I think I'll take my whiskey and leave My coffee bag and my bed at three You're too sweet for me Ah, good morning everybody. Welcome to Kaneda's Pinball Podcast. How's everybody doing? What's happening in the world of pinball? It seems like the one word that is on everybody's mind right now is quality. The quality of these games as they arrive into people's homes, we're all watching very closely. There's quality issues now with Dungeons and Dragons. There's some quality issues with Evil Dead. There's quality issues with Pulp Fiction. And as we're spending this much money on these games and the games come into your home, really making sure that it's a quality piece of manufacturing is really important. And let's talk about that on this episode of Canada's Pinball Podcast. And let's also just talk about some other stuff I didn't cover off on my last show. There's a hundred more Galactic Tank Force games coming out in the world. I don't know who wants any of those. There's now more sale prices happening for games like Toy Story 4. Let's just go around and talk about all this stuff right now. How does that sound, everybody? So look, let's start with this American Pinball this company again seemingly is in this weird place I saw that David Fix just did a new interview I haven't listened to it I'm not going to listen to it because I don't really care to listen to it but someone summarized everything he said in it and there's a lot of talk about like torturous interference if he signed an NDA with American Pinball? Is Mukesh going to be mad? I don't really care about that. I think Mukesh is now at a place where he's either going to hire a new leader and bring new pinball machines to market, or he's going to stop making pinball machines. I don't think this company is going to turn into a contract manufacturing company that does not design its own product. And I think there's just so many pinball companies executing properly that we just don't need another. It is sort of shocking to me over the last like three to four years. We really haven't seen many pinball companies fail and there's like 13 of them and we don't need that. So apparently in this interview, they said they're working on Galactic Tank Force Code. The team's been working on it maybe pro bono and post layoffs as a homage to Lyman Sheets. Okay, for the record, Lyman Sheets made some of the greatest pinball machines of all time. His name should be nowhere near this game. There's absolutely nothing about Lyman Sheets' name that is going to get honored by Galactic freaking Tank Force. This is actually disrespectful for Lyman Sheets, if you ask me, to sort of put his name or say that you're doing this for him. He would not go anywhere near this game. We also know that they're going to make a hundred classic editions of Galactic Tank Force that are removing stuff from the game, like the lighting on the side, the Martian doesn't pop out of the tank. and it's $7,995 for like a stripped down version of the game. And they're only making $100. But here's the problem. You can go get a GTF Limited Edition with all the bells and whistles and the tank wheels and all that stuff. You can get the game the way it was intended to be for $8,000. So who's going to buy this? the answer is nobody they're just trying to clean out their inventory but if you ask me if you're trying to move these stripped down gtfs you got to be looking at a price like four thousand nine hundred and ninety five dollars not eight thousand dollars nobody's buying these games some more news from this interview he said he's not sure if game seven will come out but he deserves one for free all right he announced that the mechanical engineer and developer from american can now work for other pinball companies. Ametron started shopping the company at the end of 2023. So he's now admitting that this company was for sale, which is what we've been saying all along. He claims to have sold more barbecue challenges than Hot Wheels in the first year, in quotes. Unclear what that means. IPO resulted in less support as upper management was focused on that. It's all this finger pointing. I'm not going to go through the rest of it, but it's all this finger pointing at Mukesh. And this is not surprising. It's like the people who were in charge of making the decisions seemingly don't want to take accountability and responsibility for the financial reaction the community had to games like Berrio's Barbecue Challenge, to games like Galactic Tank Force. And so, look, I don't want to give any more airtime to this. You know how I feel. They came at me personally as well. So I don even want to discuss it Everybody to blame The media are to blame Canada to blame It Mukesh fault It the IPO fault It Dennis Nordman fault It everybody fault except for the leadership team who had the reins over at American Pinball. So we shall see what the future holds for that company. It's not looking great. Speaking of not great, imagine if you spent $12,000 on a Toy Story 4 LE. And now you're looking at Jersey Jack themselves is offering the game with a topper for basically $9,999. We're seeing now manufacturers putting their own product on sale. And I think we're going to see more of this. What we're not seeing is anybody lower prices? That is the big question mark I have is how long are we going to see these games lose so much money on the secondhand market to the point now where manufacturers are going against their own map pricing and they're basically now destroying the secondhand value of their own product. So everybody out there that now owns a Toy Story 4 LE, you know your game is worth more like $8,000. If that, you can go get a CE for like 10, which is a $5,000 savings. So it's just kind of brutal, but it's also just kind of indicative of where we're at. And I don't know if anyone's going to wake up and like realize that you can't charge this much for every single game. And the entire hobby is overpriced and it's happening everywhere. And I know that there are certain people out there. I got a really nice note from Ed Ed Robertson. He's like, Chris, hopefully while you're sick, you're going to reflect on what this hobby is all about and what pinball is all about. It's about having fun. And Ed, you're not wrong. I 100% agree with you. These things are toys meant to give us pleasure. They're about having fun. They're amusement devices. But the problem, Ed, is for most people out there, they also have to think about, like if I'm going to have fun, I would rather have $12,000 fun for $8,000. That's the reality, Ed. If