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Episode 231 - Like a Dragon Remastered

Eclectic Gamers Podcast·podcast_episode·53m 50s·analyzed·Oct 27, 2024
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.031

TL;DR

Metallica Remastered announcement sparks debate over LE devaluation and Stern's market dominance.

Summary

Tony and Dennis discuss Stern's announcement of Metallica Remastered, a 2013 remake running on Spike 2 with new art, code, and animations. They analyze the implications for limited edition buyers, the precedent for future remasters, and broader concerns about brand loyalty in a niche market dominated by a single manufacturer.

Key Claims

  • Metallica Remastered is limited to 500 units, the first 500-count LE run in years

    high confidence · Dennis provides official specs from Stern announcement; notes this is a modest LE count not seen in recent years

  • Metallica Remastered has no Pro model, only Premium ($9,700) and LE ($13,000)

    high confidence · Dennis cites Stern announcement details; notes departure from typical three-tier pricing

  • The original 2013 Metallica LE will be devalued significantly by the remaster due to superior art, code, and rules

    medium confidence · Dennis speculates on secondary market impact; notes new version is 'better in every way' except possibly layout

  • Stern previously broke promises on LE exclusivity by expanding Batman 66 SLE and Munsters LE counts

    medium confidence · Dennis references past precedents; notes Stern is now 'trying to be a little more careful' but still shapes loopholes

  • Metallica Remastered LEs sold out immediately post-announcement

    medium confidence · Dennis notes 'early reports are the LEs are all spoken for' but does not cite specific distributor data

  • Next Stern remasters will likely be Spike 1 games, possibly Ghostbusters, not SAM games

    low confidence · Dennis speculates based on demand and LE variant history; acknowledges this is personal speculation

Notable Quotes

  • “this is going to do really well for them”

    Tony — Concise agreement that Metallica Remastered will be a commercial success despite LE loyalty concerns

  • “Stern has played – as Shannon noted, Stern's done this in other ways too. They expanded from their original expectation on the number of SLEs for Batman 66.”

    Dennis — Documents Stern's pattern of breaking LE exclusivity promises and reshaping commitments

  • “Do you think this impacts brand loyalty? No, not really. I think at this point, pinball is so niche and there are so few large players that it's not going to overly affect brand loyalty.”

    Tony — Core argument about market structure: Stern's monopoly position makes brand loyalty irrelevant

  • “the pinball hobby has proven that you can do anything to them, and they will still buy your most expensive edition no matter what you do or how terrible of a person you are”

    Tony — Sharp critique of collector behavior and market inelasticity despite ethical concerns

  • “It's like trying to opt out of Google and you still use the internet.”

    Dennis — Analogy for Stern's market dominance; illustrates lack of viable alternatives in pinball

  • “I don't know that they thought they could have sold more than that. And that's why they decided to go with the smaller count.”

    Tony — Explains 500-unit LE cap as sales ceiling rather than scarcity strategy; implies demand conservation

  • “What garbage.”

    Chris G. (email) — Reader reaction to Adventures of Alice in Wonderland; part of broader negative expo feedback

Entities

Stern PinballcompanyMetallica RemasteredgameJohn BorgpersonLyman SheetspersonRaymond DavidsonpersonReese CooperpersonJerry ThompsonpersonChuck Ernstperson

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Stern's near-monopoly position in commercial pinball manufacturing eliminates brand loyalty as market constraint; collectors locked into ecosystem regardless of pricing or business practices

    high · Tony: 'the pinball hobby has proven that you can do anything to them, and they will still buy your most expensive edition'; Dennis: 'If you want new in-box pinball, Stern is the only sizable game in town'

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball Expo 2024 featured strong positive reception for Metallica Remastered and Uncanny X-Men; significant negative feedback on Adventures of Alice in Wonderland playfield design and art

    high · Dennis: 'There was a lot of love for Uncanny X-Men' and 'a lot of positive response to the new Metallica game'; 'a lot of negativity to the upper play field, the magna play, the power play field. A lot of people didn't like the art'

  • ?

    event_signal: Turner Pinball's Ninja Eclipse now expected to sell out entire 100-unit initial production run based on strong Expo 2024 feedback

    medium · Dennis: 'that game, incidentally, is now actually expected to sell out of its initial 100 unit run. Good for them' and attributes to 'Expo feedback'

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Metallica Remastered leverages existing artist/band relationships for re-licensing; music IP easier to secure for remasters than other license types

    medium · Dennis: 'It's probably a touch easier to get the license re-upped to do a re-release or remaster of a music pin compared to some of the other things'

  • $

    market_signal: Metallica Remastered LE presale completely sold out immediately; signals strong demand and effective scarcity positioning

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.161

0:00
Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. Today is Sunday, October 27th. This is episode 231. I'm Tony. I'm Dennis. Tony, we're back. Expo happened. It did. We weren't there. We were not. I had one person ask about it. I was like, I think everyone knows that we don't go to Expo for a variety of reasons.
0:39
But we will talk a little bit, a very little bit about it. Since we're not there, we're not going to. There are plenty of other shows where people can find out about it. That they were actually there at it. I do want to thank One Way Ticket, our latest Patreon member. One way or another. No more. Okay. We'll get copyright strike. It was basically perfect. Yeah. Yeah, it's true. I don't want it because when this auto-loads to YouTube, it will look for that stuff. Yes. And it will judge. Speaking of looking for stuff, I'm looking to hear what you did over the last couple weeks. I have somehow managed to – it's a little annoying. No, no. It's bad. Oh, dear. It's real annoying. Oh, dear. Okay. Oh, my. So we have an open position at work. I am the hiring manager, so I'm setting up all the interviews and doing all of that to do interviews. But somehow in the course of this, there are two other groups that are doing interviews for, like, management-level people. So they bring in managers from outside of their group. Somehow I got tagged into that. So all of last week and all of next week, I have somewhere between one and three interviews every single day. Wow, that's a lot. Between the three groups that I'm helping interview for, between my group and the two other groups. So it feels like my life anymore is just sitting in and asking people interview questions. and by the end of the day I come home and I talk to my wife and kids. And that's like, hey, so what kind of learner do you think you are?
2:14
Can you tell me about a time when you had a bad input on yourself and how you handled receiving such bad input?
Pinball Expo
event
Turner Pinballcompany
Chris Turnerperson
Hexa Pinballcompany
Dutch Pinballcompany
Uncanny X-Mengame
Tonyperson
Dennisperson
Zachperson
Dirty Donnieperson

medium · Dennis: 'early reports are the LEs are all spoken for on this'

