BlahCade Pinball Podcast this is the BlahCade Pinball Podcast i'm your host chris freebus aka shut your trap joining me as always halfway across the world it's jared morgan hello there I'm here down in Aussie land Yeah you know Due to the curvature of the earth I can't quite see the wave But you know Yeah it's like You've got really really really high So you can see down where I am Yes meanwhile all the flat earthers are going No you can see them So Last week folks Obviously we did our big VR episode and thank you for everybody that bore that out of 100 minutes of VR. That was a long episode, but it seems like you guys really enjoyed it, got a lot of good info out of it, and don't worry, like we said, we will be doing some more. But I did want to make one correction, and that is, so Jared, you were talking about how when we're in ZenFX 2 VR and you've got your three pinball tables and I was complaining that, oh, I have to look at the screen, pop up the menu of all the tables, select which table is going to go where, and you were like, no, you just do a simple button push. And I was like, I can't do that. Turns out I can. You just need to be aware that you can do it. Exactly. So, yes, that kind of eliminated one of those small gripes that I had that it was like, Oh, yeah, I can just cycle through real easy, and there they are. I just wanted to bring that point up. And then there was another thing that we completely forgot to mention, and this falls in the realm of, oh, come on, really? With the Stern Bimble Arcade app, when you score high enough that you can get your initials up on the DMD, great let's go into our initials on the dmd and what do you get presented with big old dmd in front of your face to enter those initials in and i'm like but why i can see the dmd perfectly fine i am in virtual world i don't need you to put that up there right smack dab in my face break the third wall or the fourth wall or whatever it's called yeah uh so that just falls into that category once again of things that made you hyper aware that you are in vr as opposed to just in a room reality um then that being said zen kind of does the same thing in terms of once your table is your game is over up pops their menu and it starts doing all your super score stuff I think the difference of why that doesn't bother me so much as the Stern one is simply because, again, the DMD entry is right there. Super Score isn't going to appear on a DMD entry. And as soon as you do your DMD entry on Stern, then boom, pops the menu for playing the game. So it's almost like a double menu as opposed to just a single-layer menu. Anyway, it's just one of those quirks that just kind of like... The other thing that's a bit weird with Stern is where they position their menus as well. There's two actual, like, spatial positions. They position all their game menus. Sometimes it's quite close to you, and sometimes it's a little bit further away as well. Like, there's no consistency in when these overlays exist in virtual space. Okay. So, yeah, I've noticed that as well. It's subtle, but it's definitely different positioning. There was one other thing, and I can't remember if I mentioned it. I think I mentioned it in the show. Correct me if I'm wrong, Jared. But I was talking about how the table slope on the tables, it almost looked like it was always pointing down. Yeah, you did mention that. That was really kind of bothersome to me. I tried something. What did you do? Well, when setting where the table is, I tried looking directly straight ahead. Typically, I was looking down at the play field and setting the button, right? Yeah. Instead, I looked straight ahead and I set the button for setting the table. And then I looked down and it no longer was sloping down. It suddenly then looked more realistic to me, looked better. so that might have been also one of those little quirks where it's like yeah because I was looking down it was making it almost like I was hovering over the table or something I don't know it was weird VR perception that was within Zen I did not try it on the other two games but I imagine it's probably going to be the same way for all of them because all three I was experiencing that on you know what is interesting And I haven't experienced what you're experiencing. And the reason is that I don't have to worry about configuring my VR space to line up with a controller. Right. So because I'm just sitting in my chair, I don't have to reposition anything in Xen. It just works. Yeah. So I wouldn't have actually seen any table rake perception issues because I never have to reposition anything. so that's probably why i was not sure what you're really getting at with that last week so that explains it probably again we're coming we're talking about quirks between me using how many years old is the rift it's like what four or five years something like that old tech versus the latest tech that oculus has and how people are programming their software to interact with it So a lot of my issues that I was having in VR by using the Rift corrected with Jared using the Quest 2. Yeah. So. Okay. That's better. Enough of the VR talk. Like I said, we did enough of that last time. We just wanted to throw that out there and get that cleared up, kind of updating in the past week. Just a little bit of show erasa. Yes. That's what we had to do. Yes. This week, just a small little news announcement from Zen. It was pretty trivial, really, right? Yeah, you know, nothing. Just a little thing called the Pinball Show. The Pinball Show is Zen's new way of doing communication. so in the past it would be them sending out a trailer to like IGN and we would get the trailer also but then we would have to wait until IGN had already aired the trailer and then maybe we could air the trailer and then maybe we could have Mel on to do some talking about if we could get everything aligned because believe me getting our schedules aligned with Mel's schedule depending on his... No mean feat. Yeah. I mean, especially depending on sometimes he was in bootpest and was trying to do that. Ooh, that's rough. It was going to be bad for some time zone and it's usually Australia. Yeah. Not to mention, you know, our subscription base is not exactly large. No, that's right. You know, although we could get the message out, we're not going to get it out nearly as well as what IGN could get it out. And now, not nearly as well as what Zen themselves can do by having a special channel. Exactly. So, the Pinball Show. Pinball Show is going to be a monthly show, and it's going to have Zen announcements. And so, Zen pretty much came out the gate with a rather large announcement. I'm just going to go ahead and play the trailer for you guys of that first bit okay so there you go there's a new pinball effects folks in the works and it's just going to be called pinball effects not pinball effects 4 it's just pinball effects that's not going to cause any confusion at all but it's a new font so it's a completely new game yes and as you saw there there's things like they're mentioning that there's going to be Battle Royale there's new IPs that are coming new gameplay types all that so we're going to we're going to kind of get into that and break it down discuss these things we're going to kind of show some highlights