every now and again one of my wishes with pinball actually gets answered and this happens to be one of those occasions that it actually does get answered by stern pinball nonetheless we have it right here. Of course, it's been about two weeks ago, but now I finally got around to it. And as you can tell, if you're watching this on YouTube, I'm going over an article right now. We're going to talk about the Stern Pinball Insider Connected platform. And they announced it. And to me, this is actually a pretty dope thing. Now, if you're not quite sure what I'm talking about, you can go over to YouTube and you can see on Stern's own YouTube page, they have a, I believe it's like a trailer. And then they have about a six minute video with George Gomez, kind of explaining it all. But right here, we'll just go ahead and read a little bit from their general, I guess it was their press release on it. And it says, and this is as of August 26th, and as of this recording, it's September 7th. So, yes, I'm a little behind, but, hey, that's what vacation does and COVID quarantines for the kiddos do as well. And, yes, they're all okay, though, by the way, but that is the main reason why I have not been putting out any content. But enough excuses. Let's go directly to the content now. So Stern Pinball announced today, about two weeks ago, the launch of Insider Connected, a comprehensive technology initiative to connect the universe of Stern Pinball machines. I can't even talk right now. That's how excited I am. The platform is designed to enhance and extend player engagement with the games across both home and commercial environments. It also presents professional operators of the pinball machines with a robust set of tools to drive location play, build player loyalty, analyze performance, make adjustments remotely, and maintain the machines. Registration for Insider Connected is free. Players can either scan a QR code at the games or go to Stern Pinball website, where they will need to enter an email address and create a password. And so basically it just goes on to say that once players are connected, that there will be issued a unique QR code, and this will be used to identify you according to the Stern Pinball database with your player log. Now, obviously, this player log is designed to track your progress where you can earn game-specific achievements, you can engage with the communities, as I believe they're going to have forums, and apparently you can participate in promotions and challenge quests as well. Now, as of right now, this is going to be available for just a few of the Spike 2 LCD games, which we'll get into here in just a few. But eventually it should include their whole basic LCD database or LCD universe that they have over at Stern Pinball, which is 17 total games. And so, yes, as I was just saying a second ago, at launch seven titles will be supported. And so if you go over to tiltforums.com, which is basically where you go to for competitive stuff, But the user Jamon has actually posted up a pretty concise and just a great overview of the whole entire thing. I don't think anybody else could have done a better job than this. So full kudos or full whatever you want to call it goes to Jamon. I can't even think right now because I'm too damn excited to be able to read through this with everybody. And so he pretty much has everything written out right here to where we go over the introduction, the basics, player-oriented features. And so I'm just going to read through this a little bit, and then I'll give you my thoughts on it as we go along. And so right here on introduction, Stern Insider Connected is a platform for all Stern Spike 2 games with LCD screens. And again, if you're watching on YouTube and you kind of want to follow along as well, it's on tiltforums.com or if you're listening to this on audio. So in a sentence, it adds Internet connectivity that allows players with dedicated accounts to experience additional features such as achievements or challenges and be able to socialize such as competing with friends for high scores or access official forums, which is tremendously great. I like the idea of being able to be on a forum with the people from Stern to where they will actually interact based on what you're talking about with pinball. Now, of course, we've seen some of them do show up over on Pinside every now and again, but I know there's a large part of the community that does not go to Pinside. and even though PennSci does have a huge database or a huge user database, there is still a solid number of people out there that don't necessarily go to that site or they don't necessarily participate in the forum. So I'm curious to see how a forum strictly dedicated to Stern Pinball would work out, especially if they end up having it just sectioned off for games, for tips, for strategies, for tournament stuff, for being able to ask the designer directly something like AMAs, all kinds of stuff. I think that the ability to reach out to your customer base is huge. If you're reaching out to your customer base through this means, I think that's a good thing. So it says here that the platform will probably absorb Stern's current insider loyalty program upon launch. The paid insider all access will likewise become insider connected all access or maybe it's insider all access connected. I don't know. I've seen both. I'm not quite sure exactly what it would be. I guess it's based off what Stern Pinball said themselves, that they launched the Insider Connected platform. Trademark. So there you go. All right. So the basics, again, QR code is going to be on the machine to where you'll be able to get it to link back to relevant pages that you'll need for Stern games. And again, it discussed a little bit about the unique QR code, which is pretty cool right there. And this part was interesting as well. as Zombie Yeti, who's an artist that's been with Stern for a while, or at least they've done several games for Stern, that they confirmed on two separate occasions that each game will actually