  • ?

    announcement: Stern announces Metallica Remastered on Spike 2 platform with new art, code, LCD animations, and four new sculpts; runs no Pro model, only Premium/LE tiers

    high · Dennis provides full technical specifications from official Stern announcement

  • ?

    product_concern: Secondary market impact: Metallica Remastered will devalue original 2013 Metallica LE and Premium copies due to comprehensive upgrades; Pro versions unaffected as no Pro alternative exists

    high · Dennis: 'This devalued all of those Metallicas. Other than maybe the pros, because there's no alternative for the pro, Metallica Premium, Metallica LE, those are going to, in my opinion, those will sell for less, a lot less'

  • ?

    rumor_hype: Dennis speculates next Stern remasters will target Spike 1 catalog, possibly Ghostbusters, rather than SAM games; based on demand patterns and LE variant history

    low · Dennis: 'My speculation has been the next game won't be a Sam. It'll be a Spike 1, and they'll do Ghostbusters' and notes 'there's been a lot of demand for it'

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Negative community sentiment from 2013 Metallica LE buyers regarding devaluation by Remastered version; Stern's LE exclusivity promises perceived as broken

    high · Dennis: 'there have been some people, let's say in particular, LE buyers of the 2013 version who are frustrated'; discusses Stern's pattern of expanding SLE counts and reshaping LE definitions

  • ?

    business_signal: Stern limiting Metallica Remastered LE to 500 units as deliberate scarcity tactic to restore FOMO after overproduction of prior LEs (X-Men 8,111 units did not sell out immediately)

    high · Dennis: 'this is the one and only...500-count LE run in years at this point' and notes this is response to X-Men LE not selling out; Tony: 'I don't know that they thought they could have sold more than that. And that's why they decided to go with the smaller count'