from the show and unpack everything that is being said with regards to that here's the thing though that just kind of sets me off though alright what triggers you Chris is it going to be 60 seconds of rage from Chris oh it's going to be more than 60 seconds strap in folks yeah so you go into some comments or you go into certain reddit threads or discord threads whatever after this show aired and people were like It was an announcement of an announcement. Yeah, I did see that. It's like, folks, they just confirmed that there's a new Pinball FX version coming out. What, that's not big enough for you? That's not major enough for you? Well, apparently not. Look at the YouTube comments of the first episode. Right. Because then they're like, well, but you didn't give us any details of it. You didn't say when it's coming. sure they did it's sometime in 2021 yeah take a wild guess when did fx coming this year yeah probably not in the next month folks when they say the next year let's let's put at least a six month distance from where we are now on it and that's like at the earliest i'm guessing we ain't seeing this puppy until end of third quarter probably fourth quarter of the year to make maybe to line up with Spring in the US or something like that. No, Spring in the US is about to happen. Sorry, Winter in the US. Yes, Winter in the US. So I'm thinking, I would guess probably not seeing it until September or October. That's just throwing that out there. And I'm basing that off of when FX3 was released. Similar time frame. when we heard about it to when it actually came out there was a long lead up time so right okay see again that was something that i wasn't um privy to because i was on mobile at that stage i had no cares for the pc so yeah i didn't really experience that sort of uh lead time with announcement to delivery so that's interesting that it's a seems like a reasonable assumption then to sort of base it on yeah that's that's what i'm kind of guessing but so oh pinball effects brand new version whatever that may entail that wasn't good enough but then oh battle royale well i don't like battle royale then so if you don't like it then apparently that wasn't good enough for you um and instead what do people just like you didn't kill us any new tables yeah too bad because guess what folks it's a monthly show they're probably going to save content for when the stuff was actually about to come out not you know blow the cherry on the first show go here's the whole year laid out for you but bye they're all shows yeah no no that's not how not how these shows work no not not in the least so um anyway that's that that's kind of my it's like i just laugh when things aren't good enough for them and then the the topper of this and this is kind of maybe it kind of cracked me up people were mad that they didn't mention anything about vr and i don't know how much of that is us to blame for it yeah having done our gigantic vr show a couple of days before. Because apparently we are the canary in the mine for the studio, apparently. We like to reveal everything before the main user bed comes up. Because, you know, I don't know. Even though we clearly stated that we knew that a VR announcement was going to be coming probably sometime in February, based off of what Mel had said specifically a few weeks earlier in the Arcade 1-Up Weekly show. Yeah. So, why are you then going, but you didn't, it ain't February. Well, it's going to be by the time people watch this, but it wasn't February. That's right. Yeah, we're not quite there yet. We're nearly there. Nearly there. Just got to wait a little bit. Next month, I would think, probably on the show. Possibly. And it's possible that, as all things game developing, maybe February doesn't be the month that they announce it. Maybe they save it for March. Who knows? Could even be April. Well, we don't know. So anyway, I just laugh that when people don't get the announcement that they want, which again, I don't know what announcement they did want, but if they don't get the announcement that they want, then everything is utter trash. Yeah, yeah. Junk. Horrible. Horrible. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Anyway, let's move on to the next bit of this here. ...effects for, you know, whatever. There's a lot going on with this game, and when we summed up all the pieces and we looked at the big picture, we realized that we were actually really rebooting pinball effects. Okay, I'm going to pause it right there. Key word. Mel's saying, we are really rebooting pinball effects. Reboot's a pretty big thing. It's not just a continuation, a reboot. Right. Reboot entails a lot. So keep that in mind with everything else that Mel says. We needed to just kind of start over from scratch. We have new technology we're working in. There's new consoles. New technology we're working in and new consoles. Well, not quite. We'll get to the new technology part. But new consoles, yeah. PS5, the new Xbox. Nintendo hasn't officially come out and said anything yet but the rumors are rife that there's going to be a Switch Pro I've been saying that for years but no I mean like the steam is gathering with there being a Switch Pro coming yeah it makes sense to do it it's well and truly up for a reboot like the hardware is getting a bit old now yeah okay let's see what else he has to say I consider this our next gen platform there's a lot of new features There's maybe some new business models. Ah, maybe there's some new business models. Let's pause on that for a moment. Because, Jared, people are freaking out over possible new business models. People are going, oh, my God, it's going to be subscription. It's going to be a freemium game. I'm not going to be able to own my pinball. Let's lower the temperature, folks. because I'm not saying that subscription stuff might not be here, but as a whole, I don't think they're going to turn on all the consoles and on the PC and on mobile and everything across it. They're going to ditch everything that they've done for the past 14 years and go with a completely different kind of service that everybody would scream bloody murder over. no no because they know that people don't like it yeah really but for like for the main stuff that you want to be playing all the time you know your tables everything people want to actually get permanent entitlements to those now i don't say own them because you never own anything with dlc you have a right to use it yeah and people that there another thing that people don get like when you go and buy a pack through Steam that a license for you to use the software It doesn mean you own the software Just remember that. All right. So we're going to actually go again. We'll unpack some of this even further a little bit later on, but let's keep on going on with what this is. This new feature like Pinball Royale. And so it just didn't really fit into the FX3 framework. and the game is not packaged the way that you knew it from before. So it is a total reboot. I expect this will be a platform that we support for the next huge phase. You're not going to see FX2 come. Consoles are operating differently now. Technology changes much faster. And so to support that, you just need a game that can operate across platforms. That's really what FX is