get new artwork there that will be custom made by the original artist. So people that have seen pictures of just kind of what the QR codes look like, and they're kind of wondering, okay, well, that kind of looks off-putting compared to what was there before. Well, now you've heard it right there that Zombie Yeti himself has said that new artwork is coming there. So that'll be interesting to see how that is integrated with the existing artwork and also with how they're conveying it, how Stern Pinball is conveying these QR codes right now on the apron. So it says here that once registered, every user will have their own profile page and avatar. The former displays information about the games you've played, such as high scores and total number of games played on a particular title. Differentiate it between pro and premium LE models. My God, I need some green tea. I cannot talk right now. So that right there, I actually really do like that feature. I like the idea of knowing what games I've played, and if I can pinpoint when I've played them and what location I've played them out at, even better. I like the idea of that. And I know that there's a lot of people out there that don't necessarily want to feel like they're being tracked. And I get it. I get it but quite frankly just my mindset right now is I just pretty much it pinball I not really too worried about it So let see The platform will also provide all users with news about Stern Games along with pages for each of their titles with all kinds of game stuff This is according to a podcast that George Gomez did, by the way. In addition, there will be official forums, which we just talked about, but general and specific to the game. Again, just talked about. And then it goes on to say how developers and engineers will all interact and answer questions and stuff like that. So there you go. All right, so the thing that will affect the majority of us watching this video or listening to this, player-oriented features. Now, something that I've been wanting for a very long time when it comes to pinball is some type of achievement system. And this is something that if you've been a gamer for a long time, whether it be on the Xbox or PlayStation, and I don't recall Switch or Nintendo having anything like that, but if you've been a part of the Xbox or the PlayStation ecosystem, you're very well aware of trophies or achievements. And something like this was hinted upon with Avengers last year when they had about 32 trophies included in the game. And I thought that that was awesome because it gives you a lot of different reason to play different parts of the game and not necessarily do the same thing over and over and over again, whether it's to get a high score or whether it's to challenge or go after a wizard mode. because truth be told, for people that are either slightly above average or really above average players, most of the time you'll get to where you're doing the same exact thing on games over and over and over again, and I'm sure even some of the below average players would find themselves doing the same thing as well. With something like this in place, I'm excited because it allows the player to explore more of the game and it gives them reason to pretty much use the whole entire play field. And if whoever's coding and whoever's laying out the rules and whoever's coming up with the achievements, if they can lay this out in such a way that it gives the player incentive to explore different parts of the game, that is a huge win, in my opinion. That's a huge plus. So I'm very excited about it. So this article or this little post goes on to say, players who log in with Insider Connected will be able to acquire achievements specific to the game they're playing. Examples given by George Gomez on the podcast included beating Juggernaut with a certain time and Deadpool training Turtles in TMNT. Again, those types of achievements would be pretty dope. Time-based stuff, that's pretty exciting because it makes you play out of your element. If you're a control player, it might make you play a little bit more wild. I like that. So these are all going to be designed by the team who made the original game. Again, a plus. Earning an achievement awards XP to your account. Doing this on a game in a commercial location will mark it as verified, which will award the full value. Otherwise, they'll merely complete it and only give you partial XP if you're not on location. Now, it says right here, this is how Stern's addressing the issue of cheating by taking the glass off. For me personally, and I've talked about this on the other podcasts I have over on TPM with Tom Graff and Joel, over on a triple drain. We talked about this in detail for a little while on our past podcast, and I'm not a huge fan with how this is designed. And the big reason for that is if I'm paying for this particular product, at least it's going to be baked in to any pen from now on. But if I'm getting this, and this is what I'm wanting to do with my pen, I'm wanting to get achievements, I'm wanting to get XP, I'm wanting to participate. I'm not a huge fan of only getting half of the XP compared to if I was on location. Again, I know that this is an extreme first world problem. I realize I am very much in the minority of this issue. I have to believe that the vast majority of people out there really won't care what their XP is. Just for me as a completionist, because I'm very OCD about this stuff, It's going to drive me insane to have a game at my house to know that I'm churning through all these achievements. But yet I look at it. I'm like, OK, it's it's only like halfway. I'm only a half mast on doing something like this. And that kind of drives me a little bit crazy. And if the only reason that they're doing this is because of the issue of cheating with people taking the glass off, then what I would have liked to have seen is maybe you could still keep the verified and unverified or just flat out verified, just indicating your own location, right? And then have the badges that you