    • 2:26
    Yeah. It's just looks like my life is interviews now. And I don't know. I don't know who I pissed off to get locked into doing all of these interviews. But it feels like all I do is interviews.
    2:38
    I have not done an interview in quite a while, which is nice because I do not like doing them. We're doing merit, though. I'm in the middle of that, too. So I mean, I got my stuff done really quick. But the thing is I record because we do an analysis across all of our groups to see where they're scoring individuals because we share the merit pool the way we have options. But the way our department does it is we share the merit pool. Just everyone is pulling from the same pool. We're not carving it up by division or program or anything like that. So I record all of them. I worked at a job at one time, and upper management was there, and they were doing their whole upper management pep talk, talking about things, yada, yada, yada, yada.
    3:24
    And one of the upper managers literally dropped the phrase, our expectation of you is to exceed expectations. and in the Q&A portion, one of the people went,
    3:42
    so if your expectation is for us to exceed expectations, on our review when we exceed expectations, we'll just be meeting expectations? And the manager just stared at her and then just kind of mumbled something and then they went on. Okay. Wow. In terms of gaming, I did finish Final Fantasy II. Oh, congratulations. Thank you. I'd never played that one before, so I got through it. So now you're on three. I am. I'm not very far in it.
    4:17
    Okay. I see why these weren't released in America. That's how I'm going to start this. Okay. It's not terrible, but it feels... All right. So you've played the first Final Fantasy. Yes. did you play two or three no okay so just as a real quick summary final fantasy one the main thing that that was sort of defining about it as you know from playing a lot of final fantasies is the magic system often changes between fantasy games so final fantasy one was the whole you get x number of casts of any given level of spell and as you level your character you're able to do higher levels and you get more casts within any given level so that okay makes sense i never loved that system but that's how they did they didn't do magic points in the traditional sense final fantasy 2 did do magic points traditional magic points setup except as you the way they did it is you didn't have levels per se or maybe there were but there you didn't get to pick your jobs they were defined like later final fantasies are but what weapons and gear you equipped you were leveling those so you'd level your sword ability if you were using swords you'd level your your spells if you're using the spells and the higher the level the levels whatever the level the spell was was the amount of mana it took so you start and everything starts as a one so cure cost one mana and didn't do very much healing but then when it was nine level nine is now costing you nine mana to cast here you can't like just cast lower level cure you have to cast whatever you've got so so it was like that which i didn't love uh but i did like having the magic points it's a bunny but too bad the only thing i can cost is meteor yes it's like yes yes it was like that so now i started three and in three it's the one where a la final fantasy 11 you can change your characters to any of the jobs available and you level the jobs and then we're back though to final fantasy one style of magic so they're at tiers and you get a certain number of casts so I can't just save mana by casting cure all the time I get 8 casts of cure period because it's level 1 I can't turn level 2 casts into level 1 casts so I'm back to the crappy magic system that I didn't like with the job system which I don't mind the job system per se I need to get more experience with it but obviously as you go along later in the game I'm going to get more and more jobs because I only have like 6 right now and you have to start them all from one so it's come up with like what do you do because i think the way they wanted people to do it was go and grind back in the old day because i've seen some suggestions online of strategies like just take five rounds and and and equip like one guy with double shield and just and just click defend for five rounds and then and then kill whatever it is and you'll quickly be able to like move the levels up and stuff because it's all about the number of turns they get is what determines the leveling not not what they actually do like in terms of damage or anything so i was just like oh my god that sounds terribly inefficient but they're like but you want some of those jobs you don't want to just like play red mage the whole time right because that'd be a disaster so i'm doing that and then also special shout out to uh blizzard for their junkenstein's lab that they're doing this year you know you remember Remember the old Halloween terror thing and there's Junkin's nice revenge and they did it forever. Right. It was always the same. It wasn't bad, but it was just like, it got tedious, especially if you're trying to grind it for loot crates or whatever. This time they've done Junkin's nice lab. It's an arcade mode thing. And it's actually, it's, it's frustrating, but it's a lot of fun. So it's, it seems like the concepts from PVE kind of got integrated into this. So basically you start and you get like cards and there are rarities to the cards and they are your your modifiers and you equip two. And then every round you can equip another one and you can also always throw one away and equip a one to replace one. So like you're going along and as a case in point would be like Reinhardt. Reinhardt, I think he's got one where when he flame strikes, he torblodes like Molten Core along the same path. Or Reaper can fly.
    8:44
    This is what you wanted, is Reaper flying around. Moira can throw three orbs. She fires them like a spread shot, and they go damage or healing. um mercy can uh heal uh and the the heal beam bounces to a second person and does 25 healing to the whoever the second closest to whoever your target is and she's got another higher level one that does that with the damage boost huh yeah or she's got one when she vouchs winston shield neat uh soldier uh like modifier healing circle moves with him healing circle when used gives everyone a 15% damage boost. Don't have to be in the circle. It's just an ability. It just is.
    9:31
    So, anyway, so you get all these, and which ones you have available are not the same every time. And the further you go, the higher level the cards get to be, and they put this mode, it's always control maps, and it's always best out of five.
    9:46
    And I hear they're bringing 6v6 back next season. That's next season. Yeah. So that'll be fun. Possibly fun. But the lab is fun. So if you ever want to go into arcade mode, I would say it's definitely worth checking out Junkenstein's lab because it's just a really crazy way to play. And it's just – it was a breath of fresh air. So it was nice.
    10:06
    Speaking of fresh air, Tony, we got pinball. It's the pinball. I don't know why I said fresh air because we're going to be talking about a remake.
    10:15
