And we just don't feel the same Gotta blame it on something Gotta blame it on something Blame it on the rain That was borrowing and falling I said, I said, I said, I said, I said, I said, I said Welcome everybody to Kaneda's Pinball Podcast Three years later and we are finally gonna get this Cactus Canyon code update the one Lyman F. Sheats Jr. laid the groundwork for. Not sure how much is in this that came from him and how much were his blueprints, but it's finally coming out. It's been three years! I think they're also going to release the saloon door mod for the game. How much is all of this stuff going to cost? I think if you have a Cactus Canyon and you enjoy it, you're going to buy it. Like, it is a beautiful machine. There's a lot in the game. So that's about to happen at TPF. They are finally going to reveal it, announce it, and I think allow people to get this stuff pretty immediately. We also are getting confirmation. Rick over at PPS hit me up. Merlin edition of Medieval Madness remake. That is going to be announced at the show. They have been ordering parts for a long time. So I don't think the way to get a Merlin edition is going to be two years like Pulp Fiction. It's going to most likely come with this blue powder coated armor, which is going to look really nice. It'll come with the topper, the shaker motor, all the bells and whistles. They're going to make a thousand of them. It's going to get interesting. I don't know if all 1,000 are going to be Merlin editions or 1,000 remakes, of which a certain amount will be Merlin editions. But that's interesting. If you own a Medieval Madness Royal Edition and you've had it for sale for $20,000 over the last three years, your games will be worth whatever the price is of this Merlin edition. I think it's good. I keep hearing people saying they don't think this game is going to sell out. I still think it's medieval madness. I still think it's one of the best games of all time. I know a lot of modern players who love games with a lot of replay value and depth sometimes consider this game to be pedestrian, to get a little boring quickly. I think a lot of people don't understand, though. Most people suck at pinball. And this is a really fun game. And it doesn't matter that 35 years have passed. It's still one of the most fun pinball experiences you can possibly have. And it still has some of the greatest mechanisms in all of pinball. And I think it's going to sell just fine. There is a level of like cohesiveness and personality. And all of it just came together on a game like Medieval Madness. It's actually an incredible thing when you think about it. that an original game has so much love with the community, even after all these years? And I don't think we've seen in modern times, think about it, have we seen an original IP game that people love as much as they love medieval madness? Galactic Tank Force? Nope. Dialed In? Nope. Black Knight? Nope. What else? I mean, there's other stuff out there. Merlin's Arcade? Isn't it funny that there is another Merlin game coming out in just a few days? I got hit up by my friend David David Van Es. David, love you. I got hit up by David. And he's like, how dare you, Kaneda? How dare you? He was joking. I'm going to add a little bit more hyperbole to what he said to me. But he's like, how can you say we're in the same league as Turner Pinball? Did Turner Pinball ship 800 games in a year? Yada, yada, yada, right? And David, you're not wrong. I think I should add another level to where these companies are at. Stern and Jersey Jack are really the major leagues of pinball. They are the two companies that get thousands of games out a year. Everybody else is either nipping at the major leagues or the minor leagues. Now, when it comes to companies like Multimorphic and Turner Pinball companies, I would have put Haggis in this bucket. They're not even minor leagues. They're not. They're not there yet. They don't make a few hundred games a year. They just don't. They're more like the third string, the intramurals of pinball companies. But I don't consider Barrels of Fun to be major league just yet. And I said back to David, I was like, maybe you have a major league theme ready to go. and everybody's waiting to see what Barrels of Fun is going to do next. I heard a rumor yesterday that they are now delayed an additional six weeks based upon a licensing issue. So what does that mean? I thought Barrels of Fun was going to be the first company to reveal their next game and they were going to be the first out of all of these companies to show us what they got. Now I think they might be the last. I think they might be getting into May with their title And if I David right now I might want to wait until all the dust settles Because it all being kicked up right now Not a lot of orders are happening. Let's face it, people. You go into the multi-morphic thread, you don't see people saying they ordered Portal. I bet Jerry has not sold 100 Portals. I bet he hasn't even sold 50 at the full cabinet level. He might have sold 50 modules to people who already own a P3, but it's not going to sell a lot. Same thing with Turner Pinball and Merlin's Arcade. Do you really think that Chris Turner is going to sell a hundred of these at $9,000 a pop? Remember, he sold a hundred Ninja Eclipses. You got to remember the variables by which that game sold. He sold a hundred of those because there was only going to be 100 games in total. He also sold those games for less than $7,000, okay? So how is he now going to sell an LE at nine grand in which he's on the record for saying he's going to make 500 of them? You want to make one less than there is demand. You don't want to publicly communicate that you are going to make hundreds more than there is actual demand of. What that does is it incinerates any demand or FOMO for your game. It's a little thing called marketing. And here's what happens. You do all the work. You know, you do all that work with Jon Norris and your team and you get it ready to go. And then you got to sit in a room and you've got to make a marketing decision and you got to be honest. And if you're going to make a guess on how the market will absorb your game, you need to guess how many people do we think will buy at this and we're going to make one less. When you make a