It's all the same, only the name will change, every day, it seems we're wasting away. Sitter, Sitter, Sitter, Sitter, Sitter, Sitter, Sitter, Sitter, Sitter. Welcome everybody to Kaneda's Pinball Podcast. We called it, we said it was Bon Jovi. Everybody on Pinside said I was lying, said I have no credibility, He said the emperor is going to wear new clothes or has no clothes. And you know what? I haven't received a single apology from all those people that called me names. I haven't seen anybody on Pinside even say Kaneda was right. They simply have to retreat into the corner of their mama's basement, open up their keyboard, and argue in another thread about what is happening in pinball. So Bon Jovi, this game, is it arriving dead or alive? That is the theme of the show today. We're going to stay focused on Bon Jovi. Dungeon Crawler Carl, you know how I feel. It's going to be a little bit of a fart in the wind, especially with another game coming out the following day. Overall, as a pinball enthusiast, before I jump right into Bon Jovi, I am exhausted. I am exhausted by the spam of both of these games or all three of these games. If you open up Facebook, who hasn't been bombarded by a barrage of content letting me know that I can order both of these games? That is what pinball marketing has become. Everything's a secret for 364 days out of the year. And then the one day the pin becomes available to order, not on the line, not with finished code, not on the shelf. But the moment it's available to order, you get bombarded. Like you have to make up your mind today on these three games that will not sell out today. Hey, you better listen to all the content shills. Man, this is the other part. I'm an island, baby. There ain't nobody else like Canada. Everybody else. I mean, it's everybody. Even the people I respect, the people I listen to, everybody. They turn their channels over into becoming salespeople for these companies. What's wrong with everybody? Why? Why are you making their content? Think about it. Barrels is making its own content with its own employees about the gameplay, about the rules, about the artwork, about how the game came to be. They're making their content. Why does every single pinball content creator make the same exact content and turn into a sales arm of the company? Why? And why is it that the only content creator that didn't have anything ready to go on day one officially with barrels of fun was Kaneda's Pinball Podcast and maybe Don because Don's always knocking on the door trying to get those invites. Don, trust me, I know you want to be treated like those other outlets, but being on your own island is better. And that's just the thing. It's like it's not just like barrels is channels. It's everybody. And then it's every single dealer and distro on the planet is spamming Facebook with the available now content. And it's just overwhelming. I'm glad I turned it all off yesterday. I went to Daniel in New York City and had a Michelin star dinner on the house from a friend whose cousin is the sous chef at Daniel right now as he trains to move to London within the Daniel Balloude Company. Amazing meal. Amazing meal. Anyway, so Bon Jovi, this game feels like it's got some things that feel like dead on arrival and some elements that make the game feel really alive. In a lot of ways, Bon Jovi's dead or alive is a great metaphor for the launch of this game. And I want to look at this game through my lens after sort of sleeping on it. I read a lot of the commentary on Pinside. David Van Ness jumped in for a little bit. He did a live. He's been doing the rounds. I get it. I get it. Like this is their moment to tell us the story, the reason behind the game. Jon Bon Jovi came to us and wanted a musical pin. When Slash went to Jersey Jack and made a pin who did you see in the launch of Guns N Roses Slash Where was Bon Jovi yesterday Is there any content with Bon Jovi Did they record a single thing of Bon Jovi walking through barrels of fun No Didn happen the same You know it doesn have the same sort of involvement I get he gave them stuff But man Bon Jovi I feel like has something that David Van Ness doesn have And maybe he doesn And maybe he did approve this. But here's where I want to start. And I've been saying this from the very get go. And I think it's the most important thing that will determine the future of barrels of fun. This will determine whether or not barrels of fun survives to get to G.I. Joe in 2028 and barrels of fun sort of gets past their cash flow issues. David Van Ness needs one thing and one thing only because he's got great mechanics. He's got, you know, innovative stuff happening under the glass. He's got a package and an offering that is putting a lot in the box for the money. All of it, right? He's sort of like making the stake perfectly when it comes to a lot of what we want in pinball. But what David Van Ness does not have, and it continues to sort of be the huge Achilles heel of his company, and it's the hardest thing for him to overcome because when you don't have this, you think you have it. And this is the biggest issue. The one thing David Van Esk does not have is taste. And taste is a hard thing for people to understand when they don't have it because they think they have it. And that's the tricky thing about taste is you think you look good in what you put on and to everybody else, you don't. You think this art package looks good and to everybody else, they don't. You think this is a pinball theme that people want, but to mostly everybody else out there, they don't. And these are decisions primarily that come down to the individual tastes of David Van S. And here's the good news