    It's fresh remade air. Fresh-ish. My favorite-ish is fresh-ish. All right, so Stern Pinball. Stern Pinball, the legendary pinball manufacturer, largest manufacturer in the game today, has revealed pinball's great hit Metallica as Metallica Remastered. Metallica Remastered is the remastered version of the 2013 title. So I do have a link in the show notes to the Kineticist article that describes Metallica Remastered. But let me go ahead and give you all a crash course on it really, really quick. Designer, as before, because it is the same layout as John Borg. The rules are different a little bit. Mostly it's the original rules, and the original rules were primarily designed by Lyman Sheets. However, there are code enhancements that are involved in this game, and those code enhancements were led by Raymond Davidson. This time the art is not Dirty Donnie. It's Reese Cooper. sound is going to be Jerry Thompson and this has gotten rid of the dot matrix display and gone with the LCD so we got animation work and that display work was led by Chuck Ernst this is now no longer a Sam game it is running on the Spike 2 system this is noteworthy because there were a lot of rumors I never bought into them that Metallica being remastered has like people knew about this for a long time but a lot of people thought it would be the first Spike three game because we know stern has been working on spike three and purportedly they're very close to revealing i would think they would do that for a new title not a remaster that was always my stance but i mostly talked about that over on the other podcast i do the pinball show but uh i was right it was spike two so yay uh it is basically like a cornerstone however there are no pro models however they're not like doing the sle or anything so there's premium and there's le but There is no pro.
    12:07
    And the pricing is in line with the cornerstones that are currently on the market. So premium is $9,700. The limited edition is $13,000. And the limited edition is limited to, surprisingly, only 500 units, which is something I've also said Stern needs to quit doing so many limited counts.
    12:25
    They're making too many. It's the limited edition. There's only 5,000 of them. And even with the drop down onto like 8111 or whatever they did for X-Men, X-Men, Uncanny X-Men did not like day one sell out of LEs from distributors. Right. So it's like they're learning. They're learning the need for the false scarcity and how it needs to work again.
    12:47
    Some of the major changes between this and the original 2013 version. There are four new sculpts in the game. There's UV light to reveal certain art asset elements, including some of that's on, I believe, a couple of the sculpts. opto spinners now instead of the standard switch spinners the band provided new call outs for the game as i already mentioned we've got the lcd so animation it's not just uh straight up animation however there is concert footage that is included so think some of the other more modern spike 2 games that we seen concert footage with like rush uh we got two new modes have been added to the game there are eight additional songs and obviously with those two changes there had to be rules expansion to accommodate all of that and Raymond as I mentioned is the one working on that In our internal notes, Tony, I've included a couple of pictures of the LE and premium, and again, because there's only LEs and premiums, this is the premium iteration. We've played both, but this is one of the hammer knocks it into the play field and all the rest of it. But I just wanted to have a conversation with you about what you think. I don't see any point in talking about the layout and such because, honestly, I think we talked about it. I don't know if we talked about it at release. No, we weren't podcasting quite. We've been around a while. But not that long. Not that long. But we've talked about it in the past. Because we've played it a lot. We've played it a lot. All right. So the layout's the layout, and the rules are primarily still lineman's rules with, obviously, these new accommodations. And they're probably – I think there's some additional stuff maybe with multiballs and all that. I didn't want to spell it all out because, honestly, until you play, who cares? But what do you think of them doing this, doing this remastered? And what do you think it means for the future? Like are they going to do more of these? Is this the one and done? Oh, I mean, they're always going to do some remasters here and there. I think this makes sense as a remaster compared to some of their other licenses. and I'm sure it's probably a touch easier to get the license re-upped to do a re-release or remaster of a music pin compared to some of the other things. But no, it's a good game. I'm sure the used market is still selling very well for them, and they might, if anything, be starting to get a little thinner on the ground. So I think this is going to be an overall good seller for them. And early reports are the LEs are all spoken for on this. Obviously, it's one of the more modest LE counts. We haven't seen a 500-count LE run in years at this point.
    15:18
    And it is, obviously, people know they like the layout, which has given it a leg up. I agree with you. I definitely believe we will see a lot more of these moving forward. I don't know which ones will be next. Metallica was interesting because there weren't, like, a bunch of vaults. Like, ACDC had a variety of editions come out. Star Trek had a variety of editions come out. Iron Man had a variety of editions come out, but there are a lot of Sam games that didn't experience that. I actually, my speculation has been the next game won't be a Sam. It'll be a Spike 1, and they'll do Ghostbusters. That's what, because there's been a lot of demand for it. It's time to go for World Poker Tour. You know, World Poker Tour would be an interesting one. I bet you they'll pay you to use the license. That one, they have to do the art upgrade. That one needs new art. No one's going to – there are some people that are going to prefer the Dirty Donnie art, but I do think that this art actually looks really good. It does look good. It looks good. And all the scopes and stuff. Everything about this basically – art's subjective, but everything else about this is an improvement. So what do you think about – there have been some people, let's say in particular, LE buyers of the 2013 version who are frustrated that an LE version like this has come out. And I will note that when Stern said they would never remake LEs, they clarified that. I went back and checked the interview that that was only for Spike 2 LEs. Like they won't do another Godzilla LE. Right. Is what they've said. That promise was never extended. But again, people were like, but it's limited. And it's like, is this different enough to be OK? Is it? Well, this has different code and different stuff. This is Metallica remaster. So obviously it's a completely new game. It's Speed 2 Cruise Control. It's a completely new movie. It's completely different. But the layout of Speed 2 was different than the layout of Speed because there was a boat.
    17:16
    A ship instead of a bus. So different layouts. This has the same layout. Nah. So no, you know, I can see there. I can see why they might make a point of it. But I just well, actually, we're going to touch on this later outside of this game. So, oh, we got an email. So I'm laying the ground laying ground. But this is going to do really well for them. Oh, yeah, definitely. It's going to it's going to sell great. And people got to see that at Pinball Expo. So speaking of Pinball Expo, that, as we noted at the start of the episode, just happened and that we were not there. I will say some of the highlights, there seemed to be a decent amount of buzz from a number of the homebrews in the homebrew section of the show. There was a lot of love for Uncanny X-Men. A lot of people finally got to get hands on it. There was a lot of positive response to the new Metallica game. So that's the main things I heard in terms of the big players. And in terms of the smaller players, general consensus seemed to be that Turner Pinball's Ninja Eclipse looked pretty good. And Space Hunt from Hexa Pinball got a lot of it was there and it got a lot of positive feedback to not so positive on the Adventures of Alice in Wonderland. Other than I have heard a couple of people say it played better than the like how they made it look on the live. Like it shot better than the live stream look. I've heard that. It played better than I thought it would. It played better. Yeah. It's like, you know, getting shot wasn't quite as bad as I thought it was going to be. Yeah. But still a lot of negativity to the upper play field, the magna play, the power play field. A lot of people didn't like the art in person and all the rest of