get for the achievements, just have those be outlined by whatever color you deem necessary to indicate that this was done on location. To me, that would be pretty cool. But I also have to believe that if they've gone out of their way to kind of differentiate this, that there's some reason for that, whether it be prizes in the future. There's got to be some reason why they would do something like that. Because to me, I just I don't like the idea of not being able to get the full XP just because somebody else thousands of miles from wherever for people I don't even know choosing to take the glass off just so they can get achievement badges. I don't know. Again, first world problem, but it does kind of bug me, and it does influence my buying behavior as a consumer. God's honest truth, I told a few of my friends as soon as I heard about this, I told them I have every reason now to purchase nearly every single Stern Pro game from here on out just so I can get practice on it, and I can get the achievements, and then I move on from it. Now that I've seen something like this, I'm kind of taking a step back a little bit because I don't feel like I'm getting the full intended value out of the achievement system. And that's just, for me, that's kind of hard to get over just because I've been around achievements now for the better part of nearly two decades at this point, or at least we're well into our second decade, starting our third decade actually of having achievements in a game ever since the Xboxes in the mid 2000s, way early on. And so that's just kind of, I don't know, maybe I'm just showing my age on that. Maybe it's, again, first world problem. let me know. Maybe it's just not that big a deal and I'm just blowing it out of proportion. Either way, I'm still interested in trying it out. I might just not be as excited as I originally was. So achievements will show up as badges on your profile page. Gomez says that there will be really cool unique new art for all of them, though the promotional video shows icons that appear to have been pulled from the original game's art package. As you can see here, if you're looking on YouTube, you'll see a little bit about what this dashboard looks like. And again, my whole idea is if it's grayed out, obviously you have not completed it yet. If it has color in it, you've completed it. If it's verified, just add some type of border around it. I think that's the easiest way to do it. And yeah, I just, I don't know, again, points. But I need to move on from that. Okay, so in addition, there's also a separate non-game specific system of achievement badges that track milestones made across all Insider Connected games. the number of games you played, the number of days you've played, both total and consecutively, and so on. Interestingly, there are also badges tied to specific events as the video illustrated this with some badges related to Pinball Expo 2021 And as we go a little bit closer you can see down here below there indeed is Pinball Expo 2021 badges So that right there is pretty cool I love the idea of having, just bringing the community further together. That is pretty sweet. That is really cool. So challenge quests are on here. Let's see. It says that they're going to be issued by either an operator or Stern itself. interested users must achieve a specific goal with a set amount of time to complete it. Once they do so, they'll earn a reward. So this is basically just like an RPG's version of a community event. And I think something like this is also pretty cool. You're just going to be hearing me say that a lot. I think most of this is pretty dope. From a gamer standpoint, I'm glad to see it coming over to pinball in general. But I would love to see different community challenge quests that if we unlock, maybe something comes of it maybe it's just a full-on another badge maybe it's swag that comes out or gear or something like that i think that there's a lot of potential with this now when it comes to the operator point of view of it i've talked to some operators and i do operate a few games myself and it's basically 50 50 on whether somebody wants to really adopt this or not now obviously there's not really going to be any choice to whether your machine's going to adopt because they're going to be on every pin from here on out, but it's still up to the user whether or not they want to take advantage of some of these things within this interface or within this particular piece of technology. Now, again, it's been 50-50 from what the people I've talked to, and I've talked to over a dozen people, and I'm on the side of I want to activate it, and I want to see how well it works for the customer base. player. Now, I don't think it's necessarily going to bring in a bunch of new players just because I think the only people that are going to truly appreciate something like this, such as achievements, such as seeing different things in the game, are going to be people that are already well-versed in pinball. I don't think it's going to be brand new people trying to figure that out. I think you have to... There's just a high barrier to entry when it comes to pinball. When it comes to understanding pinball, there's a high learning curve, and I don't necessarily see somebody brand new coming up to a pin, and they're solely coming up to a pin because they realize that there's achievements on there. Because quite frankly, they probably won't realize that there's any type of achievements or something like that on there until they look at it. Now, a lot of new people that I see play games, they can't even find the damn start button, so I don't necessarily know how a QR code is really going to really click in with their head of what they're seeing. Now, I'll be interested to see how Stern addresses this, and I'll be interested to see how certain locations address this with their existing customer base to kind of push them towards adopting this type of platform right here. So they also go on to say that there will be treasure chests, which are going to be awarded