designed to do. So there you go. it's they're they're taking into consideration the future of every other you know whatever this game can be playing being played on um you know there is like you said specifically it's not fx2 just becoming fx3 with you know slightly different upgrade of graphics and that's it you know, it's literally taking all we've learned about pinball since we started doing pinball and turning that into a brand new experience. Right. Now, you think about this too. Zen just announced, and I obviously was in the works for a while, that they, you know, got bought out by, what was that name? Embracer Group, I think. Embracer. Yeah, by Embracer. And Mel talked about having to have a 10-year plan. Yeah. I suspect that a lot of priorities got shifted. Because we didn't think that... Probably. We didn't think that there was going to be a new Pinball FX version anytime soon. It didn't seem to really warrant it, other than people wanting online play. But other than that, nobody was complaining per se about the graphics. I mean they were the engine they're using up until this announcement has been pretty good the graphics are perfectly reasonable, I mean it was able to handle the new physics changes they were doing pretty well so you know it probably wasn't like to the point where if you compare that with Farsight when we were saying you guys really need to look at a new engine because yours is aging badly, it wasn't nearly to that point no because i mean they've just done the refresh uh from fx2 to fx3 that was a refresh yeah that was that was only three years ago i think um so pretty much it was pretty much aligned with the new consoles back then right like yeah yeah yeah it was at the it was at the ps3 ps4 shift um so i i really think that this i don't know why merger i guess is a good term for it um probably accelerated plans and reprioritized where they were basically saying, hey, you guys need to be on top of these new consoles, and here's an influx of cash to let you pay for doing that. Because that's the hardest thing. When you stop what you're doing in order to do the next thing, well, you probably need to hire a whole bunch more people if you don't want to stop completely the other, and that requires a whole new set of capital. Boom, all of a sudden you've got a group that says, here's some capital, make it happen. There's two ways, right? So you could do it the way you said or you could stop really releasing as much content as you normally do for a year and work out what you do. Right. So you don't necessarily have to release anything if you're sitting on a big nest egg of cash from an investor, essentially, because you've got the money there to pay people and keep the lights on. So, hmm, interesting. Yeah, anyway, that's kind of that. Now, let's go ahead and that was kind of the overview of what Mel was talking about, of everything that was going to be coming into this. Let's go into the next part, see what he has to say there, because I wound up... The Pinball Effects... Or the Pinball Effects show. The Pinball Show didn't give all the information. There was some more information that wound up popping up on Reddit and Discord, and I wound up swimming through some of that to try and expand upon things that Mel is saying. Let's see exactly what he's saying next, and maybe we can get into some of that. The platform question is difficult right now. We're announcing the game a little early because we just wanted to get conversational about it. I would love to confirm platforms. Ideally, I can tell you exactly where this is going to ship. There's a lot of business in this game because we have so much licensed content. Okay, so, yeah. It's not saying what platforms it's going to be on. Part of that is because of all the licensing that they're having to deal with. So think about this. again if they are if nintendo is coming out with a nintendo pro switch obviously talk about that right they can't talk about that yeah that's right um so they're going to wait yeah they're going to wait for nintendo to say yes you can now talk about that it's the same case with the Arcade 1-Up, Zen couldn't say anything about Arcade 1-Up until Arcade 1-Up said something about it. Yeah, they're running the show. There's a lot of licensing going on here. You've seen how cagey Mel has been regarding the Mandalorian table, saying I can say there's a Mandalorian table, I can say it's supposed to be in spring, that's it, I'm not saying anything else. Because, don't want to tick off the Yeah, don't want to tick off Lucasfilm. No, that's not something you want to mess around with. Right. And again, this is part of the expansion and growing of their company. Having been expanded upon or bought out by Embracer, we're looking at a much larger scope of things. So if you're wondering why the information here is a little bit cagey and not complete... It's veiled for a reason. Yeah. they've got to be super careful at the moment until all the ducks are nicely in a row and it's publicly known knowledge from the actual person or group or company that's actually producing the console or the thing. Right. Announcements are hard. So I wanted to focus in on one of the Reddit comments. this came from Mel and it says we will be able to confirm platforms and answer questions about backwards compatibility because that was also a huge question people then throwing out once we have worked out some of the outstanding licensing hurdles involved I do promise to let you know if there are any tables not coming to the new platform I know we do not did not handle this well with FX2 to FX3 previously that's pretty big admission kind of an obvious addition yeah because they did really get right over the coals with that there's a lot of I mean even today there's ill will still floating around about that yeah so and I know that some of that ill will is that people are like well I just transferred the game from my Xbox to the new Xbox but in order to do that it was almost like you had to eliminate your information on the old Xbox and then so then when they want to go download it again on that there is no way of downloading the south park table and uh the you know plants versus zombies or whatever you know some of those other tables that didn't the the football super league football um they're no longer available there on the store so now they're saying hey you know i lost my product and there's no way for me to get it back um so yeah i think that there is where they're saying hey look we'll communicate what's going to be transferring over, what's not going to be transferring over, in case you need to get your purchases in now. Yeah. I lost my entitlement to play the content. It's not, again, DLCs, you don't own it. Right. But I do find it interesting that that phrasing here, worked out compatibility, backwards compatibility, once we have worked out some of the outstanding licensing hurdles involved. That must mean when they're talking to all the studios and partners that are in the game, they go, so how are you going to let us use your properties that we've got in there at the moment? Will you let us have them on the previous platform as well as the new platform? Or do you want a clean start? Because here's something that happened with that transference from