comparing like stern as walmart to like spooky as the ma and pa shop and you're like yeah i'll go pay twice as much for apples and apples might not taste as good but you know i like the people that run it and that's kind of how i approach yeah they're they have some quality issues you're you're gonna see that across the whole board we're using spookiest because they're kind of the biggest and the most known and they're really the most reliable yeah and but yeah but that's what we're sort of touching on is like buying slash operating a boutique game so you've had some experience buying a few boots boutique games we've owned a few we've usually bought them second hand not not brand new like we got our yeah uh total nuclear annihilation which is a spooky game we got that second hand in a trade and we had an american pinball houdini yeah um that yeah i said a lot i'm trying to be nice here uh yeah we're trying not to dog on things too much there's good things about that game i think overall that thing's a steaming pile of trash but i think it's i've had fun playing okay so there's so here's the thing is is like i think with ron or alex here sorry i'm gonna keep calling you wrong people are gonna be so confused no i think the thing about like i'm an operator we have a bar so we have to care about the games working and like being and and not only working like out the box and putting them on the floor but then also are they gonna earn like are people gonna play them like because the games aren't cheap and when spooky first started they were selling games for cheaper than stern so when you would get some of the weird quality stuff like hot glue on the connectors or you get some of the goofy stuff that they would do you like yeah you know like they're they're just doing it you're like it's small it's small batch and they're doing it at cheap prices which they still are pretty affordable but they're they're gotten to the point where their their pens now compete with stern pros and when you when you get into that realm and i always thought that from an operator's perspective is like all these boutique companies are are great provided you get your games we'll touch on that in a little bit but if you're buying from a reputable company like spooky you will get your game it may take a year and a half to two years but you'll get it likewise with chicago and american all of the ones have been putting out a few titles you know you're gonna get it they're reputable companies american chicago they're all reputable companies but they make games slowly at a much smaller scale But when we're talking about operating the game, you kind of need to game game. You don't really. It's it's really inconvenient to like lay out a deposit and then wait and then wait and then wait. Yeah, it's not the boutique model in the products they often deliver aren't really aimed at. They're not. Now, operators do buy them and they do try to do it. And they're usually that's why you'll hear the frustrations on their voices in Facebook groups or on Pinside or whatever. They're like, I bought this thing and it's already fucking broken. Like, you know, and like it's been down all weekend or whatever. Yeah. Which I imagine. I mean, it's completely different. That's the big thing that I think a lot of people don't really realize, especially when they're, you know, arguing with each other on pin side or Facebook groups or whatever, is that coming at this from a collector, a home pinball player perspective versus an operator perspective is completely different. And, you know, like I said, spooky, you might have a board failing in a week later, they sends you a whole brand new board no questions asked which is awesome and it's cool that they always are eager to do that but when you're an operator and you have you know if it's one of your two games sitting in a bar you don't want that game down for a full week the bar owner's gonna get pissy and the customer base the pinball location basis it's fickle like if if they show up to a place and the games don't work they might not want to go back to that place and then they might not yep you know there's dude it's insane how how quick people are to dismiss locations pinball locations based off of a single experience that they went in and stuff was broken and in people i mean people are quick to dismiss that's what i was gonna say is like if you show up in a game's always broken or it was broken the first couple times you played it or you showed up in the code was just broken you remember when when foo fighters came out and there was the ball trail misadjusted and someone took a picture posted the stuck ball on red and they're like oh no you're more QC issues for Stern. And it's just a joke because you're like, dude, that's a 30 second fix. This game came out of the box today. Just chill. But no, he's already shit talking on the Internet. Oh, yeah. No idea. When 007 came out, there was just people, loud people on a Facebook group that pinball operators and they were just like, this game's never going to earn. This game sucks. It's not finished. The shots suck. Like, this game sucks. Like it doesn even say James Bond It says you know it says Dr No Like nobody going to know our fucking James Bond earns great dude Fantastically dude It a Gomez game It a Stern It earns very well I love it. Yeah. All the casuals call it Dr. No and start 007. It doesn't matter. It turns out they still play the pinball machine. Because it's there, it works, and what's in there is fun. So did it release with shallow code? Yes. But will Stern update it? Yes. And they already have. um yeah sorry we're kind of i brought us off topic a little bit but i guess that's all the podcast is is just a series of tangents of diversions no but i i think i think it just we're speaking to the difference in companies but really what we're talking about is the challenges of manufacturing very complex games without scale so what the boutique companies struggle with is they don't have the scale and the scale means when you're building 100 or 200 or 400 of something and Stern's building thousands. If Stern's making a run of game, nobody releases their numbers. But if we look to the pinball past, say Stern is making 3, 4, 5, 6,000 games per title release and Spooky's making 1,000, that's a big difference. That's a big difference. And that's Spooky after they scaled up for 10 years. and so what what's happening is they don't have the amount of full-time staff they can't keep them they don't have the the square footage they don't get the price breaks on nuts and bolts and all the little parts because they can't buy 5 000 of them they have to buy you know a few hundred of something and i think one of the pitfalls of spooky specifically and i just am speaking a lot about spooky because it's what i have personal