it. So but and still continue praise for the sculpts. But everyone could tell the sculpts were good from the images that were provided. Speaking of Ninja Eclipse, that game, incidentally, is now actually expected to sell out of its initial 100 unit run. Good for them. I guess that was based off of that show feedback and such. But anyway, there's an interview that Nap Arcade has with Chris Turner of Turner Pinball. I have a link to that in the show notes so people can go and just read the interview because I'm not going to recap the interview other than to tell you that part of it. So people can go there to enjoy what is said in the interview. uh we don't do market trends on this show pinball market yeah he still tries to do still yeah it's still a thing it's so made up now that it's and even he sometimes drops it from certain episodes he being zach for those that don't listen to the pinball show because sometimes it's just it's just too hard to be creative enough for it but i gotta say um i'm gonna trend something down on this show so trending now he's gonna be jelly you know what he can't be green he probably doesn't even listen to the show uh trending down this week is pinball expo visitors and attendees lists a list yes we received a couple of emails i didn't recognize the names i think it was a different person both times in terms of the name and the email address the email thus at eclectic gamers podcast at gmail.com trying to see if we would like to buy the attendee and visitor list from pinball expo because i don't recognize the names i cannot say confirm claim that officially expo is selling the list of attendees to make money however these people are getting this list from somewhere and it sure is tacky and while that might happen with other entities like maybe tpf sells their attendee list it wouldn't shock me the extra tackiness is the poor research that was done to think that a podcast would want to buy this what information could i glean from this that would be useful for for the podcast so my for yeah i'm trying to figure because obviously the only value in such a list is to monetize it so what would our monetization strategy be the only thing i could think of is because they claimed it would like had over 6 000 names on it well it would be for me to have 6 000 emails yeah get 6 000 emails that we would then email to try and convince them to join the Patreon of a podcast that they don't listen to.
    21:32
    Because we do not get 6,000 downloads an episode. Right. And can you imagine just the sheer damage that would do to any goodwill you would have in the space? Anyway, tacky, tacky, tacky. So trending down. Do not try and sell me your lists. I have no interest in them. I mean, honestly, if you put any thought into it, you'd be like, why would a podcast want this? This is silly. No, that's definitely something. Mod makers or someone might want that list. Mod makers, yeah, they might want that list. Maybe. The thing is, a lot of attendees, because as you can tell from that numeric count, I mean, it's just like with TPF. There are a lot of people in town who just go and check out the show. They're not actually collectors. They don't want any of this crap. So whatever. Vendors can spend their money on whatever they want. I don't care about that. I just don't want to get those emails.
    22:19
    Speaking of emails, we do get emails that I do like us to get. And we got a couple that I want to cover, and they're both involving the pinball segment. So the first one is from Chris G., who says that the subject of the email is, excuse me, princess. He didn't write that. I know. Take it back. You take it back. No.
    22:39
    It was excuse with six U's, but I tried to carry them properly. This is what he wrote. I like Rumor Corner for the song and y'all's disdain for it. The people clamor. Great takes on Alice's adventure. What garbage. Have you heard of Barrel of Fun's rumored game BOFA? I don't know what that means. Back to the email. I started playing Civilization VI again with the Civ VII News. Do you all like that game at all? Chris. Thank you, Chris. Would you like to talk about Civilization, Tony? I know we're in the pinball segment. We are. The Civilization games are great. They're all great. All of them have been good. Some of them are better than others. six is fun four is fun, five is fine three is awesome Tony has played it more than me Civilization the first game was one of my very earliest PC games I played a lot of it I played a lot of a few of them, I think Civ 4 was the last one I put a lot of time into I think it was Civ 4 that had the play by email option this email is such bait I set this up for you I mean, I didn't ask for this email, but I was just like, Tony's going to bring up the email. I won't have to. Would you like to explain how we enjoyed that feature? So they had a play-by-email feature on Civ 4 where you would play your turn, and then when you hit in turn, it would email the other person their turn, the save or their turn to play, and they'd play their turn. And you would just email the turns back and forth. And we played that game for over a year. Yes. One game. Tony and I played one game. We were allied nations working for a team victory. And, yes, we were just, you know, months and months would go by, and it would be like, yeah, building units. Right. I mean, there would be points in time where we might, like, play, like, five turns in a day, and then you'll play, like, one turn a day, one turn every other day for several days and you might get two or three in a day and then it's back to one turn every day or two as things just bounce back and forth we won yeah let me know how how could we not all right that was kind of a given yeah but it was a lot of fun uh second email this email is from shannon b shannon writes hello guys over the last few years we've seen stern remake remaster and anniversary edition their limited editions impacting value of the core le buyer base they slide around statements on the matter but are a manufacturing business after and metallica seems to set a new precedent do you feel these actions may potentially impact brand loyalty longer term in favor of the short-term profits growing pinball is their aim but do you think do you see it sacrificing one buyer base in hopes of another in the process or no thank you shannon i think he meant uh manufacturing business after all that's why i hesitated i think he meant to say after all instead of just after all right but anyway you get the context so shannon is asking about this and the i'm going to use he didn't use this word but i'm going to use the word betrayal the betrayal of the le buyers and this came up a lot which is why they did put out that statement about doing new versions of i don't know that they actually came back and did a new le but the issue that's been the even well maybe they did here's the thing there's already been like the alviras and the there was the 40th anniversary edition that came out and that one was like super exclusive and it was after the le version of elvira which you know had the three tiers with the sle and then the blood red kiss edition which is like a premium came out but general consensus was it looked better than the 40th one which was the one that they were trying to sell for $25,000 a pop. So anyway, obviously Metallica has dredged this all up because as Shannon noted, Stern's sliding around, making their own little loopholes on what counts as an LE and what doesn And Zach and I actually had a discussion about this on the latest pinball show because you probably would not be too surprised he his stance was this is great this is a much better version of metallica uh they absolutely should sell this you know these le you know these are le's the other one is old it's a different game it's got different art it doesn't have the same rules all right of course that's his opinion of course i know i know that wouldn't And my stance was a little more trying to get at. So what's the statute of limitations on betraying at least? Because if you said something was limited and it's the same layout.