FX2 to FX3. Because it's a new platform, new licensing contracts had to be issued. And basically all the licensors, the license holders, are like, Sweet! People are going to have to buy the game again. We get another bite of the apple. Zen absorbed that cost. They paid off the licensors. and said, no, we're going to let the people carry over. I don't know how much that's going to happen this time again. I mean, it might happen again. It might not. It's really hard to say. Obviously, Mel's not saying yet because they're trying to work that out because some licensors might be cool with that. Others might be like, no, we want to be paid again for our product. And the best way to think about this is you have Star Wars on DVD. hey, now you want to buy the 4K, or now you want it in 4K. You don't just go to Target and be like, hey, so give me my 4K. Here's my old DVD. Yeah. Like, can I have a new one now? No. No, it doesn't work like that. You want the upgrade? You want that upgrade? You've got to pay. And, you know, the studios are like, yeah, we get another bite of the apple. It's the studios doing it. Yeah, it's like they're not seeing it in the game industry, and, like, they're going, hang on a second. We're not sure we like that. Yeah. Because, I mean, they'd be like, okay, great. So we had all these people buy our game five years ago when it came out. Why can't we have them buy it again? Yeah. So, again, I don't know. What I'm saying here is probably what Zen is hearing from the licensors. Yeah, this is the language they'd be hearing. These are the conversations they'd probably be entertaining now. It's like, hey, we want more money, Zen. And Zen's going to be like, yeah, but that's going to tick off our customer base. the licensors are like, who cares? Yeah, it's like, well, that's your problem, not ours. We want our money. That's a you problem, not a we problem. That's a you problem. Exactly right. So I imagine that that's what a lot of that has to do with the licensing hurdles. I would not be surprised in the least either if Zen is trying to secure some of those licenses that were lost. I bet I would with fair confidence say that they're probably trying to talk to South Park Studios to be able to re-license that table I wouldn't be surprised if they were talking to Super League and trying to re-license that. I think the Plants vs. Zombies, that's a no-go That's EA Ms. Splosion Man, I don't know nobody really ever seems to remember that one nobody clamors for it yeah so i don't know if they would be going for that one i would love it check this out here's how is this for speculation jared back in the ps3 zen 2 days there was the street fighter 2 table and the ninja gaiden table those were exclusive to PlayStation. Xbox had some exclusive titles to theirs. Well, who else owns the license or has licensing with Capcom for Street Fighter 2? Arcade 1-Up? And gee, if maybe there was a reissue and God, please update the code if you do. Oh yeah. If there was a reissue of the Street Fighter 2 table, that would be packaged really easily into a pinball machine with all the Street Fighter 2 graphics on the side that retailers would probably be like, yes, we do like Street Fighter 2. That cabinet sold well in our stores. Yeah, we'll have this in pinball form. Thank you very much. Yeah. Give us a couple of pellets, thanks. I honestly would not be surprised in the least if that happened. You know, they didn't say, Chris, that, you know, when we asked Mel, you know, does this open up more licensing opportunities? Now you have someone like Arcade 1Up in the mix. And the answer was, well, yeah, in short. And you're trying to break into the Asian market. That's a title that will do that. What other title does Capcom own that is very friendly with the Nintendo crowd? Mega Man. Maybe that kind of thing. I think there's various licensing opportunities that would pop open. There's a few. Oh, God. Let's start this one again. Ooh, if they get in bed with Capcom, could we actually see the Capcom pinball tables that were developed? Oh, now that would be interesting. Yes, folks. It's time for discussions about Big Bang Bar again. yeah highly unlikely well look you know new platform Chris new rating yeah except for that would also require new emulation and there was only 10 tables ever made so boom probably not probably not hey look a very good one for Magic Pixel to pick up I would think we keep on throwing we keep on trying to throw bills to Magic Pixel we really do have these licenses and absolutely do everything with them meanwhile the four guys in the office are going no, no stop it you two we've had enough of hearing from you guys let's see ok I think we can go back into the video and finish off this little section here but right now I can just tell you This is our next-gen platform. Can't confirm specific platforms, but we'll get that out to you as soon as possible. Again, just stay tuned to this show. We'll let you know. So, yeah, again, just more of the can't confirm what platforms it's going to be coming to, but I think we can guess what the obvious ones are. Moving on to the next portion. Yeah, I know PR and marketing are cringing right now, like, Mel, do not spill the beans. I'll tell you this. We have a lot of new IPs coming. partners we've never worked with before. Some things that I've hinted at personally, you've seen me talk about them or hint about them. They're coming this year, you guys. This is the year they're going to hit. You're going to hear about all this news right here on the Pinball Show. This is where you can go now to get these announcements. It's really cool. Yes, some amazing surprises coming. 2021 is going to rock, dude. Seriously, it's going to be really, really off the hook. Okay, so brand new IPs and the things that Mel has been hinting at coming in 2021. So I think in terms of those new IPs, we are looking at, I'm guessing, some more of those Williams DMD, licensed DMD. I don't think they have much choice not to now. They're at the point where that's kind of getting the only things they can really produce that don't have... They're sort of semi-license-free, you know what I mean? I didn include it in the video but at one point Mel mentioned all the previous partners he mentioned Bethesda and Telltale and Valve So all these things that they also... So we also might be talking just plain new IPs for Xen original tables as well. I fully suspect that. Essentially, the Mandalorian isn't a new IP because it's from Star Wars, but... The Mandalorian itself is a new IP. Is a new IP, yeah. Which, by the way, they said that they're going to announce a second Star Wars table in the February pinball show. Even before Jar Jar Binks. Yeah, yeah, that's what I said. I said, it's the Jar Jar Binks table because, you know, me to love some pinsey ball. Says no one ever Yes says no one ever Although I legitimately would like I would like A prequel pack Of the Star Wars tables We need a prequel pack and we need to get Rise of Skywalker I don't care what anybody thinks of the movies I just want All the movies represented in pinball form Yeah that's right But you know you think about how good The only thing like if you were thinking just entertain for a moment at Jar Jar Binks table it would just be you constantly smacking the living out of Jar Jar Binks every match toy every everything would be oh in this mode smack Jar Jar Binks in the head with the ball in this mode please repeat that's all you'd be doing except this time hit him with the nuts his ears act as ball locks you know oh yeah it'll be as him him fumbling the the energy balls like He did the movie to be fumbling the balls and they spill all over. Well, that's what they did in episode one. That's what I'm talking about. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, they can bring in episode one. It wasn't a terrible pinball machine. So, anyhow. So, yeah, so there you go. There's going to be new IPs. What those are going to be, who knows. But, like I said, good money is that it's going to be some of these Williams tables, license tables. but additionally good money is that you're going to see some zen originals with a licensed ip i don't i well i was gonna say i seriously doubt that zen's going to be doing uh fully original non-licensed but then we forget that they've got in their back pocket that that three pack of tables so yeah it's gonna be really interesting to see what happens this year i think there's going to be some stuff that even us with the amount of experience we've had with the platform over the years we won't even be able to predict them like it's going to be left field stuff that you know particularly those lot like ips and stuff that are you know from the the asian market yeah i think those are going to be surprises but if they actually start coming into the platform we're not going to really see those coming at all they're going to be like probably good as well but also like oh oh of course that makes total sense but it's like a nibbled thought you know yeah um let me see what our next portion of the video is because i can't remember what i have coming up next uh so i might pause this really quick because it might not be ready for me to talk about it okay so oh yep i don't want to talk about the royale yet okay so we're gonna get to pinboy royale there's no doubt about that um but what i did want to touch upon this was stuff that popped into the reddit thread um so one of the questions was about the physics okay and mel mentioned he said we are working to make sure the entire library is supported with the williams physics then he goes funny we started out calling the new physics pro physics but i think everyone's now knows them as Williams Classics Physics. So, hooray! I don't know how smart that would be to label it as Williams Physics, because now you're making your physics engine tied to a licensed property, but... Yeah, it's just like new physics. The pro-physics just never worked for me. I did not like calling them pro-physics. Well, if they're going to apply those physics to every single table, they're no longer Williams Physics. so you need to think of a new name right um other things that were and this is going to tie into the pinball royale which we're gonna have a lot to say about um but yeah some other things that were mentioned um let's see some pillars from today this is again mel uh wrote this pinball royale and live events we want the game to feel alive and fresh all the time new table ips will feed these pillars. This is something that we mentioned with Farsight, where we're like, guys, your game is dying on the vine because there's nothing exciting going on other than DLC. You're not enticing people to come back. How do you entice them? We were arguing at the time, resetting leaderboards, making it something that you need to come in active every year to restake your claim. So, doing live events, that would be a big part of that. Akos then followed that up by saying, Pinboy Royale, a clan system, challenge modes, a career mode, we are switching engines, so completely new visuals, we got new IPs on the way. That's a lot of stuff, Akos. That's a lot of stuff. First off, clan? I can guarantee you, there will be a blockade clan. It will happen. It will happen. So all you good players, you're going to come join us, right? Yeah, that's right. You'll come to our clan. Be part of our clan. Challenge modes, who knows if that's the same challenge modes that we're used to now or not. I don't know what career mode necessarily would be, if that's just another way of doing super score. I think so. It's probably like career mode would be goals. I reckon they're going to take a few leaves out of Magic Pixel and have like, you know, those, you know, chase a light thing or, you know, that type of thing. Sure. You know what I mean? Sure. Yeah. Would make sense. And then we are switching engines. So completely new visuals. Later, Mel writes, updating each table with the new physics system is not done at the push of a button. is basically a completely rebuild of the game, and with a library the size that we have, it's a monumental task. You may have heard me mention that we are working with new technology, which also creates the opportunity to get this work done. So I think it's safe to say, Jared, they're scrapping their old graphics engine and working into a new graphics engine. Yeah, which was the PX engine, is what the engine was called before, which has served them now for, I think it's about 10 years. Okay. So that one's going. And insert new one here. Easy, right? And specifically, we're talking about graphics engine, not a physics engine necessarily. I'm sure the physics engine is, like, they've been working on that, tinkering with that. They're not going to just, like, scrap that for a brand new. And that might actually be PX. Like PX may actually be the physics engine that you're talking about there. Yeah, because I don't know what graphics engine that they're currently running on. But it's interesting that they mention this. So why would they need, though, a new engine? And how would this create the opportunity to get the work done? well if you use a new engine that is scalable to various platforms based on you know what let's say on pc obviously you can have all the bells and whistles all the everything turned up to ultra essentially yeah with lighting and all that stuff but then you want to throw it down to the switch well they can't handle all that well that's fine you just tick off you know you just have a profile right you're not going to have this this this and this function we can just put the slider down to zero boom no problem and then port it straight over and ship it yeah yeah yeah and i think that that's going to be between frameworks like you know having to develop on the the ps5 native framework versus xbox's framework you know having one way to sing essentially single source and produce a build on demand just by adjusting settings and parameters like that is a big selling point for the ability to iterate quickly and not have to um try and retrofit features into other platforms like farsight had to do right in their development right because that was literally bad oh i mean farsight alone on pc they had their dx9 version they had their dx11 version but it was two codes it was two separate codes it wasn't even just them flipping a switch and having it go and so they would correct a bug in in dx9 and it would wind up causing a bug in the dx11 because they had copied certain portions of code over and then they had to chase it down