you're going to buy something for $12,000 that is then going to be worth $8,000 in just a year, isn't it more fun to have the same exact experience for so much less money? And we've all been in this hobby for a long time now, most of you who are listening. It was never like that. You never bought a game and lost $4,000 in a year. You never bought a James Bond 60th and lost like $10,000. You never bought an Elvira like Blood Kiss Edition and lost $3,000 instantly. You never bought these games and watched other people's ability to buy the same exact game for 30% less money in less than a year. And I know this isn't a conversation that a lot of people want to have that are friends with the manufacturers. I know these companies are spending a lot more money than they used to have to spend to make the product. But the problem is they all significantly overstepped. And the stuff we're paying for isn't exactly what's in the game itself. We're paying for bigger factories. We're paying for like a lot more employees at these companies that might not even be necessary to get a pinball machine into a box and to us. So I just think we're going to see more of this. The good news is Harry Potter is going to buck the trend. Harry Potter and King Kong are going to buck the trend. They're going to be the two games that make comments like I just made seem a little bit off because you're going to see two titles that are going to hold value. You're going to see games sell out instantly on day one, even though the price tag is going to be really high. And it's going to be FOMO day. It is. There's going to be FOMO around King Kong and Harry Potter. Everything else, absolutely no FOMO. Everything else, there was no reason to buy right away. You all know this. All right, so we've got Toy Story on sale. Godfather, I think, has been on sale. Elton John is going to be the next game that goes on sale because we know that there's Elton John Platinums sitting in boxes all over the place. The game is still not even sold out. And speaking of not sold out, like Avatar CE is not sold out. Dungeons and Dragons LE, I was looking at that today. That's not sold out. And so let's talk about D&D. This is one of the big ones. This is one of the big things because everyone's really excited about this D&D game. The mechanism in it is really cool. And now it seems there's an issue with the mech. And it's not the mech itself, it's node board number 10. And something's happening with the wiring between the mechanism itself and that node board. And when the wire gets pulled and twisted, it's causing like intermittent signals to go to the node board, which can short it out. And I think the same thing happened with Rush Pinball. And so now we've got the LE owners, the first 100 or so that are getting their product are really nervous about playing the game. I saw a guy just unboxed his LE and he's like, it's beautiful, I love it, I'm not going to play it until Stern figures out a fix for node board number 10. Because if your game goes down and node board number 10 goes down you really don have a game You got a paperweight But it does beg the question So clearly there was some manufacturing issue between the prototype of that cable and the final production version of it. And Stern Pinball wasn't able to test the final version of that cable and the node board in the game and has passed that on to customers without proper testing. And so then $13,000 new in box LE buyers are the new guinea pigs on a game. And so that's not good, right? It's not good. We're not asking for Stern to put 500 plays on a game, but they should at least when they get the final version of everything, right? The final cables, the final node board, they should at least have like five test rigs that are all built with the final products and at least put those games through a few thousand hours of testing before you start mailing games to customers. That's not happening. And they're boxing up these games and they're going out the door before these issues even have a chance of being identified at the Stern factory. And again, the learning here is just don't buy right away. unless you absolutely need to buy these games right away. Why would you wanna be a guinea pig like this? Is the solve gonna be easy? Do they have to redesign a node board? That doesn't seem like an easy fix. Are they gonna have to wait for these cables to be remade? That might not be something that can happen in weeks. It might take a month. I don't know what the fix is and neither do you. What I do know is that people just spent $13,000 on a pinball machine and I go into the thread and the entire conversation is troubleshooting this issue. We're not talking about the updated dungeon maps every Sunday. We're not talking about the code. We're not talking about the layout. We're not talking about the shots. We're talking about a quality control issue. and we saw what happened with X-Men when quality starts to become the conversation on day one, all hype for the game dies instantly because nobody wants a headache. That's the thing, right? It's like for this much money, the last thing you want to do is buy a headache. And if I were an Ellie buyer right now, I would have been like, I would feel stupid because you should have listened to Kaneda because there are still Ellie's for sale new in box, which means yours is worth much less than 13,000 instantly. and now that there is an issue with the game, guess where the price is gonna go? South. And after going through what people went through with the Uncanny X-Men fixes, I think people's confidence in Stern to fix these issues quickly has eroded a bit. And it's not just Stern Pinball, people. I'm over in the Pulp Fiction thread and I see owners there, just issues with the lockdown bar. There's nothing more annoying than a lockdown bar that doesn't work right. Then you've got the glass doesn't slide into the machine properly. You've got people spending $10,000 on a pinball machine and they have to take black duct tape and duct tape the corners of the glass to get the glass to stay in the machine and not slide down and hit the lockdown bar. Really? They've had two years to figure out these issues. And these are brand new LE owners that are saying, I've had the same issue with my SE version of Pulp Fiction. They did nothing to fix the problem. And then I'm seeing new LE owners and they're having issues with the topper on the game. It's not sitting flush on the backbox. And that's annoying. It's like you need two people to press down the topper and force it