for David. When you don't have good taste, you can get it. But the only way you can get good taste is if you surround yourself with people that have good taste. When my dad met my mom, my mom has impeccable taste. She's an artist. She led the art department at Bristol Myers Squibb. She never went to college. She didn't even go to art school. She just is like innately one of the greatest artists ever. And she has taste. You know, she has an art gallery. When people walk into her gallery with paintings worth tens of thousands of dollars, they need someone who understands an eye for what's going to look good with this picture. And how do we frame this? And what color should the mat be? All of this. It's very much like pinball art. What color should the armor be? How should we arrange the characters on this trans light? What should be on the right side and the left side? And this play field, does this look good? When you stand back and look at it, what is my taste telling me? And what is other people's taste telling me? Now, David, this thing is now long overdue. You need to hire people that have taste. Yeah, I've got better taste than you, bro. I just know that. But look, I'm not going to sign NDAs and give you my feedback for free. That's not how it works. But I can tell right now at Barrels that David and Brian don't have good taste and it's catching up to them. I would argue that Labyrinth was not the right taste and did not serve up what the community wanted. Neither was Dune. I know a lot of people want to have revisionist history now because they got in bed with dealers to sell 200 more Dunes, but it was a business failure. I know there's also the inability for people in this community to realize that Winchester and you could argue like, oh, David's taste. No, David got lucky with Winchester. Let's be honest, people. It was a lucky guess that a haunted house theme would launch at the same time. Stern Star Wars failed horribly And it look it was really quirky and unique And there weren many of them But Winchester with everything in it only 525 units is a business failure It not a success And I love that people think it a success because the secondhand market people are making all the money David and Brian are not making any money on that game OK now look when we look at Bon Jovi this is where I want to bring it back to taste This isn't the theme that most people wanted, but it's the theme that he wanted. So when he says like three musical acts approached us, OK, that reminds me of the time when Jack Guenari said that Pat Lawler had three to four theme ideas. And the first one was dialed in and I told him to stop right there. I'm just curious. I've never would have said that if I were David, because when you say that three musical acts approached us, Jon Bon Jovi. And I'm like, well, who else? Who else approached you? And, you know, did you do any surveys? Did you do? No, no, no. Look, Bon Jovi is huge. But there's clearly there is clearly a lack of enthusiasm by the pinball buying demographic for Bon Jovi. There just is. I mean, you saw the response. Even when I leaked it, people were like, there's no way this is going to be the end of barrels. That's not the response you want. Did anyone say that when Guns N' Roses, when we knew that was coming? Nobody. Did anyone say that when we heard that it was going to be like Foo Fighters? This is going to be the end of Stern? No, no, nobody said that. I don't think I've seen a theme where just the theme alone has created so much anger. Not even Dungeon Crawler Carl had people angry, like people were excited that we're finally going to get a Dungeon Crawler Carl game. So that's not good. If you just go down a checklist of what we need to do to align our taste with the taste of the pinball buying demographic, which, you know, I kind of feel bad for David a little bit because let's be honest, folks, the folks in the pinball buying demographic don't have the greatest taste. Cargo short wearing rush listening people, you know, you'd be a little bit confused. What do these people actually want? But if you had just sort of read the room, you would have known that this isn't really what they wanted. They would rather have Spongebob, G.I. Joe, Masters of the Universe, Big Trouble. You could go down a list of things that would just be maybe more aligned with the taste of the pinball buying demographic. Okay, so you did it though. You did it. You made the Bon Jovi pinball machine and now it is real. Okay, so now that we've got that out of the way, David, trust me, I hope you're going to get better taste in the area from Carl because Carl D'Angelo, here's the crazy part. I actually think the layout and the design and Carl's help on adding that upper flipper. Carl's got great layout taste. He knows how to make a great pinball machine. People's response to him has been great. He plays a lot of pinball. I think the challenge for Carl will be to make games. You can step up to it and they're not too hard because he's so good. But that being said, I still don't know if Carl D'Angelo has good taste either. And when it comes to like aesthetics, because Carl D'Angelo saw this art package as well. Carl D'Angelo knew this was the theme. Now, I don't think he could have changed the theme. But the fact that everybody at Barrels of Fun stood over this game when they were mapping out the art package and said, yeah, like, let's go with this. This makes me nervous about all of their ability to sort of be honest with David. And this is the challenge. When you're the head of an organization and your taste is not good, you're not going to make it an environment in which people can tell you no. And David needs