so they were like doing double work every single time you don't want to do that that's that's inefficient so yeah if you can have all of all of your platforms wrapped up into one graphics engine that can do it all that makes things much more efficient you can crank through these things you can do all these massive uh upgrades to all these tables um makes sense the other thing and this was also on reddit uh somebody said can we expect william's vr tables on psvr so that's sony's VR, and Mel writes, this needs to happen. Needs to happen. Needs to happen. So, if we think about the VR world, according to Oculus, you have three choices for your graphics engine that will work with the Quest 2. That's right. Unity 3D, Unreal Engine, and then a natively developed engine that you obviously are working on yourself. I suspect that they're probably not doing their own anymore. It would be much easier as you grow and expand to pop into one of these other engines that is already scalable to all the various platforms, including mobile. That's right. Well, you know, if you start writing your own, like, development platform, you're essentially no longer a software company. You're a platform development company. Yeah. Because you've got to support the whole thing. And it's just, your time has been spent elsewhere. so you take an existing one and you start using it yeah so i think that's very interesting with where this can go um we've seen some uh you know splash reels of what can be done with lighting and particle physics and stuff in some of these new engines that are pretty amazing It's pretty amazing because it uses so few resources of the CPU. Yeah. So if you start having that kind of technology at your fingertips and being able to use it, think about this. Arcade 1-Up has already started thinking about how are we going to get things like NFL Blitz into a cabinet? Yeah. Because that used a whole different, much larger, that was using a ROM bait or a disk-based. It was a disk-based system, yeah. Yeah, a system. They're obviously not going to do that in their cabinets. so they're going to be seeking out a new way of doing probably these games using some kind of an engine of this sort. Well, if that starts being produced for that, they can put that same thing into the pinball machines, and then all of a sudden, developing for Arcade 1.0 is also, boom, easy. Throw it over with wonderfully perfect graphics, not just Android port of graphics. that's right just flick a couple of parameters to knock down the um stuff for the system on the chip they're using and um off you go in fact i think a lot of these frameworks actually have development targets for certain socs or systems on a chip so if you've got a ps5 or a ps4 that's just preset preset things that you just export to yeah so you don't even need to do a lot of optimization or tweaking it's just like i i want to publish for ps4 click done so where people are not being excited about everything that was said that's because you're not listening closely enough there's plenty to get excited about um and to to speculate of where this is going um and what this could mean for the game um i think where people get bugged as they immediately start thinking of what's it going to cost them again don't know of course like people always think about you know what's going to be the hit on their pocket because you know people have been stung in the past sure plenty of times by you know you know getting done with a platform upgrade and having to rebuy everything i know there's there's plenty of customers on the farsight side who've had to rebuy everything a couple of times you know across all the different platforms they own and you know they can it's pretty costly after a while particularly with a large catalog um so yeah you can see why people will be a little bit uh careful about it but again i think about with if you have a unified graphics engine across all your platforms, that means all your platforms could potentially talk to each other. Why is that important? Now we'll talk about Pinball Royale. Yeah, that's right, Battle Royale. Battle Royale action. Let's go into this. Here we go. Battle Royale, I don't know. It's going to be bonkers. It's just going to be so fun. It's an entire kind of new creation within Pinball FX. I think it's going to be a real pillar of the game for a long time. It's going to be kind of crazy. you're going to have a lot of players all together at the same time you'll be able to do things to different players affect their game and at the end you're going to have a pinball wizard so we'll be revealing a lot more about pinball royale in the time ahead i know everyone's going to want to check it out like what is it we've been doing some early testing a lot of prototyping a lot of iteration we are going to get some early feedback so like a beta or something like that right and i'll just say no none of us normal beta testers have beta tested it yet so i think it'll Maybe be coming soon, but everything's been internal right now based off. It was like, oh, really? You're beta testing? What? Oh. Where's my key? Right? Okay, moving on. Yeah, you'll be able to check it out really soon. Battle Royale games are often seasonal. Are we going to see seasonal events with pinball effects? Okay, actually, I'm going to pause it there. We're not going to talk about the seasonal thing yet because that's going to move into a different area. Let's talk Battle Royale, Jared. What exactly is Battle Royale? I wasn't familiar with it myself, other than knowing that Fortnite was. But Mel, he's going to, specifically mention Tetris 99, Fortnite, and PUBG, which is Player Unknown Battleground. Huge game. Being these large Battle Royale games. Tetris 99 I took a look at and that's the one I think that is most likely to be our clue as to what Battle Royale is going to look like so let me share this screen here, there we go, this is Tetris 99 so you got your main field right here in the middle, but look at all these over to the side, there's 99 of these playfields interesting that they are all very much in the shape of a pinball table. And these are all active. Like, you can see them changing in real time as you're playing. That's pretty wild, eh? This is huge, folks. This is huge. Because, first off, this means that Zen is cracking the online gameplay aspect. if they can crack it for this having 99 fields up on the same time that you're battling against and affecting other players that means we might just get true head to head maybe yeah maybe i mean if you can crack 99 i'm pretty sure you can crack four players or in real time because you know 99 like the interesting thing too is you know looking at the the tetris 99 screen yeah you see that like those playfields are essentially thumbnails The amount of power you would need to stream that level of fidelity is the reason why they can do 99 on screen at once right Yeah. They're detailed enough, and as you can see, there's a bit of intelligence here as well. They're high contrast enough that you can still see the detail really zoomed out and really small. Well, what you're not seeing in this image, okay, over here you see this little hexagon action. Well, what that is is who you're targeting. So in Tetris 99, you can, by clearing levels, by clearing