into place. If there's one thing you don't want to do on any pinball machine when you're working on something is use the word force. You have to use force to get it to sit right. No, that's not how it should be. How can you have two years to design this thing and you can't get the topper to be installed in the right way? And then I'm watching Don play his evil dead and he's got to take the glass off and use his thumb to activate the ball trough in the game. Spooky Luke was on the chat saying maybe he said it at the wrong height. But man, it's like brand new games, brand new games, left and right. No matter where you turn, there's issues. And look, we all know this. Pinball has always been a thing where it's not unheard of where you have to pop the hood and make a few adjustments on your game. But some of this stuff is not like adjustments. It's just engineering mistakes. And that's not something you should have to do. What I'm calling for in this hobby is a lot more quality control. And I mean that. And I mean quality control on the final production version of the games. I think we're getting a lot of quality control with the prototypes, but then they get the final version of stuff in, whether it's node boards or cables or toppers, and the final production version hasn't gone through adequate quality control testing. And I don't think any of our games get really tested, people. And the reason why is nobody wants a damn dimple on the game So your game is probably not played at all before it goes into a box and it goes to you because they care more about you seeing that unmolested play field than making sure your game has everything hooked up right to make sure everything's operating properly. And if it's not, you've now got a beautiful, clean play field and a $10,000 paperweight because the game doesn't work right. I think quality is going to be one of the number one things people look for moving forward. I think there are some games that are problematic. I think there are some games that can't be fixed. Uncanny X-Men, anybody? I think what's going to happen is the games that have good quality, that are easy to service, that don't have many service issues, are going to be the games that people want. And hey, here's a little unspoken truth that we all know. There's a reason why Jersey Jack yanked so many toys out of its games because they wanted to make their games more reliable. So they just took out toys and mechs. Like that's the easiest way to make a game pretty bulletproof. You don't have much in it. But the problem in this hobby now is simply this. For this much money, the games need to be loaded. And when you spend this much money, you expect great quality. So we're at a point now where these companies need to be firing on all cylinders. They need great themes, they need good quality product, and they need a lot of mechs and toys to justify the price. And if you don't deliver that, I think everyone's just going to wait on the sideline until a game like that comes out. I think this year is going to be a year defined by that. I think it's going to be a year defined by, are these games delivering enough magic for how much they cost, and is that magic engineered in a way that it's going to hold up over time? I know there's a lot of people looking at the older games, the older products, right, on SAM platform, much more reliable maybe. Maybe not as easy to work on, but those things were built to last. These companies are aiming towards efficiencies in manufacturing, not necessarily the best quality or the best bulletproof system. Just what's a cheaper way to make the product? How is it cheaper to pop in and out node boards? So my advice to everybody is this. Unless a game is something you absolutely need to buy the first month it's out, just wait. Just wait. You are not going to have a hard time getting anything. Here's the truth. If you want a D&D LE and they are sitting still new in box and these issues now have popped up. By the time they fix it, by the time the game gets corrected, trust me, D&D LE within six months is going to be a $10,000 game. $10,000 game. And I mean, you're going to be able to find these things probably in a box for 10 grand. So why would you need it now? If you have it now, you're nervous. You're anxious. The guy who didn't buy it, he's not anxious at all. And if it turns out to be a Brian Eddy masterpiece, great. He's going to be able to march in and get it for $3,000 off. Smart man. I don't even want to bring up like all my friends who bought X-Men LEs right away. Those guys are in a whole new hell. And my friends who bought like Godfather CE, they won't even talk to me anymore. They won't even talk to me anymore. They've lost $5,000 to $6,000. There's not even a way to justify that they had that much fun. It's not. There's nothing fun about losing $5,000 to $6,000. And look, it'd be very convenient if we stopped approaching this hobby this way, but we're not. We're not because this is the story. This is the story of our time. Pinball is the most expensive it's ever been. The quality is questionable, even from companies that used to be rock solid, like CGC Quality used to be amazing. Now it's crap. People's decals are peeling off their Pulp Fictions. Their decals are peeling off the front. Have you ever tried to replace decals on a cabinet? It's not easy, but how did it go out the door, right? Lazy day at the factory, someone decided not to apply the decal in the right way and nobody looked at that and said, you didn't do this right. We can't ship this to a customer like this. Redo it. No, nobody's doing that. So the games are the most expensive. The quality is going downhill. There's not as many toys in the games anymore. I mean, guys, you can't paint a picture that's any more clear than this. It's time to just wait. No buy 2025. Trust me, if you adopt the no buy 2025, you're going to be able to buy everything at the end of the year for so much cheaper and you're going to be able to get whatever you want for such savings. And look, I know this might not apply to Harry Potter and King Kong. We're not going to see back to the future this year. So Harry Potter and King Kong are the only games that I think are going to be immune to the forces that are going to make every other game lose so much value this year. Everybody, Canada's Pinball Podcast, thank you for being a member. Get some friends here. We're sliding into like 705. Like what? We were supposed to get to 800. What do I need to do, everybody? Come on, let's do this. Canada out. You're too sweet for me