oh happy friday everybody we made it through another week of not buying a new inbox le game d and d le's are still for sale not surprised they couldn't move 740 i think everyone's just looking at the resale stuff, it's just getting brutal. I mean, if I'm Stern and Jersey Jack, like it's hard to avoid what we've put our customers through, right? It's like you made something at this price based on this theme. And this is what the industry thinks of the value in just one year. You go two years and it's brutal. But I'm excited about pinball in 2025. I really do believe the past is the past. These companies have learned a lesson and we're going to get some really awesome stuff this year. I also think there's going to be some big misses. I think there's going to be some big gambles and bets that don't work out. But if I had to put all of my chips on two bets on the roulette table, it would be Jersey Jack Pinball's Harry Potter and it would be Keith Elwin's King Kong. Those are the two games. If you want to get your money back, trust me, those two games and not just your money back. If you want to have the best pinball of the year, I am going to make a bet that those will be the two games we talk about the most, the two games that win most of the accolades at the end of the year when we hand out those awards nobody cares about anymore. They're going to be the two games that sell out on day one. They're going to be the two games that are going to actually go up in value. I know people think I'm crazy for saying this, but people believe me. Even if Harry Potter is $15,000, they're going to sell out on day one of the CEs. And then you're going to be like, I should have listened to Kaneda because now I want to get in on the FOMO Harry Potter train and they're all $18,000. Now, do I think any pinball machine is worth $18,000? No. Do I think Harry Potter's gonna stay at 18,000 once they make 7,000 LEs of the game? No, right? Just look at what happened to GNR, right? Those CEs, there's only 500, and they were worth like 18 until they made like 6,000 LEs of the game, because it's still gonna be the same exact game. If the LE version of Harry Potter didn't have Harry in it, then yeah, the game might be worth a lot more in the CE trim, but they're going to give you a lot in the LE version of the game. The only thing different is going to be artistic. There's going to be maybe an exclusive topper that does nothing for gameplay, but trust me, people, you're going to want to get those two games and just be on a list and just be in on the fun. The hype train is going to leave the station when those two games come out. Now, look, everybody else, everybody else, I don't really know what's going to pop. Are we really going to get that excited again when Medieval Madness comes back? Probably not. Are we really going to get excited if Barrels of Fun makes the new Dune movies? Let's talk about this because Dune just got, I think, 10 Oscar nominations and everyone's like, oh, yeah, see? It's a really popular thing. And what could possibly go wrong if we make a pinball version of this really popular thing, right? It's sci-fi. It's Dune. And I'm just here to tell you, if Barrels of Fun is making the new Dune movies, it's going to be a hard sell. Now, they only need to sell around 1,000. So will they sell 1,000 of the new Dune movie games if that's the theme? I don't know for sure, but I've got a little bit of a good feeling about it. I just don't feel like this is what we want. And I also think this coming out, if it is this, amidst the other games that are available, I think a lot of you, be honest, I'd rather own Dungeons and Dragons than the new Dune movies. I think some people would rather have the old David Lynch Dune movie. There was just one movie, right? Not two. but here's the thing with all the pinball. You've got to kind of give the people now what they want and it doesn't even matter if you're boutique anymore or a big boy like Stern and Jersey Jack. You got to kind of give the people what they want. All of these games now, if you think about it, on average, they're around $10,000 and I don't know how much you make. I know how much I make, my wife makes, our collective income. I wish I put a lot more into certain stocks. I have a more conservative investment portfolio, but I know this. Most of you, your disposable income to buy pinball machines, I would assume comes from you make more in a month than your cost of living, than your bills. So you have some extra money every month that you put away into either savings or investments. And you know, some of you make a lot. Some of you make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Some of you make hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. Some of you make a few million dollars a year. Some of you might even be a billionaire. But some of you might just make $100,000 a year or $60,000 a year or $150,000 and you've got a couple of young kids. I know that if you're going to take $15,000 of disposable income and put it into a pinball machine that you have to be pretty well off. But if you're pretty well off, you're usually pretty smart