rows, you can attack other players. And you're choosing who to attack based on who's close to a KO, random person, attack people that are attacking you, attack people that are earning badges while they're playing. And there's little lines and graphics that are popping and showing you who's doing what to you and warning you and all this stuff. So it's very interactive, what's going on. So I started thinking about how would this work in pinball? What would be the goal? Obviously, your goal, one, would be to keep your ball alive, I imagine. Yeah. So how would you be earning points or upgrades to slam somebody else? and what would that slam be? I mean... Like half-powered flippers, maybe? Oh, sure. I mean, if you want to talk about the things that you can attack somebody with, yeah, reverse flippers, half-powered flippers. Oh, yeah. One flipper not working. Turn the table upside down. We've seen that happen. Right, weighted ball with no balance. Yeah, lead ball. Yeah, lead ball. I mean, there's all sorts of things that you can do that way. how would you send that attack? Hitting combo after combo would be a good one. Starting, I don't know what tables they'd be using. Something tells me it's not going to be, hey, we're playing this Williams table this week or whatever. I have a feeling that it's going to be a Zen original design. You reckon? I kind of do. Just because that would be... It would make it easier and make it run more efficiently over 99 playfields. I don't know. I could be... Otherwise, you'd have to redesign the rules for what did what across all the tables. I mean, Mel's already hinted that that's non-trivial to do physics. So imagine trying to implement that rule structure across all tables. And what happens if some tables don't have certain elements to them? Like, if a table has no bumpers or something like that, how you're going to tie that rule in. So you almost need to control... You're right, I think you probably would need to have some control over what tables appear. It might be like a sub-selection of tables. Like, you know, let's pick a number like four playfields or something like that, that they know they can actually really tightly control. Which is what they do with... They've done that with the online skills multiplayer. There's only two tables at any given time, and usually they leave those two tables up for months. that they're having everybody play with. All right, well, this actually works. This goes into the next section, the last section of video that we have, because this will further down the rabbit hole. Here we go. Yeah, we are. We're huge fans of games like Fortnite and PUBG and all those games. We took a lot of inspiration from Tetris 99. Took a lot of inspiration. Seasonal events that allow us to refresh content, keep things interesting. that's kind of, you know, that's what we're going for. You're going to see that. So right there, seasons to refresh the content. That makes sense. So, yeah, every now and then the table will change. Keep on going. It also allows us to do really fun and unique things with our brands and the IPs that we work with. So we have a lot of new creative freedom and a lot of new things. It's just going to keep it really fresh. It's going to be really kind of evolving on a constant basis. It's going to be really cool. All right, so there you go. It's having fun with the licenses. They're going to be allowed to have that fun. That's going to... Again, if you look at Fortnite, when they do a new season, all of a sudden there's new characters. They had a period where it was like Deadpool, and I don't know if I think right now it's Terminator or something like that. But you're able to bring in these licenses. So if all of a sudden you have a table, that is licensed in this fashion um then that will make the licensor very happy yeah that's right it's like well you know fortnight even did things like live concerts in the game and stuff like that like it was like fortnight itself was just very much well an ecosystem or a platform that was basically able to take pretty much any license shove it in there and make money from it right so you can kind of see why zen might want to be getting into this particular space now the one the one thing that people have been freaking out about and we mentioned at the beginning was when mel mentioned new business models if there's one area that this works really well in it would be your battle royale thing again think about fortnite think about Rocket League. They're free to play, but there is also, you can purchase packs. You can purchase a subscription, a season subscription. And what does that give you? It gives you extra stuff. So I had gone to Engadget and found them kind of doing a breakdown of what Fortnite does. We're saying a Battle Pass currently costs 950 V-Bucks or a little less than $8. Fortnite crew subscription makes sense, therefore, on the months that the Battle Pass is released because you're also getting a bonus 1,000 V-Bucks, so it's like you're dealing with coins and stuff like that. Yeah. And it's basically for people that want to have exclusive gear that they're wearing, right? Yeah. Well, how does that work? It's actually Chrome. It's just Chrome in-game. Right. So how does that work with pinball? Well, just look at the Williamus app. You can have custom flippers, custom balls, custom ball trails these are things that i would not be surprised if you're able to by doing a subscription have um yeah that's right you're bling out your thing make yours unique um yeah because so when you're going head to head your play field looks unique exactly uh yep that's right so i don't think that the model of the how we you know outright purchasing tables I don't think that's going anywhere. I think that if there's going to be a subscription, again, don't know if there is or not, I'm just basing this off of people going apeshit over the possibility of a subscription, that this is where it would probably fall. It's going to fall within your Battle Royale. That's what makes the most sense because that's the business model that's currently out there. And that would, again, be an influx of cash for when you're doing these licensed events that helps pay the licensor to be able to do this event, to have this custom thing, and go from there. I'm actually thinking that the whole Battle Royale thing will be the freemium part of the product, which means that if you want to try out Pimble FX and you've never perhaps seen it before, you can go to the Battle Royale area. You'll get access to a select number of tables available in the arenas. And you can go nuts and play them. And if you're, again, if you're not a diehard pinball fan, you know, it will lead to sales. Like you'll go, gee, this table's really fun. I want to buy it. So you'll go and buy it. And, you know, it's just going to lead to sales if they do it right. I almost think that there's going to be some people who just I think you're going to have your free table just like you have right now Fishtails is free and Sorcerer's Lair I think you're still going to have that as your free I think the Battle Royale this is why I don't think that it's going to be hey we're Battle Royaling with Getaway I don't think that's going to be it I think it's going to literally be hey we're