somebody to tell him no. And he needs to find that trusted person that will give him the real real. I don't think he has it. And I think it's a big problem in all of pinball. I don't think people tell Steve Ritchie no, right? With Sonic, that might not necessarily be the direction I would have wanted him to go in on a design level to go all in on that upper play field, right? It comes down to like, it's hard to tell people who are pushing the creative ball forward that you don't agree and we might want to think about something different if we need to bring this game to market and this thing needs to Align with the taste of what people want to buy. Okay. It's just, it's like, it's a hard thing to do. It happens in every industry, but let's talk about the game. So the art package, Johnny Crap has been very divisive. Unfortunately, it cannot change. And again, we're hearing there's another translate. I'm over this whole thing where why why do you have to have two translates David Is it a cashflow issue Think Think about it Why Why would you sandbag any version of your game Why are you making people pay more for the better translate Stern Pinball could put a chicken scratch translate into every game and then require all of us to buy the nicer one. That to me is a bad move. It's a cash grab move and it also is bad. You only get one chance to make a first impression and you should have the nicest everything on the game on the day the game releases. And when you're only making one version of the game, you should put your best foot forward. This Translight is one of the ugliest Translights I've ever seen. You got young Bon Jovi next to old Bon Jovi. Imagine having young Axl next to old Axl. Like nobody would do that. Like who approved this? Like what artist over there? No one on your team was like, what is this? And then look at the actual art of the young Bon Jovi. How bad it is. I'm sorry, Johnny Krat. I'm sorry. I know some of you want a consistent livelihood in pinball. You gotta earn it. And how many times are these companies going to have this empathy for artists that are just not good enough for a $10,000 to $15,000 item? Pinball machines are not $6,500 anymore. And I also don't think you should point at Rush as an excuse for this. I see a lot of people doing that. Well, Rush was ugly. So this is better than Rush. Is that how you live your life? That that meal sucks. So this crappy meal is a little bit better than that crappy meal. Is that how you make decisions in life? Like two wrongs don't make a right. Okay. So the art, I'm sure it looks a little bit better in person because it looks horrendous over the Internet. And the armor is weird color, looks exactly like Winchester. I don't get it. I don't get it. All right. So I think universally what is arriving dead on arrival is the overall aesthetic of the game. The art on this game is one of the worst artistic launches I've seen in a long time in pinball. The dungeon crawler car art is way better. I don't even know what the story around this art is, but it's abysmal. Guns N' Roses was beautiful. We had ACDC looked way better than this. Metallica looked better than this. Just so much better in the music genre. And if you're going to make a music pin and you know which music pins people have loved aesthetically, I think they tried to do like a retro throwback 90s like Data East GNR looking thing. And I'm here to tell you guys, you didn't nail it. You didn't nail it. Okay. Okay, so, but once you get over, and you have to get over this hump, and it's not a hump I would have made people need to get over. You have to get over two humps, that it's Bon Jovi and it's ugly, all right? So you get over those two humps, and then you get to what matters a lot, which is gameplay, and the mechs, and the software, and how the game is delivered, and what will the pinball experience be? And this is where things start to get much, much better. And because you've lowered the bar so much on the theme expectation and on the artistic delivery, you can kind of only go up. And that was what I noticed yesterday. It's like you really clobbered people to a point where they were just dying to have some good stuff to connect to over the game. And there's a lot to love about the mechanical stuff in this game. It almost makes it so painful that you wrapped it in such a mediocre way. But when you look at the mechs and you look at the heart and dagger mech, amazing, amazing. When you look at the loop-de-loop with the spinner and the captive ball, amazing, right? It's like this stuff's very creative. When you look at the layout, the use of the ball locks, the magnets, the shot flow, the flipper on the lower outlane in the lower left area, when you look at all that stuff, it's cool. It just looks different when you look at the amp board on the apron. When you know that they got the music videos, I was harping on this. I was like, they need to get the music videos, the iconic music videos from the 80s and 90s. They got it. It's got almost every single Bon Jovi song you could ever want. I think it's like 17 songs. It doesn't have the one from Blaze of Glory from Young Guns 2, but that's probably because the movie studio owns that. But in the end, man, it's like there's a lot of really good stuff going on here. And from people that... They've played it. They're like, this is the best shooting barrels game to date. Now, I wouldn't say that that's like, you know, the bar wasn't the highest. If we're honest with ourselves, I mean, I think until this, the best shooting game was maybe Dune, which isn't the greatest shooter. Winchester is a little tricky. Like there's some shots that are great, but it can be a little bit