with your money and you don't want to lose money and you don't want to like go in early on a stock. Imagine if you bought a stock, right? You put $15,000 into a stock and a six months later it was worth $8,000. You would never go near that stock again with the 10 foot pole, or you'd want to buy that stock at $7,000 and just enjoy it and hope it goes up one day and have some fun. Now look, I know pinball is not an investment. People say that, but that's not a hundred percent true. Everywhere you spend your money. You want to kind of feel like, A, you're getting the enjoyment out of it, but B, you didn't get ripped off. And that's the thing. I think that's the better way to frame this entire conversation. I don't think anybody thinks about pinball like an investment investment. I just think we want to buy pinball machines and feel like we spent what the product is worth and that it should hold some of that value long enough to justify what my initial purchase price was Remember this is a luxury item It is a luxury item that you don need Same way a Porsche is a luxury item A Rolex is a luxury item If you decide to collect Pokemon cards or collect like Star Wars figures, that's a luxury purchase. You know, it's a toy for a grown adult. And when you buy toys, yes, you should buy them because you want to own those toys and those toys bring you happiness. And that really should be the guiding motivator around every new pin purchase, right? I always say this, play a game, make sure you love it. And then if you want it and you need to own it, right? That's the other thing is like, we're in a new golden age of pinball where there's so many good locations now. There's so many places to go play these pins and enjoy them. And for a lot of you out there, I think the smart thing to do is like form more communities locally. If you form communities on a local level and get more people into your local community, into pinball, you all have friends on the block, right? Imagine if you could just divide and conquer who owns what. Jimmy down the block is going to get the D&D. I'm going to get the King Kong. Then he's going to go get Harry Potter. And then each of us doesn't have to spend $45,000. We each spend $15,000 and can play these games in the best possible environment. But you know why we don't do that. There's something weird about needing to own it all myself. I need to own all of this myself. I'll give you a little analogy to this. I'm an identical twin. I think most people know that by now. I have an identical twin. My whole life growing up, we could share everything. We could share every single article of clothing. We were the same size, the same shoe size, the same hat size, the same everything, but we didn't want to. We wanted it ourselves. I wanted my own pair of shoes. We easily could have taken turns rotating who wears what on what day, but there was something about it's mine. This is my pinball machine. Nobody else's. I can play it at any hour. I can do whatever I want. I can put all the gaudy mods in the world into this machine. I own this. And this is an interesting hobby, everybody, because these things were never meant to be in homes. They were never meant to be owned by you. They were meant to be owned by operators who spent like $3,000 on a Twilight Zone. You know why they spent $3,000 on Twilight Zone because that game made them $9,000. Think about that for a minute. You bought a game back in the day that was super popular and your $3,000 pinball machine put $9,000 into your pocket. You take away the $3,000 to buy it. You made yourself $6,000. So were these machines not investments by operators? Do operators not look at these things like investments? They did. So I think it is totally ignorant and completely juvenile. All the people that say pinball is not an investment, that's what it was always meant to be. It was never meant to be in your home. And so when you think about it like that, try to apply that old world sort of approach to pinball to modern pricing. Are you going to spend $15,000 on a Godfather CE, put it on location and make three times what you spent on that game, is it going to bring in $45,000 in earnings? Absolutely not. You won't even break even on the machine. And we're seeing now a Godfather CE for sale, people, for a $6,000 loss. It's just funny to me. and the guy selling the machine with 100 plays. But here's the thing about 2025. We know all this about price, right? They know all this about price. Trust me, what keeps Seth Davis up at night and George Gomez up at night, it's not just designing the best machines. They are witness to what has happened to their industry. I think they had this kind of feeling that this hobby would just keep growing exponentially, that somehow all of these new pinheads would get into the hobby and buy everything that the good times would never stop. Remember during COVID, these guys were selling out of everything. Distributors and dealers were selling out of all of their inventory and they were watching an incredible amount of money being thrown at games that were hard to sell when they first came out. For those of you who are