doing Star Wars this month, we created a Star Wars themed Battle Royale pinball. Right. I'd love to see a Joust style Battle Royale where they actually... This group goes down the path of head-to-head, right? Where you actually have a Joust or an Elvengy soccer ball style table where you can actually go head-to-head and actually do that sort of thing on there. Right. Part of what I'm saying is they're seeking new audience. They're seeking different audience, right? So this whole platform of Pinball FX is kind of a catch-all for all the possible audiences that you might have. You're going to have those that want the Zen Originals. Boom, you got it. You're going to have those that want the Williams. Boom, you got it. You're going to have those that never played pinball before, but they love Battle Royale-style games. You know, it's like they may never have played Tetris normally, but they like this. Or like Pac-Man Championship. that was a Battle Royale type thing, I think, wasn't it? Yeah, I think so, yeah. Yeah, so it's like you're bringing in players, sneakily, being like, don't you like this? Well, while you're here, look, you're in this ecosystem. You downloaded Pinball FX so that you can play this game. Why don't you try and sample some of our other wares? And there's where you're going to get the full, the actual sales, the product sales within the free game. so you're offering a lot of content for free which is you'd be offering battle royale for free you'd be offering those select tables for free um yeah that they always have and that's what's going to entice and if you're having live events and live head-to-head or whatever that's only going to bring in more type of people and keep the keep it active if your platform appears active and has a lot of people in it and are engaged that's more likely than that you're going to stay within it but the whole live events thing is interesting i wonder if that's going to almost be like hey let's get one of the um the voice actors that's done you know the work for one of these tables in for an ama you know and it'll actually be inside the app so they'll stream the interview in the app and it won't be available anywhere else like you know that sort of thing yeah i wonder i mean yeah i kind of think and again this is why they're probably rebooting they're making So the sky's the limit. They can't do that currently with what they have. It is a bit of a walled garden at the moment from that perspective. There are limitations on what FX3 can do. We were wondering what could possibly be the game plan for 10 years. Why would you need a 10-year plan? Where does pinball go from here even five years from now? How is it wildly different? We've seen how wildly different it's got. From 2010 to now, just the innovation in pinball has just absolutely gone through the roof. So if 10 years produces this much innovation in pinball, yeah. And if you're seeing Guns N' Roses from J.J.P. doing online scoreboards, Stern is starting to do that with – what did they do that with? Was it Led Zeppelin that was going to have online? I can't remember. But they were talking about they were going to finally start doing online leaderboards themselves. Clearly – No, it was in that Terms of Service document that was – Oh, that's right, that's right. Remember? Yeah. Yeah. But clearly, even the real pinball companies are thinking in this direction. So it only makes sense. It's an ancient city. They know it brings people back, and they want to compete, because people want to compete. And it's hard at the moment with the world and the state it's in. So give us ways of doing it. People are craving it. So let's wrap this up. new pinball effects and it's just called pinball effects well for instance it sounds like that's just going to be it there's not going to be sequels like windows 10 i was just gonna say it's like windows 10 windows 10 yeah windows 10 is now the version of windows that you'll just have for you'll always have decades yes it's now it's now just gonna be pinball effects um yeah sometime in 2021 yep battle royale is probably attached to pinball effects so you're not gonna be playing that until you get pinball effects so that's sometime in 2021 new ips those are probably going to be being seen previously previous to pinball effects possibly i think so um i would i would think um with new tables coming out because these aren't technically tied to uh software that no no um new engine am i missing anything probably not probably not i don't know there's a lot there is a lot um that's what we're trying to say it's no like as you said before chris you like what may seem like a non-announcement oh it's a big announcement you just need to know what you're looking for you know and tease it apart which i i do want to point out that in one of these Reddit threads, Mel gave a response. Well, the Blockade listeners have the inside scoop. You think? Mm-hmm. Yep. Yes, you do. What we're saying is, yeah, sure, there's going to be stuff that's on the pinball show, and then you're going to come here, and then you're going to learn about everything that was possibly being said. That's right. And, you know, odds are we'll still be able to get Mel on here occasionally to really hammer in some things. Yeah, really make him sweat. Yeah. I'm sure he gets nervous when he comes to our show. I always wonder, I always think about when we post some of these that are highly speculative, because we know that they listen to these or watch these, how often they're just like, oh, crap. Guys! we didn't tell you that how did you know that exactly yep we can put two and three together and get four we've been doing it for years we've hit close to the bone many a time um so that's uh that's it that that is a big nugget of stuff right there so it's not just an announcement of announcement look deeper you'll see there's plenty that was actually said without being said which you know for their show that was i think what 12 minutes long and we spent an hour on three minutes of the show um yeah yeah so i said don't make it any longer than that otherwise it'll be an eight hour show oh my god we'll have to do a two-part or something can you imagine exactly okay well look folks we appreciate you watching this. Please do us a favor. I hate being the like and smash button guy, but we've got a couple of a-holes that love, without watching our episodes, pushing the down thumb, and so all of a sudden we look like we're not a liked episode. So if you like what you're watching, do us a favor. Combat the trolls that just... And I know this because I look at the analytics and I can tell that people are watching literally ten seconds. Guess who's probably giving us that thumbs down. It was long enough for them to hit that button and skid away. I reckon it's probably even a bot. Someone's just set up a YouTube bot to just downvote. Because people do that sort of thing. I don't know. And it'll be for the most random episodes sometimes. So, I'm just saying, do us a solid. Especially if you watched at this point. You clearly are liking what you see. Do us a solid. until next time who knows what it is we are going to be talking about other than Jared's favorite things stuff and things there you go buh-bye folks thanks for watching see you later buh-bye