of a difficult shooter. But this game had a good reception. And so that is why when I think about all of this, this barrels Bon Jovi launch, it is a little bit exhausting because it's frustrating. It feels like you did so much so well, but you also did so much so badly. And putting it together makes me feel a little bit frozen emotionally about how I feel about this. Because in the end, all these pinball companies are trying to get us to buy their items. And when you have a game like this, that's very divisive. This game's not going to sell out in one day or two days. It's not. It's not going to be a 48-hour, 700 units are gone. And David's trying to play this interesting game where if he sells more than 700, then the barrels reserved people can order more. If he doesn't, then there's only going to be 700 ever. It doesn't matter if the demand grows later on down the road. The reason why I don't like this, and especially with a game like this, he never should have done the barrel reserve now. Because here's the thing. This is going to be a slower burn game. More people need to play this game. The word of mouth needs to travel more, I think, to get people to pull the trigger. But there's only a seven day window. I think this is going to be a 700 run of Bon Jovi. Will he sell all 700 over the next six months I don know Dune barely sold 500 in six months Now on day one this game has more in it than Dune but I think people were more upset by Bon Jovi than they were of the Dune theme I also think Bon Jovi as a music pin. I think music pins are harder for people to want right now because we have so many of them versus movie themed games. I think people prefer some of that storyline and movie driven stuff more than music right now because we just have so many music pins and you probably own a few music pins already. Maybe N' Bon Jovi wasn't on your list of what you wanted to put into your collection. So it's going to be interesting. Who knows? Anything is possible. The market will simply do what the market does. I also think that Barrels of Fun, in my honest opinion, continues to be a company that struggles to create a real identity for who they are. Like, who are you? This theme doesn't fit at all with your previous portfolio of games. You do it, it makes me scratch my head. I don't know. I just don't know. Spooky Pinball, they seem so much cooler as just an organization. Same with Jersey Jack and Stern. I mean, Stern, we always knock Stern lately, but Stern has done so much. And I'm just looking for David and Barrels to just get a little bit cooler, like make the art package look cooler. Like Bon Jovi is rock and roll. Why put him up on the trans light looking like a woman? Like it just doesn't work. This whole thing could have been cooler. You could have gone more towards like a slippery when wet vibe of the whole cabinet. This to me is like what you get when you don have the swagger and you don have like the coolness you kind of like letting a geek guy and look it OK We're all geeks, but like, you know, like geeks are making decisions on aesthetic things. But man, all these companies, I mean this, whether it's Barrels or Spooky or Stern, all these companies should hire a few graphic designers from like, Art schools that are like hip and cool and understand design like these products are too expensive to miss the mark by a mile on the aesthetic appeal of these games. And if you miss that and now you can't change it, I don't want to have. And the irony that they made a rubber duck, nobody wants to put an ugly duckling into their pinball lineup. We've seen how beautiful games can look like Ghostbusters LE, Deadpool. We've seen Batman SLE. We've seen Guns N' Roses. We've seen beautiful games, Harry Potter. David, you are not just competing with what's new in box right now. If I have $12,000, I'm looking at every single pin I can get for $12,000 and where do I want to put my money? I'm hearing already that Goonies is going to just blow us away. I talked to somebody who saw it and they were like, bro, just wait. If people pull the trigger on these games, they're going to regret it when they see what Goonies looks like, when they see Franchise Back to the Future. And that's what I'm just saying. Just wait until November. There will be Bon Jovi's on shelf in November. And they not going to even have all 700 made by then And I just urge you to be patient We getting bombarded Buy today Available today It annoying Just tune it out Get ready to buy from Brenda though I telling you like I not going to spam you Just be like if you want to buy these games Brenda going to get you the game at the best price We going to work on all this stuff What it going to take Free shipping Okay How hard can that be We going to do it We going to do it Frank Mack and Brenda are coming, baby. Everybody have a great Wednesday. I look forward to seeing what people's experiences are when they jump on these games at Southern Fried Gaming Expo. But it's been an exhausting week. Three games in two days is too much. These pinball companies need to get together and space out these reveals differently. And here's the thing. You don't need Southern Fried Gaming Expo. You don't need every single pinball content creator making show content for you. All you got to do is get the theme right. Goonies is already sold out. Gremlins is already sold out. South Park is already sold out. David, I've been telling you, nail the theme. This is not it. When you made me sign that NDA, the two themes you told me, that was two years ago. This isn't it. Where are those themes? Did you make it up? Or were you just like trying to get me to be quiet? Baby, you can't buy Kaneda. Kaneda, out.