new, you don't remember this, but like a Stranger Things LE was like $8,500, $9,000 and nobody wanted them. They sat in boxes for a year. And then at the height of COVID, a Stranger Things LE was like $18,000. Same thing with Jurassic Park LE. Same thing with a lot of like the older games. Kiss LE. Games were going for like double, not like just a little bit, double what they were new in box. And so the manufacturers saw that and they decided to keep increasing the prices to get more of that money in-house. But look, it all cooled down. I'm going to use a cargument. The same thing's happening in the automotive world. When I got my Honda Civic Type R, guess how much money it was? $34,000. It was the best $34,000 you could possibly spend. A Honda Civic Type R today is $47,000 to $48,000. That's a lot more money for what is ostensibly the same car. And guess why Honda did that? Because they saw all the dealers charging $5,000 over to get one because it was such a good value. And now that they're charging $46,000, $48,000 for the cars, guess what? Nobody really wants it anymore the way they used to. You can walk into a dealer and get one below sticker. And when you buy one now, good luck trying to get someone to buy a used one for anywhere near what you spent on your car. Let me tell you another quick thing about a Honda Civic Type R. When I bought mine for $34,000, I drove it for three years. I had 12,000 miles on it. During the height of COVID, I drove it into a Honda dealership. Remember when there was like a chip shortage and you couldn't get cars? They gave me a check for $36,000 for my car after three years of ownership and 12,000 miles. I'm laughing all the way to the bank when I cash that check. Now the same exact car is going for like 24, 26,000 with the same miles. But we need greatness. We want greatness in pinball. And the reason why I think we're going to get greatness in 2025 is real simple. I think there's going to be something that there hasn't been in a long time in some of these games I think there going to be a new level of passion a new level of passion combined with talent And I think that a really important thing Like you could be really passionate about wanting to make a pinball machine and end up with like, I don't know, like Cosmic Carnival, end up with like the Blues Brothers, right? Everyone who makes a pinball machine is very passionate. Do they have the talent to execute something that can be amazing in 2025. And here's why I think Eric Meunier might actually have the winner. Because Eric Meunier to me is like an interesting guy, right? I think he's got a lot of really interesting ideas. He can't be like ignorant to the feedback about some of his decisions in some of his games, but he's had a really rocky pinball sort of existence in my honest opinion. He made Pirates of the Caribbean. They released the game. Pat Lawler made them yank out some stuff. They took about a year after revealing the game to get the game on the line. By the time they got the game on the line, they streamed the game so much that nobody really wanted it. And then the games sat. They sat for a long time. Nobody wanted it. And then Leonard Abbas was like, screw this, we're not making any more. And he pulled the plug on the game really early on and never made more. And that is why the Pirates of the Caribbean games are worth a fortune, because when you think about it, only a thousand of one of the most fully featured games in pinball history, one of the nicest looking CEs Jersey Jack has ever done. and it's just filled with toys like Widebody Game. Yeah, they don't have all the assets, but what they did do was create one of the greatest atmospheric pinball machines of all time. David Thiel's music alone is worth the price of that machine. If you've never stood over a Pirates and just cranked the volume and listened, not just to the music, all the sound effects, what they created in that game, you will not hear anything since then that pulls you in in an atmospheric way, quite like Pirates of the Caribbean. Because like since then, since David has left Jersey Jack, their games have sounded like slot machines and they just don't come at you with nearly as much richness and soul and the sound. It's all been a little tinny and metallic. And once Jersey Jack went down that road and lost David's input into their games, I think their games did lose a lot of that soul. So I'm hoping David Thiel is going to be back working on Harry Potter. I know that Eric wanted him to come back and work on The Godfather, but it's maybe a good thing he didn't because that game, there was no saving it. So Eric did Pirates of the Caribbean, and then he did arguably his most popular game ever, easily his most popular game ever, and maybe Jersey Jack Pinball's greatest selling game of all time in Guns N' Roses. I'm not going to debate anything other than Guns N' Roses was a phenomenal success for Jersey Jack. It was the greatest launch video of all time. It is the greatest theme integrated music pin of all time. I will fight anybody on that. The game suffered from playfields falling apart. It suffered from too many