    27:29
    Changing the art doesn't. I mean, so you added new code. You added new rules. But hypothetically, all those things could be added to the same game. Yeah. Via USB stick. Right. But so for me, it was. I mean, I get why they're doing it. But Stern has played – as Shannon noted, Stern's done this in other ways too. They expanded from their original expectation on the number of SLEs for Batman 66. I believe it was Munster's LE that they increased the count when there was the initial demand over the art.
    28:02
    And so they have broken their word before. And now it seems like they're trying to be a little more careful about following their word but shaping it in such a way that it allows all sorts of instances to exist that I think they would know logically people,
    28:21
    I was going to say by and large, but I'll say some people wouldn't like, whereas others might. So obviously anyone who didn't get a Metallica LE back in the day might love this idea of being able to get a new version of one. But I think as you noted how Metallicas were probably getting pretty hard to find on the used market had been such a long time. This devalued all of those Metallicas. Other than maybe the pros, because there's no alternative for the pro, Metallica Premium, Metallica LE, those are going to, in my opinion, those will sell for less, a lot less. Because the new one is, art opinion aside, the new one is better in every way. Every way. It will. Yeah, it'll push down the price when they're used. So back to Shannon's email. Do you think this impacts brand loyalty? That was Shannon's question.
    29:15
    No, not really. I think at this point, pinball is so niche and there are so few large players that it's not going to overly affect brand loyalty. I think that the pinball hobby has proven that you can do anything to them, and they will still buy your most expensive edition no matter what you do or how terrible of a person you are or how terrible of a company you are. They're still going to sell out. They're still going to handle it. I just think that's where we have come to in such a small hobby with such a high price tag that those people who are going to buy in are going to buy all in. But I do think that those kind of concerns are a large part of the reason why their LE count is 500 as opposed to a larger count because I don't know that they thought they could have sold more than that. And that's why they decided to go with the smaller count.
    30:15
    I actually agree with you. I don't see this impacting brand loyalty. And it's for the main reason that you've pointed out, or at least one of the reasons you've pointed out, which is regarding who you're going to turn to. Right. You don't have real options in this hobby. If you want new in-box pinball, Stern is the only sizable game in town. We will talk up JJP. We will talk up CGC. We will talk up Spooky, who are their biggest, quote-unquote, competitors. But it's, quote-unquote, for a reason, because they're not real competitors to Stern. Stern controls so much of this market that if you were to just decide, I'm not doing Stern anymore, you absolutely can do it, and you probably won't like your experience very much. Yeah, it'd be like trying to opt out of Google and you still use the internet. Yeah, it's just – it's not – and I don't – I hate doing – because this is Pinball and Video Game Podcast, but because I'm familiar with watches for other hobbying reasons, like it's – I'm giving you a case in point for a different scenario. Let's say you wanted to say, I don't want to have anything to do with a Rolex. That is so much easier to do. They are seen as a behemoth in watchmaking, but they, in terms of income for Switzerland, so that's not counting Japan or Germany, which have major watch manufacturing hubs, and I mean luxury watch manufacturing hubs, not just the basic stuff. Rolex is only 25% of the Swiss watch income. So you think about that compared to Stern, which is like 80 plus percent of the entire world of pinball versus what is seen as the biggest, most profitable company in watches, not counting Apple. Because Apple's watch is actually bigger, makes more money than Rolex does. But Rolex, it's 25 percent. And that's only the Swiss watch industry. You start factoring in the Germans and the Japanese. It's an even lower percentage. Yeah. so my point is in other spaces automotive watches comics there it's a question of who else is a real player in the space and as you noted tony there's just there's not anyone else other than stern there's really just i mean you could go i know people that get every cgc game but cgc can't even put out a new game a year yeah it's one of those things it's just it's the nature of the hobby because we are such a small niche hobby. And the problem is that we compare ourselves to, you know, video games, tabletop games, watches, these other hobbies that we're part of and we know of, but they all have a much larger base. The reality is the closer comparison would be to something like RC cars and RC airplanes.
    32:57
    The much smaller, more niche groups is where pinball would actually fit in better. And I can't argue those because I don't know anything about RC cars and RC airplanes other than just the very most basic basics. The one thing I will say, Shannon, that I do think where it could have an impact on brand loyalty is some of those past LE buyers might forsake buying LEs. It depends on the nature of the collector, though. Right. If it's about status and the flex, and for a lot of people it just is, then they're over a barrel. They don't have the wherewithal – I'll phrase it nicely. They don't have the wherewithal to walk away from Stern. They're too invested in it. So they'll grouse, and maybe they'll grouse to Stern, and that's where I think you get Stern making these little kind of mealy mouth, we're not going to remake any LEs as long as they're Spike 2 LE, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, sort of things. but some others might be like you know what because i don't trust stern anymore on the on what they're going to remake a verse you know from a high-end thing maybe i just get premiums now like there may be some that do that the thing is there's so many new people in the hobby that void is going to be that again it's like for metallica remastered it's 500 units that pit is going to be filled in with new buyers yes so they're just not so no stern wins no matter what because y'all allow them to but it's not all you're all it's not all y'all's fault because it's not like you can just make there be another major manufacturer that's at stern's level because a lot have tried right they've tried and failed they've tried and died that's beautiful thank you i stole it i know um one um one last thing i didn't put this in our internal note to tony but i just remembered it because i was checking something i was having uh some people had some issues with itunes or not with our uh with our podcast but i heard about it with others so i was making sure ours worked in in itunes was still working and it is uh but then i saw apparently we we had a new itunes review we hadn't had a new itunes review since 2022 wow so i don't ever think about it we don't ever talk about promoting the itunes reviews anymore because we don't really care people if we grow the channel or not but um but one came in in june uh of this year from i'm gonna probably mispronounce their handle but it's it looks like it's jackal shark which is sounds like a very scary shark but the um but this is what they were i thought you might get a kick out of this they did give us five stars so we appreciate that we appreciate that subject title was be selective and choose the eclectic and jackal wrote as far as pinball podcasts go it's really hard to beat the mix of the knowledgeable cynic dennis teamed up with the light-hearted pessimist tony having a good basic recap of the video game industry is just a bonus that's it that's what jackal wrote so thank you jackal that's beautiful i'm the light-hearted pessimist i'm just saving that to tell you here that's so awesome i mean The thing that cracks me up about that. You're like the cheery Eeyore. He is. I'm the cheery Eeyore. That's cool. That's awesome. See, I'm used to, at this point, everybody considers me a massive cynic when it comes to most things. But on here, you're the cynic. And I'm just a straight-up pessimist. But I'm a happy pessimist. Yes, lighthearted. The lighthearted. A pessimistic joy. It's like, it's all going to fail and everything's going to fall apart. But you know what? That's okay. Oh, well. we'll just live with it. We'll live down here in the dumpster fire with everybody else. You're the dog. This is fine. You're the fine dog.