guess like 500 at 9000, what you're doing, you're not making a guess anymore. You're engaging in wishful thinking. What he's trying to do is feel good about the next two years that we're going to be able to make this many of this game. And I'm here to tell you right now, it's not going to happen. They will struggle to sell even a hundred of these games at $9,000. And who in their right mind is going to look at a 24-month delivery window with a non-refundable, non-transferable deposit? it. Who is going to see all of that and still say, give me one, especially when we know over 24 months there's going to be Pokemon, Harry Potter. There's going to be a remake of maybe Walking Dead and Tron. There's going to be King Kong. There's going to be Predator. There's going to be a whole nother year. What's next from Jersey Jack? Is it Sonic the Hedgehog? Is it Top Gun? There's going to be a whole nother game from Barrels and Spookies, Beetlejuice or Gremlins or Goonies, all of these games. And by the time they finish the run of freaking Merlin's Arcade, Back to the Future will have been out for a year. We stopped talking about it, but Back to the Future is coming out at the end of this year. Dutch is working on it. What do you think Barry and team are doing every day? Aside from building the Alice's, they're getting Back to the Future ready. The deal's not going to happen with Stern or JJP. They're going to make the game. And so it's an interesting time in all of pinball. You know, when I was talking to Rick and talking to Dave and I talked to other people out there, I talked to content creators. I talked to a lot of you. There's a feeling that there's just a lot happening, right? I don't think it angers people anymore. I think we've all come to accept the high prices are the high prices. Okay, fine. It just is the way it is, right? I could walk out of my house every day and complain about the sky being blue. I think the prices are overpriced, but it's just the way it is, right? Nothing's going to make these prices go down. The companies that used to sell cheap products like Turner are now raising their prices. Spooky pinball used to be a cheap option. Now their games are almost $13,000, right? It just happened. Maybe it happened gradually. Maybe it happened quickly during COVID, but it is what it is. Now buying a pinball machine for everybody, doesn't matter who you are. I don't care how rich you are. I don't care how poor you are. For everybody, there is a lot more thought that goes in to every single pinball purchase that will happen. There's a lot more concern for dealers that are sitting on so much inventory. They need a lot more cash to buy the same amount of games they used to buy. So it's an interesting time. And right now, we've got TPF in a few days. We're still waiting for the big games. I saw someone say on my chat, Canada doesn't have any scoops anymore. What is this? When did this start? I got no scoops. I've been giving people scoops all throughout the year. Every single week, I give you guys stuff that you don't hear anywhere else. The problem is there's just so much now. There's so many content creators. There's so much noise. Nobody really cares as much as they used to because it was different a few years ago. Remember if I had a scoop about what this company was going to do there weren 15 other companies There wasn 38 other podcasts and 100 YouTube pinball content creators right And everyone's just saying the same thing. And the reason you come to Kinead, it's not just because of scoops or news. It's because of how we talk about those things. That's what I enjoy doing. I know that's why you enjoy tuning in every week is because I'm going to tell you right now. As nice as I think Chris Turner is, and Chris, you're a great guy. I'm glad you're a subscriber. You're going to sell about 150 at nine grand at most. You're never going to get to 500. And hopefully you have something else in the pipeline because it just is what it is. You know this. I know this. The market knows this. There's just too much out there. And I mean this because in about a few weeks, what's going to have more of an emotional pull on people? Merlin's Arcade or Predator, Merlin's Arcade or Harry Potter. You want another scoop, people? Here's another scoop. I am hearing that Jersey Jack is gonna go back and have an entry-level game, something that sits below the CE and the LE. They're gonna have an entry-level Harry Potter. All right, did you hear this anywhere else? No, so stop saying I don't give you scoops. I'm the freaking Baskin Robbins of pinball podcasting. You come in here, you get scoops. I just don't get credit. I don't get credit anymore. I don't even need the credit. The only validation I need, no longer the trippies, the only validation I need is we have more subscribers and everybody else can buy. That's great. That feels good. And you know, you know, Bond, I know you're listening right now. You retired at 45 years of age, Brenda. He retired and he's in like Tokyo with all this money. Brenda's clapping. And I think he only contributes $5 a month. Oh, Oh, that's going to trigger people. Some people get mad. You can't be busking for more. Okay, here's a scoop. They're going to make an entry-level Harry Potter, but it's not going to be like Guns N' Roses SE. They're not going to take anything out of the game. They are just going to really dress it down. It's going to have all the mechanisms. It's going to shoot the same way as the LE and the CE, but it's not going to have like the Radcows and the Inner Art Blades and the shaker motor and the topper and the Invisiglass. They're going to take everything that's not needed out of the game that is cosmetic. And I think they're going to charge $10,000 for it because they want to get operators to buy more of these games. And they know it's such a big theme that it's a location and operator dream come true. So let's see if this Scoop by Kaneda comes true. It sort of makes sense. and we're going to know about this game in just a few weeks. Okay, so let's see. Now go to Pinsider and say, hey, the guy that I can't mention gave me some news items and I don't want to admit that I subscribe to his site and nobody ever backs me up when people talk smack about Kaneda. Nobody. Brenda's looking at me like, what are you doing, Chris, with