multi balls, which you can kind of dial down, but it's kind of the way Keith coded the game. I still don't like that. And it had mushy flippers. You can fix the flippers now. You can kind of mitigate the multi balls. The layout's still not the best, but it's a phenomenal game. It has soul. Guns and Roses has soul. When you turn on GNR and that spotlight's going back and forth and you're drinking a whiskey and you start playing something like Out to Get Me, you're in it, man. Like anyone who's not vibing with that game and doesn't feel the energy that's captured in Guns and Roses, you're the one without a soul, not the game. All right, then he goes on to Godfather. Godfather is like this. Godfather is like asking you to sleep with someone you don't want to sleep with. Like, think about that for a minute. Imagine if you had to sleep with someone that you don't want to sleep with. What is that going to be like? What's that experience going to be like for both people in bed? That is what Godfather is. it is Jack Guarnieri asking Eric Minier to sleep with a theme that he doesn't want to sleep with and you can tell by the entire game this is something he didn't want to make this is something the coder didn't want to make it's just a game in general with no passion no soul there's nothing in that game that makes you feel like they spent all night trying to figure out how to do this It is the most going through the motions pinball machine I've ever seen. And the resale value of it reflects that. So you take a guy that had his first game cut short. His second game was a sales phenomenon. His third game, which should have catapulted him into a much better place within the community, was a total dud. And then you hand him something that is his personal favorite theme. Harry Potter. He told me when I was standing next to him, he's like, this is the thing, man. Like, this is the thing, me and my, I don't know if his girlfriend or his wife, I forget. Sorry, Eric. He's like, this is what we grew up loving. We watched these over. And I will say this, he never said Harry Potter because I was like, oh man, you really like the Matrix that much, Eric? No, he's talking about Harry Potter. And so like, you give the guy the thing that he loves more than anything. And then you tell me that this thing is not going to be special, that this thing is not going to like just crush it. Now, look, do I think you always have to have a personal love affair with the theme to make a great pinball machine? Clearly you do not. Do you think Keith Elwin was the biggest Godzilla fan on the planet? No, the bigger Godzilla fans were over at Spooky pinball. And if spooky pinball made Godzilla, it wouldn't have been anywhere near as good as what Keith Elwin made. So look, you know, it's a little bit of both. You want to be excited. I think what you just need to do is you need to be excited about the assignment. It needs to be something, if you're a designer, you see the potential, you see the opportunities, you see what could go into the game, you see how you could arrange it all in such a fun way for the player. And that's what Godzilla is, right? It's so awesome. And you should see a game under glass that is basically that theme's world coming to life. And that is why I think Harry Potter is going to be that. Once you hear the theme song, you see Hogwarts, you got to have the lights twinkling like the candles, the staircase moving, the magic of Harry Potter. It's going to come through in this game. I'm telling you, it's going to come through in this game. And everybody's like, Kaneda, are you Win Schilling this game Kaneda Kaneda Kaneda be realistic It Jersey Jack They going to mess it up and you not wrong The one thing that keeps me up at night wondering how they going to get this wrong It real simple to me There two things they going to mess up They're going to mute the clips. They're going to remove the soul from the film. The things people love about Harry Potter, the things Eric loves about Harry Potter. I'm nervous. They're going to mute all of that. If they don't, yes, they know they can't. and if they do I think it's going to be the biggest fumble in all of pinball and the other thing is it's too empty they didn't put enough magic in it that's why people don't want avatar it's not just the theme people avatar is empty it is one of the most empty games I've ever seen it has absolutely nothing mechanically in it that is that interesting it's like diverters are the toys in that game. It doesn't work. UV ink is not a mech. UV ink doesn't require like a lot of engineering. I can walk into Spencer's gifts in a mall and get a freaking $10 poster and have a more wow UV ink experience than I can on a $15,000 avatar. It's just not there people. And it's going of fade from our memories so fast and it's on them man it's on them they didn't put enough in it i just don't see where the mechanical magic is in avatar i also don't feel the soul of pandora in the game you know you got the tree of life the most pivotal monument in all of pandora that lights up in a bioluminescent way that is like the main thing in the first movie it's