    36:40
    I actually have a this is fine patch on my laptop bag. That's cool. This is fine. Well, I think it's probably fine for us to move on to the video game segment. It is. So, you know what else was apparently fine? apparently laying off 2,550 people is fine does great things for the bottom line good enough that the ceo of microsoft uh sataya nadella um they got a 63 increase in pay this year so they're making 79.1 million dollars and it only they only had to fire 2,500 people to do it wow i wonder how much i could get if i what no i don't i don't have 2,500 people yeah that's why i just have to wonder i gotta figure it's like how's that work out to percentage wise how many of my staff can i lay off to get to a million dollars a year i mean that's the question it is and the answer is no it wouldn't happen it wouldn't happen because well we can't have a mix of cash and stock is the problem see that's the thing it's not just like a 75 million dollar w9 or two or i i'm getting my W is mixed up. Right, right. Yeah, no, because it's a mixture of cash and stock. I mean, can you – Their stock's doing pretty good because I have a few shares of Microsoft. Yeah, I'm definitely sure it's doing fine. Yeah, now they're doing the big Call of Duty push, so we'll see how well that does for them, I'm sure, when we start seeing the public disclosures. What would it be like if public entities released stock? It would be – How dystopian nightmare would that be? I think you've described an ideology.
    38:28
    It's like, well, I own this. I own the road. I own two shares of St. Louis. It's worth four cents. Oh, wait, no, that's because it's East St. Louis.
    38:41
    It's weird. I was looking at my shares of East St. Louis, and they just lit on fire in my hand. Spontaneous combustion. It's a penny stock.
    38:50
    It's a penny stock. There's just people at the mall just handing them out. Would you like some East St. Louis?
    39:02
    Well, so Nadella must be pretty happy. Yeah, no, definitely. I mean, who wouldn't be happy with making just shy of $80 million for one year's work? Do you think he'd try less hard if he only was making like $70 million? I'll be 100% honest. At this point, if I made $80 million a year, I would just retire.
    39:25
    You wouldn't put in like a couple of years to just like fix things? I might consider it, but more likely than not, I would be like, all right, well, I gave her the old college try. We did what we could. All right. Thanks, everybody. Where are you going? It's like, oh, yeah. I've got a van over there. and I'm going to go sleep in it and drive around the country. So see you. Bye-bye.
    39:53
    Now, they did announce as well that with the acquisition of Activision Blizzard King, they now have 20 franchises that have generated more than $1 billion in lifetime revenue.
    40:06
    I mean, that's a lot of franchise money. Let's see if they can use it properly. Right. That's the question. And let's be fair. some of these titles when you talking about lifetime revenue you are talking about 20 plus years at this point Warcraft has generated more than a billion dollars Yeah When did the first Warcraft come out Like 93 or something like that So I'm okay. Yeah, I can see that. How many Warcraft games have there been? Yeah. Yep. No, I can understand that.
    40:37
    And as a follow up with their pushing to release more of their big in-house first party games into other gaming spaces. they did announce that they were going to be releasing the Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is hitting PC and Xbox in December, but it's coming up to PlayStation in February. So it's only got like a two-month delay before it hits PlayStation. I'm a little surprised they don't just release it simultaneously. I know. That short of a delay. Otherwise, I would have thought they'd have waited at least half a year. Well, see, that's my thought. And then, of course, my other thought is it's like, has there ever been a good Indiana Jones game? I never played the Atlantis one. Was it good? Do we know? It wasn't? I've heard not. Okay. I don't know. People seem pretty positive on what they've seen out of this one. Right. No, I mean, it's like, okay. It's like, yeah, we'll have... I don't know if Indiana Jones, or even necessarily that story type, lends itself well to video gamification. Yeah, you may be right. I don't know. I think they look over and they go, it worked for Uncharted. We can get this to work. I think that's what they think. Maybe. Yeah. I can see that. Tomb Raider games are like, why can't Indiana work? Yeah, Indiana's original. I just, I guess it feels like, to me, it feels like Indiana. Tomb Raider's really a platformer, so that's its main thing. And to me, it feels like Indiana would have to be so much more scripted to work because it's so many set piece and one-liner type things. But who knows? We'll see how it goes. We didn't talk about it when the initial announcement was made. But there's been a modification to it That I found Mildly interesting Also the fact that I completely missed the original announcement Is part of it But there's a new Like a Dragon game coming out And it's got the greatest subtitle Because all the Like a Dragon games have a subtitle And it's Like a Dragon Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii Okay The game opens up With Goro the main character from most of the games, washed up on shore with amnesia.
    42:51
    Okay. I'm assuming there's a shark jump in the game somewhere. I'm assuming it's necessary. But their big change was they were originally slated to release on the 28th of February, and then somebody in their marketing department realized that that was the exact same day that the new Monster Hunter game was coming out. That would be a problem. So they're like, you know what? We're ahead on our – everything's looking real good, so we're just going to go ahead and move our release date up a week, so maybe people will play our game for a week before they just stop.
    43:24
    I think it's a good strategy. I think it's a real good strategy. And I think it's going to pay off for them. I think so.
    43:29
    The thing you do not want to open up against a Monster Hunter game or come out in like the week or two after a Monster Hunter game drops, unless you were like a heavy hitter, heavy hitter. and I don't know that like a dragon games are that heavy hitter. I don't think so. Um, and, uh, super Nintendo world. It's a mushroom kingdom inspired theme park. They've got one in Tokyo, uh, and they've got one at universal in California, uh, is now opening at universal in Orlando.
    44:02
    So for everybody who's going to Orlando, now you can go spend time at the mushroom kingdom. Do, do, Well, enjoy all the cleanups after every hurricane.
    44:15
    Very true. Also, on the Nintendo front, they finally did it. They made their hardware announcement. Yes.
    44:26
    They're releasing an alarm clock. Yes. And it's like the most annoying alarm clock ever. It's the most annoying alarm clock ever. It's so awful. You choose the sounds, and it's like the coin grab sounds from Mario games or all sorts of different things.
    44:43