that tone of voice? You're going up and down. She's in the kitchen right now. We're about to throw some money against our mortgage today. I was talking to people on the chat about this. Like I'm not buying any pinball machines because I'm knocking down my house by half a million today. Knocking it down. How many pinball machines can you get for half a million now? About four. The way these current pinball machines are priced. But I'm looking forward to that. I've been looking at GNR. I haven't fixed it yet. I know the wires I need to fix. And I'm still kind of coming to the conclusion GNR will be leaving this household once a dream theme that shoots better comes out. Harry Potter is not a dream theme. King Kong is not a dream theme. Pokemon is not a dream theme. Back to the Future is. If I were to look at everything coming out, I would say that Back to the Future would be the kind of game that would replace my Guns N' Roses. No, it's not Metallica Remastered. My friend Frank, Frank, I love you. He's always like, Chris, this game's amazing. I bought three of them. I flipped two. Frank, here's the thing. I know the game is amazing. I just don't love Metallica. I get it's a great game, but I need to love the theme more to lug it up the stairs. Brenda, are you really unpacking the dishwasher right now? That is going to make so much of a clinking and you can hear it. You know what? You might as well just do it. Just do it. This is the kind of respect you get when you don't help out nearly as much as you should. I love you, Brenda. We're just going to roll with it. I'm not even going to edit this out. Okay, so here we go. So dream theme will replace GNR. So let's go back to what's about to happen. So we are going to get, let's see what order we're in now. If Barrels of Fun's next game is delayed six weeks because of licensing issues, that puts them at the end of April, early May. So that means the next reveal is going to be Medieval Madness Remake Merlin Edition, the Cactus Canyon code update that took three years to come out. Then after that, we're into April. Okay, I don't think anything's going to happen between now and then, But you want to know the scary part Rick at PPS told me when I was like there too many companies there like 13 or 14 companies He like Chris there about to be two more new companies that nobody knows about There about to be two more entering the pinball space not the road trip guy not the stuff we've seen, not home pin, two more players that want to reveal and release fully featured pinball machines coming out. I don't understand what happened. Like what is everybody looking at? Everybody. It's like all these white men with money are trying to turn their thousands of dollars into hundreds of dollars. I don't get it. There's no room for more. There really isn't. I know Stern must be really nervous. The tariff stuff is real. If that hits, it's going to impact anybody who makes games in Europe. It's going to impact all of Stern and where they buy their parts from and with where prices are at. If it really takes effect, we could see a total collapse in the pinball new in box market. We're not there yet. Nobody knows. It's a little bit of a scary world. I have to admit, it doesn't matter what side of the political fence you're on. Everything seems very volatile right now. No ceasefires are staying intact. The economy is all over the place. Sure, things like Tesla stock have been decimated. The media is negative every single day. The vibes are terrible everywhere on both sides of the political parties. Like there's just all this uncertainty. And I think what people realize is when times get that way, people tend to spend less money on things they don't need. And this is not a drug you need for your medical condition. I know we're addicted to pinball, but we'll see what happens. It's going to be a crazy 2025. Okay. So going back, so we're going to get medieval madness. Then I think the next game gang, I think the next game is going to be Harry Potter. I think we're going to see Harry Potter in mid April. I don't think we're going to see Harry Potter at a show. They don't need to launch this game at a show. It's going to have a crazy, awesome launch video. And then we're going to get King Kong. And then I think we're going to get the barrels of fun game. And I think it's going to be dune. I know they were handing out bags of sand. Apparently they did that at pinball at the beach. I still think they're sandbagging us. I mean it. I hope they're sandbagging us. Here's the thing. I think they've allowed too much of anti-dune sentiment to grow all of these weeks and months. And if they do have Dune, they should have got in front of all of the negativity and all the people that don't want it. Because I'm seeing the same thing happening to this game. If it is Dune, the same sort of negative sentiment built around Elton John and Jersey Jack should have got in front of it. They should have steered the narrative into a more positive space, but they didn't. They let all the negativity grow. And then when they released the game, it was like confirmation of something you didn't want. Instead of spending weeks getting you excited, ripping the bandaid off. Yes, it's going to be Elton John, but here's why you're going to love it. They're not doing that with Dune. And I think if it is Dune and they think they're just going to like reveal it with a hundred in a box and all of a sudden everybody's mind is going to change and want it. I think they're mistaken. David, come on. You know marketing. I know these guys know it. The problem is, is everybody thinks their baby's beautiful. Chris Turner thinks he can sell hundreds more of a game than he really can. Dune is not a theme that a thousand people are going to drop like $12,000 on. It's not. And it's going to get crazy, baby. But one thing we all do know, the biggest narcissistic, sociopathic, insecure pinball podcaster. Yours truly will be giving you content more than everybody else out there. And most of you will never raise your subscriptions. And I don't care because unlike every single pinball company out there, I ain't ever raising my prices. It could be 30 years from now, be a seven-year-old man making, you know, $5 a month from guys worth $50 million. dollars. Canada out. Thank you. you