at complete random for the users. The exact content is hidden until the player checks the app. Now, for me, I like this idea. I just wish the execution might be slightly different. I don't mind the randomization of it. What I would love to see, though, are certain just sky-high, really difficult objectives, right, that a player base or that a certain player has to get. So it's almost like a bounty program. If you play something like Destiny, you might realize what I'm talking about, to where you have your daily bounties and your weekly bounties. And I think there's some things that even have monthly events. Now, something like this, I would love to see some type of weekly bounty program that Stern would implement that maybe you just make things very difficult. And for the ones that get past it, maybe you choose a player based out of that. I don't know. Legally, I don't know how that would be, but I kind of like the idea of earning stuff just as much as the random awards that you get from it. But I understand why there's random awards. I just want to see also the people that are very active on this platform to get back some stuff as well, to just kind of engage the community even more. Because obviously we're not owed anything in particular or anything like that, but it would just be cool just to engage the community a little bit more. So the rewards that they were talking about before either physical or virtual or store discounts, it looks like that potentially when they're talking about physical stuff, it's probably going to be via their store, especially since it's also noted here that in the promotional video, they used a lot of pictures from their store also. George Gomez elaborated a little bit more on how virtual goods work on the podcast he said we want collections to happen and we have plans on helping you build collections and then eventually giving you the power to trade some of that stuff such as I got two little deadpools I only need one I can trade that so it's almost like a virtual trading post between members of the Stern Insider Connected and that is fascinating I'm not quite sure how that would work but I'm intrigued by that. I'm intrigued by collecting certain things and just kind of hoarding some stuff and then eventually just trading it out and just getting like a full swag bag of gear. I don't know. It's an interesting proposition. All right, so then there's different promotions. Also, as Gomez had mentioned, that there's promotions akin to a punch card, such as getting something free after buying several of them over time, while others will just be random drawings. So the video actually kind of showed the giveaway, And if you're looking here on YouTube, you'll notice that it says Stern's 90 Days of Giveaways. And it says, congratulations, you successfully entered into the giveaway promotion. Anytime you receive a ticket notification and enter it online, it will be entered immediately with immediately spelled. Not right. You can still review the rules and progress at any time in the promotions page. So who knows? Maybe immediately is spelled right. I'm going to feel like a dope if it's not. I need to look that up real quick. It just looks so weird to me right now. All right, so 30-day giveaways, 60-day giveaways, 90-day giveaways. And we can't quite see what the prizes would be on there except for the monthly grand prize would have been a Stern Insider membership for the 30-day, the 60-days indicating autograph lit translate, the 90-day giveaways indicating Stern pinball machine. I don't know if that means an actual Stern pinball machine or not. That right there would be very interesting. and now I'm still looking at it immediately. Now all of a sudden it looks like it's spelled correctly, so I don't know. Maybe I need to take some spelling tests a little bit more seriously in my youth. All right, so we go on to look at the operator-oriented features. That pretty much just winds up or puts everything in a nice little bow for the players. Now for the players, I am still excited to see what all comes of that. Again, I'm not a big fan of the XP in terms of earning or not earning as much as you would on location, But hey, it is what it is the promotions look pretty dope I hope that they do put on some bounties And I think it's really cool that they do have the randomized treasure chest in order to win just random loot or random gear So that's pretty sweet as well. Alright, so if you're an operator What going to be interesting about this is that you going to have Analytics so this platform right is going to be able to give you different statistics based on your location and based on game things So I'm assuming that not only does it mean, like, revenue or maintenance status and stuff like that, but I'm assuming it might give you certain audits that indicates how the game's being played, such as how long the game's being played, what the ball save timer is, replay value, just the basic things that you already see within the menu system as well. I think it'll just be a little bit easier to really go over all this data and all this analytic stuff so that way you can really figure out how the game plays. And I'm kind of interested to see how that would work exactly with Stern Pinball actually taking this data and using it for themselves to figure out how to tune games and figure out how they're going to make games in the future. I guess that kind of caught my ear or kind of caught my eye when they were talking about that. I just don't know exactly how that would go. So it still says that, quoting George Gomez, that there will be a huge data mining effort that's going to be happening at post-launch on our end, meaning Stern's. It's happening outside of my studio with the real data mining company. I should say a real data analytics company. So, again, this means that your information from this machine or whatever information that is coming from this machine is going to be sent over the interwebs. and it's going to go to Stern and Stern's going to figure out what exactly is