experience with but they change hardware and stuff they're always trying new stuff from game to game in in hopes of improving and sometimes it works good and sometimes it doesn't but it can be tough because it's like how many iterations of game does it take to find a connector that doesn't work itself dear god in the spooky connectors they've apparently done a new generation even since my ultraman i think scooby-doo has new ones that are supposedly even better and my ultraman connectors have actually been awesome my rick and morty connectors are yeah our tna are constantly fiddling i've replaced a bunch all the punch through one suck in it you're just like come on man you've made i mean rick and morty a small batch game they made 750 of them but at that point they'd already built a couple thousand over yeah over their years not at once right over many titles you're like a couple thousand stern does that many of one yeah of one i was just i was talking to an operator recently i can say it out loud we've talked about him on the first episode the pops pinball guys on the east coast and they have a big lebowski and they posted like hey big lebowski's back up so i message them because we don't have one we don't buy boutique games so spoiler alert before our conclusions at the end of this podcast we don't buy boutique games and i'll explain a little bit more why but i was talking to them and i was like oh i have a couple questions for you one is that game reliable and two does it earn well and then he said no and no so he said you're like well that's a compelling argument to spend twice exactly that's the other thing is that and he's like for 12k absolutely not worth it but i guess that their location uh bought it and they just operate for him so they it's not a game that they bought and operate so yep and that's one thing that i will say i think there is value even if the games are unreliable and even if the games don't earn that much i always think there is something to be said for having some unique titles at your place just to make it more of a pinball location you're talking about wetcha here that's all we do dude exactly i was gonna say but that's the big thing is that some operators think they have to buy boutique stuff and you're like you can also go grab any em and you'll probably have the only one of those on location for 500 miles so there's kind of different ways to go about how to make yourself stand out and some guys go some guys go the boutique route you see a lot of locations that only have games released in the last 10 years and those will be the ones that are always hankering to buy a new american or a new spooky or whatever they think will you know work and that's good i mean i like opportunities to play these games and i respect them for putting their money where their mouth is but it's um yeah it's just different ways to go about that i think it's noble because you always want to support you're rooting for an underdog we all love an underdog story as a small business owner myself as someone that you know we we built wedgehead from the ground up with our own hands we've made lots of mistakes there there have been issues that bigger companies don't have to deal with right like so it's like i empathize with the smaller companies and i obviously want that but if there's a if there's an issue of like we have to decide what we're gonna buy with limited funds and we have to decide what's best for our business and we need to buy a quality product and really for us it's come to the point where my business partner he he owns the games and so he's the final say in what we buy or what we don't buy and at the end of the day we don't buy boutique games right now because we're operators we're not private collectors it's it's it's not worth taking a flyer on for us and it takes a valuable floor space not only in wedgehead but if we put it in a different location it's it's something that we already have a lot of really cool old games that we like a lot why are we going to buy a brand new game for a lot like like if you take an old game that we think is cool like frontier or mystic or something cool like that like an old george christian game and we put it on location like the game's not going to earn a lot of money but also So we bought that game for $2,000 years ago, right? So it's like, okay. It's already a cost that's gone. Why are we going to spend $8,000, $9,000, $10,000, $12,000 on something that's going to earn one of those games and be less reliable? And we might not even think it's that cool. Yeah, and that's something we haven't even really talked about in our 20 minutes is what we actually think of how a lot of these games play just from our own personal. Well, I think that's how this is how we're going to end is because I think we we appreciate we both you and I both appreciate. I appreciate anyone who goes out and fucking does anything because it's the easiest thing in the world to criticize. People criticize everyone. Everyone's a fucking critic. Everyone will criticize everything you do, but everyone has an opinion on how something should be done. Very few people go out and actually do much of anything. So if you put it on the line and you do what you say you're going to do, I have the utmost respect for Chuck and Spooky Pinball in particular, for Nermal and for American Pinball and for all these other companies, for the ones that actually release games. Total respect. Do I like most of the games they make? No. As far as like, not even from an operator. As far as like, we're going up and playing. Do I enjoy playing it? No. Most of the time. See, I'm the voice of positivity on the podcast, and I enjoy most little boutique games. If you put one next to other things, I might play other things more, but I like the variety always. There are some that, though, I think, I don't know. I guess we're going to wrap this up here pretty soon, but I would say if you were going to pick one boutique game from the last 10 years or whatever. Okay, one that's not a spooky, so Nos Catanissis. They're the only two good ones that ever got made. it was scott denisi made rick and morty and tna and they're both phenomenal games both of those games are like legitimately great you haven't you haven't put much time on or any time on galactic i haven played yet and that thing listen i a dennis norton fanboy you know this about me we haven covered this on the pod but we will in the future dude there good games Because there some that I don know there always ones that I want to play more but the problem is you don see them because they don earn and they expensive But I'm hoping Alien. I'm hoping that we see more Alien. Alien is pretty cool. That's a pretty cool game. I'll say that too. Yep. I think I like Big Lebowski. I play it every time I get the chance. I haven't played it.