the heart of damn Pandora and you represent it in a pinball machine for $15,000 with a flat plastic. Get the F out with that level of laziness and cheapness. Cake toppers, ballerinas that look like 30 cent figures in Elton John, cake toppers and Toy Story people. Remember when they tried to deny that? And then you go online and they're on Amazon for like eight bucks. You put $8 cake toppers into a $15,000 machine. That's why Toy Story CE is now selling for eight grand. You lost $7,000 because they put $7 cake toppers in the game. So Jersey Jack needs to wake up with this game. They need to get someone like Lior making sculpts for this game. That Hogwarts needs to look amazing. They need to go back to what stuff looked like in games like Wizard of Oz and games like Pirates of the Caribbean. This game needs something as exciting as the upper play field in Pirates of the Caribbean. but I believe it's going to have it. I believe it's going to have it. I believe in Eric Minier because if this game doesn't do well, just think about it for a minute. This is his dream theme. And if he misses the mark here, how are you ever going to wake up and want to go see the next Eric Minier movie? How is he going to want to wake up every day for the rest of his life and know that he had his dream theme. He had his shot at making a masterpiece pinball machine. Do you think he wants to wake up and feel like he didn't quite execute it the way he wanted to, of course he's not going to want to feel that way. He's got a billionaire backer. He's got everything going in his favor. He's got the biggest challenge, right? Because everybody's expectations are through the roof, but I think he's going to deliver. I don't even have to go down this road with Keith Elwin. He's going to crush it. King Kong is going to be insane. The big mech that he's excited about is obviously the mech in King Kong. This guy knows how to make a game that when you play it for the first time, you feel like it's an old pair of sneakers you've been wearing your whole life. It just feels right. It feels good. Everything about it just feels awesome. And then from there, it gets even better. You learn the combos. You learn all the different ball pathways that you didn't realize right away. And then it gets even better. You realize he's got the best code and software team in the history of pinball. He absolutely does. And what they're going to put into that game is going to be insane. And it's going to make owning it something you're going to want to own for the rest of your life, because that's what Keith Elwin and his team does. They make games that you never really want to sell. They make games where like, if you only had one pinball machine in your home or in your collection, and you have a Keith Elwin machine that you'll be good in the world of pinball for the rest of your life. He's that good. The games are that good. All of them are that good. They really are. Avengers is amazing. If you only had Avengers in your house, I get the code is annoying because it's like complex, but guess what? If you owned an Avengers only, you're going to learn that code. I know nobody wants to, but you would learn it eventually, and it would make for a much more satisfying experience, and the shots are super cool, it's a theme everybody knows you would only own that as your only pin if you were like a marvel dork and an avengers nerd and then you'd still be happy because you'd wake up you see thanos's glove and you just have a good time playing a pinball version of something you love everybody there's way too much negativity in the world there is there's way too much division i got stuck into it a little bit in the chat the other day talking politics i still have friends calling me idiots and this and that. I hate the division in the world. We come to pinball to have a good time. We come to pinball to escape it all. We come to pinball to look at what these pinball companies are going to put in a box, a very finite space, but a lot of money, a lot of money's got to go into that finite space. They want a lot of our money to get that finite space from their factory into our homes, into our barcades, into our locations. Pinball was never meant to be in our home, but now that it is something that you're going to put in your home. I mean, I'm looking to buy a bulldog and they're $3,000. An English bulldog will bring me more happiness, more joy, more love. It is criminal that a pinball machine is five times the price of what an English bulldog is, but that's where we are. It's not even close which one will make you happier, which one will love you more, which one will you think about for the rest of your life. And here's the other crazy part. When you have a dog you love and someone knocked on your door and said, I'll give you a million dollars for your dog, you wouldn't sell it. You would not sell your dog. If someone knocked on your door and said, hey, I'll give you $6,000 right now for your Godfather CE, you'd freaking take it. Everybody, I love you. Happy Friday. Thank you for being a subscriber. Bring one friend into the show. Let's get to 800. Kaneda out. you