going on with it. So or at least it's going to happen with the data mining company. What they're going to do with that exactly, again, not quite sure, just based on what we just talked about. Maintenance alerts, again, machine will notify operators when something malfunctions. That's pretty cool right there. Highly expected to happen. But it's nice to be able to have some type of alert system, especially if it goes with your smartphone or something like that, that if something goes down on the pin, you no longer have to rely on somebody reporting this to the front desk or somebody actually catching it because sometimes there's issues that go unnoticed. Unless somebody absolutely knows what to look for, this is an issue that could go completely unnoticed for days at a time. So this right here would be a very good thing for operators. You can also use it for local promotions. And again, even the poster says on here that they're not completely sure what this is exactly. and it's just based on George Gomez mentioning on the podcast that you could create specialized QR codes and even using it for different fashions. He's even compared it to using it with McDonald's, I guess as a collaboration of some sort. So I imagine you could probably do some sort of collaboration if you happen to have your game in a bar that maybe you talk to the bar manager and you guys figure it out from there or a restaurant manager or whatever it could be. And then the code could be set to update automatically. Now, for me personally, I think it's great that it makes it easier to update the code. I'm not a huge fan of the code updating automatically. And a big reason for that is I typically will wait at least a week after a new code comes out just to make sure there's no game-breaking bugs in the code. Because I actually had my Star Wars Premium from about three or four years ago now that I bought new in box. It might have even been four years ago now because this is back in 2017. But when I updated the code, it totally just bricked the game. I believe it was Nodeboard 9 just totally petered out. The fork to Death Star just got stuck in an upward position. And it was like that for about four to six weeks. Not fun. And it could have been entirely avoided if I didn't download the newest code. Now, that being said, I have not had this happen in a long time since then. but I've always developed the habit to not download and update my games with the exact code or with the newest code until a few days pass by, and I know that there's no game-breaking bugs in said code. So I guess that's kind of go at your own risk on something like that. Then the launch details here show that Insider Connected is planned between September and October this year, so it's going to be coming very soon. And again, as of this podcast, we have no idea what the cost is, but George Gomez has been adamant that the cost is going to be low, I guess, is the easiest way to put it. It's not going to break the bank from what I've been told now. What their idea of not breaking the bank is, I don't know, or what their idea of a low-cost product is, I don't know. Something that you might think is low at $250 might be high to me, and something I you. I don't know. We'll see what happens here. so the plan is to support seven games at launch as of right now it's going to be Deadpool, Jurassic Park Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Avengers Infinity Quest Led Zeppelin, The Mandalorian and the next game coming out, Cornerstone Game that was actually supposed to be announced tomorrow but has been delayed until Tuesday, September 14th I believe, which may or may not be Godzilla, the funny part is it's never really been confirmed It's confirmed that Stern has this particular thing, but it's never been confirmed that it is indeed Godzilla coming out next. I think it would be freaking hilarious if it turned out not to be Godzilla coming out next. That would have pulled the wool over everybody's eyes and just caused a massive whiplash. Anyhow, so those are the seven games coming out. Deadpool, Jurassic Park, Ninja Turtles, Avengers, Led Zeppelin, Mandalorian, and the next Cornerstone game that's getting announced sometime next week. and then as you can tell right here they are going to come out with a system or with basically a retrofit kit that will be available from any distributor pretty much or any dealer and even Stern's own online store and you'll be able to get this for how much we still don't know but you'll be able to use this particular retrofit kit to go onto your game to help you get online or connected with your particular game and as you can tell right here that on some of the games you may need a specialized kit with a new apron. And I think that's just for a couple. I could have swore that they said Star Wars was one of them, and I forget the other one off the top of my head. But it's basically to where you have to replace the full bottom arch on a pro. And that's pretty much what it looks like. Oh, of course, it shows it right here. Batman 66, Star Wars, and Elvirus. So there you go. Those are the three games with the specialized kits. And then let's see here. Gomez claims that there will be a super-duper Wi-Fi antenna rig for challenging locations where Wi-Fi may be a problem. And then, of course, as always, just as Gomez recommends, just put an Ethernet cable to your cabinet if you can. It's always best to hardline your stuff if you absolutely can. And I think that that pretty much would wrap it up right there. I mean, what do you guys think? Are you excited about finally being connected to the Internet? Do you not care about being connected to the Internet? And all you want to do is just play your game in peace. Let me know in the comments, email, whatever you want to do. Other than that, that's all I got. Thank you guys for listening. Go play some pinball. You have just listened to a pinball podcast. You can catch new shows on your favorite podcatcher or over on YouTube.com forward slash Marv Loco for even more pinball content.