    But it's like the snooze and shut off button are like motion activated. Yes. Not just motion activated. It's like imaging because if there's multiple of you in bed and one of you gets up out of bed, the alarm will turn off, and then it will reactivate because it realizes there's another person in the bed still. Yes. So not only is your alarm hearing Mario go nuts on the coin block, but creepy Uncle Nintendo is now watching and realizes when you get out of bed that your partner is still in bed. And they probably want an alarm to go off too, so they're going to turn back on and keep waiting until they go. You don't have to have coins. You can have the Splatoon shot.
    45:37
    Like no one's going to activate Pikmin. My wife would. No. She would, 100%. But yeah, no, there's going to be like 30 some odd sounds, and there's going to be downloadable sounds and expansion stuff. It's just like, I'm like, is anybody really? Is this something somebody's clamoring for? I can't. Does anyone in your family want one, have they said? No. Are you kidding?
    46:05
    I can't get my kids to set the alarm on their phones to wake up. Are you the alarm? Oh, gosh, no. Because you get up pretty early. You're the snooze. You're the snooze alarm. Kids are getting up in two hours, just FYI.
    46:22
    I didn't talk about it earlier. Two weeks ago, my eldest daughter, we did a university visit to KU because she's a junior and she's starting to visit universities and this and that. But one of the tours she wanted to do was at 8 a.m.
    46:41
    So I'm like, well, you need to – so the night before, I'm like, you need to go to bed. It's like 9.30 or 10 o'clock. She goes, well, we don't have to be there until 8.
    46:52
    And I'm like, you do realize I'm waking you up at 5.30 because it's like a 40-minute drive, and you're going to want to stop and get breakfast because I know who you are, and I know the closest place we can park, and then we've got to walk, and I'm an old fat man. She's like, 5.30?
    47:16
    And I'm like, yes, I'm waking you up at 5.30. And you know what? we got there about 10 minutes early by the time I actually got her up got going we got on the road we stopped and got breakfast because she wanted to stop to get breakfast yeah got up got parked and walked up to the place for the first tour we we got there about 10 minutes early so my timing was exactly correct yes well I mean you are familiar with that route so yes I did it for a long time did she did she say something like you were right father i was wrong to doubt you no no she made fun of me because at one point we started uh after doing multiple tours of different engineering things because engineering is her primary interest she wanted to go and listen to a thing from the journalism group so instead of waiting for the special buses that they had running around because it was their giant open house day i was like well i know exactly where that building is because that's the building where i started before i realized journalism was a terrible major and quit it and now i'm a podcaster uh and went let's just walk over there and then we're walking up the hill and ku has a hill at the top of the hill exactly right stores and i'm going up that hill to that store and we're getting up and my daughter's like waiting at the top and she's like i thought you said the hill was bad it's not that bad of a hill why are you breathing so hard are we going to be late are you going to be okay do i need to call an ambulance and i'm just like i should just leave you here it's just roasting you it's like it's it's like maybe it's like so so once i get my enough breath back that i can speak with her as we're walking to the thing i'm just like i know it's not that far from home but i am going to require you to live in the dorm for the first year or two i think it'll do you good to live in a dorm yes all right so no alarm clocks for your family no alarm clocks for my family um now of particular interest to me they did release an announcement trailer for subnautica 2 uh subnautica was a really fun game. The DLC was nowhere near as good as the thing. It happens sometimes. But what's interesting is Subnautica 2 is going to be a co-op multiplayer game, which is something that I think would be perfect for the Subnautica games. I think having that game co-op multiplayer would be akin to having co-op multiplayer on things like Satisfactory, Minecraft, stuff like that. I think it'll be a lot of fun. The interesting thing is they are doing an early access release, which is what they did with the original. They'll be early accessing sometime next year. But they're saying their plan is to be in early access for about three years. So we'll see what comes of it. I enjoyed the first one enough that I think I will not do any of the early access stuff. And I'll wait until it comes out and is completed and ready to go. Okay. Makes sense. Yeah. now in pinball we've all heard the horror stories of working with a james bond license yes and all the myriad of issues that came out of that supposedly the game's got good rules at this point i don't know i haven't played it since shortly after release so but another company has decided to take a swing at the James Bond license.
    51:00
    The team behind the Hitman games, which are good games. They are. IO Interactive, I think it is. I think it is IO, yes. As long as you have the M16, they're good games. Right. It's so much easier when you just collapse a building. It's like, how can anyone identify the Hitman if everyone is dead? Exactly. But they're doing a James Bond game. A James Bond origin story. It's an original James Bond story. and their hope is if it does well to make it into a trilogy of games. And it's obviously going to be made kind of in the Hitman style would be my assumption based upon who's doing it. So we're not looking at a GoldenEye-style group multiplayer shoot-em-up so much as an actual story-based game. Okay. Fun. I think it could be fun. The question is just how much trouble are they going to have from the license? Because one of the things in an interview with the head of the studio was talking about was this is the first time they've dealt with a license that wasn't theirs.
    52:04
    Yeah. I mean, it might not be. I don't know if a video game will be as bad. There have been other video games that have used James Bond. And so I'm going to guess maybe that's not as brutal as what was going on with Pinball. because I think, you know, I don't know what happened all with, purportedly it was stuff like the challenge they had were with the modes and stuff, and it's all tied around movies, and the licensor being really uncomfortable with, like, elements from different movies running at the same time was, like, a big part of the issue. Right. So that shouldn't be a problem. And since this is an original story. Right. So it's probably more about, like, getting the asset look of Bond approved and maybe some of the villains, if they're using anything that was, like, Spectre or something. Right. Which would make sense for something like this would be to use Spectre. But it might. I mean, them not being used to working with licenses, it could still be a steep curve. Yeah. We'll see.
    52:59
    But that's all I've got in video games today. Well, then, we've done it. We've educated the world. Educations. The entire world. If you would like to educate us, you can always email us at collectogamerspodcast.gmail.com or go to facebook.com slash eclecticgamerspodcast. If you'd like to support the channel, we have a variety of Patreon tiers, three specifically, the lowest of which is just a dollar a month and that's at patreon.com slash eclectic underscore gamers we're available on twitch and instagram is eclectic underscore gamers and we will be back in a couple of weeks will there be new releases to talk about i don't know uh supposedly american pinball's release was originally planned to be at expo and it is not at expo so it could be imminent we don't know this is me not holding my breath i can tell because you seem to still be breathing and i'm speaking but uh until the next episode regardless of the state of american pinball my name is Dennis. Goodbye, everybody. See ya.