BlahCade Pinball Podcast this is the BlahCade Pinball Podcast i'm your host chris freebus aka shut your trap joining me as always halfway across the world jared morgan well hello everybody how's it going today it's not a weekend right it's not the usual day we're doing a midweek and there's a reason for that. Joining us also right now, just in the northern side of my state, Mel Kirk from Zen Studios. What's going on, Mel? Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. Thanks for changing up your normal schedule. I appreciate it, and good to be here again. Well, it's really easy for us to change our schedule right now, as we're both home, for the most part. We're both waiting from home. It's not down at all at the moment. I imagine usually what lately has been the issue with us not being able to get a hold of you is because of all the shows and places, the trade shows that you've been going to. And you had two that were coming up that obviously have been eliminated for the time being? Yeah, actually, so I was supposed to be in Europe end of February, all the way through the middle of March, right until GDC. and then from GDC I was going I forgot what was going on but in the E3 of course out there in the future but all that was wiped off and cancelled and so I've been parked at home for a while now like the longest stretch in probably the last 10 years which I'm finding to be quite enjoyable under these circumstances but like no flights books that might be the first time in the last 15 years I don't have anywhere I'm scheduled to go right now I think We're all kind of in this same situation. Because you guys were going to be promoting, I know that I kept on seeing Twitter posts regarding both Operencia coming to multiple platforms and then also, was it Dreadnoughts? Yeah. Operencia is launching on multiple platforms next Tuesday. That's the 31st. Here's the weird thing, too, is like days are all bleeding together. I don't, today is Thursday. I was reminded that today is Thursday. It could have been Saturday or Tuesday. I don't know. so I have to keep reminding myself of actual dates now instead of like Tuesday Monday but yeah the 31st is Oparensia Dreadnoughtical is April 29th and that's across that's a multi-platform launch as well so uh and that was pretty much what the trade show stuff was going to be I imagine this can be your focus with Zen Studios yeah I think so um and it's interesting now because we have more staff um and we have a marketing team and all these things that we never used to have so they plan to go to events and shows and like i i may or may not be going to though i'm usually doing bd or strategic kind of things and um but i know that we did a dream hack event in la where we had we had a pinball machine and we were showing up rencia that was actually that event happened and that was like the last one after that everything got cut off but um then there was during gdc there was supposed to be some game showcases for dread nautical that that got canceled it moved to an online edition um at uh on on steam where we had like demos live and stuff but everything's going digital um the event presence for now is down we are locked down the i've seen that trend moving towards digital everything even in the space i'm working in technical writing all the conferences are going virtual i actually think it's awesome because people like me can't get to the u.s and it actually opens up the world a lot more you know it's interesting uh i met a guy so i was at dice in vegas in february and that's kind of the like the executive conference for the for the game industry um and met a guy uh mark sullivan i believe was his name from fast company and he ended up interviewing me so i was in fast company uh for a line about what events mean to the game industry and the whole thing is like actually it's kind of better for everybody because now everyone's gonna do their talks and just post them straight online and everyone can have access and we can share information faster. So maybe there's something to this, you know? Yeah. I don't know. So I'm going to get this out of the way too, just right off the bat, since we're talking about On Perentia and Dead Nautical. Because obviously there's been a gap between table releases. We're still in that gap. You guys said probably May or June is when the next pack would be dropping. But I know this and you've told us this before, but I just want to kind of clarify it for those that are curious. You guys working on those two games in no way diminishes the work on the pinball side of things because it's almost two different divisions, correct? Yeah, and it's actually, you know, there's pinball and non-pinball. And I'll just kind of say it again. We're actually, I mean, we're a multi-project studio now. Back in the day, we only worked on pinball and that was all we did and that was great. And then we've grown over time and we've launched other games and so we have three non-pinball projects these are all fully featured games operencia dread nautical and castle storm 2 which has been announced and will ship sometime those are all their own teams they operate um completely independently of pinball and the pinball team uh itself is incredibly busy right now it's uh we're busier than ever we're in a major uh console generation transition happening everyone knows Xbox 5 or PS5, Xbox Series X are all coming, the names, right? There's new platforms for people to play on. There's like Apple Arcade and there's Stadia. All these places, you know, it's totally reasonable to think that games should be shipping on those at some point soon and that there might be a slowdown on current gen. So, you know, the things that if you just look through the history of our cadence of releases, I think you'll find that we're in a similar situation. It's funny, too, because I think about, it's like, it's real easy for us to just go, well, just come on, put it out. But then it's like, well, you try running a company sometime and seeing all the moving pieces that need to go and get involved and, you know, and the marketing and the strategy of when to release and making sure everybody knows it's releasing and everything. It's like, you can't just go, here you go. yeah it's my responsibility to you know to look at the big picture and to make sure that we're set up for long-term success at times that that's going to mean that we're not shipping a quarterly pinball uh pack for everybody um and that's perfectly okay because uh working on larger initiatives you know is proving to be very good for us like star wars pinball nintendo switch last year was a rather big project it was a great payoff um and it was it was really well received super high quality content we're all proud of it um but like taking the approach of like big meaty things that we can really build on and set us up for future success are important um and those we have to balance those with like a quarterly dlc release or even a you know bi-quarterly dlc so um you know there's no shortage of pinball content in the pipeline i think we're going to surprise and delight uh people uh in the soon and in the not too distant in the future. So yeah, just bear with us. I'm kind of curious. With the Switch, obviously Williams Pinball had been out prior to the Star Wars titles dropping, and then that came out, and both physical and digital versions. Did you guys see a huge spike in Switch downloads, and did that translate not just in Williams' tables, but also all the older Xen originals that were available. Yes. Star Wars Pinball on Nintendo Switch, I mean, Pinball FX3 was doing really well on Switch. It always has. It continues to this day. But we have seen a lift in Pinball FX3 activity since Star Wars Pinball Switch came. So that game works to our advantage to bring people into saying, hey, Pinball's a game I enjoy on Nintendo Switch. Where can I get more? and we definitely saw a lift. That's really good. Yeah, it is. We're basically, I'd call it about a year and a half into basically from the time you announced Williams Pinball to having Tables released and up to this point. And I kind of wanted to take this moment in between these release cycles to just kind of reflect back on this past year and a half and what that's been like for the studio. It's kind of what the the focus that we're going to be doing here since we have your attention. Kind of one of the big things I was just curious about, though, was just what were some of the bigger challenges with making the Williams tables that Zen faced in general? Yeah. You know, you can't really work on these games without having an actual machine to take apart and to model. So one of the challenges is just, well, luckily in Budapest, We have the pinball museum there, which has a lot of games. And one of the things that I found out during this whole thing is back in the day, pinball was so popular in Hungary because that was kind of the only thing they had for entertainment during the Russian occupation. They didn't have Nintendo. They didn't have these other things. So they had a lot of pinball. But they had the highest pinball machine per capita of anywhere in the world for like 20 years. And that was a really, really interesting fact. So we've been able to get our hands on the machines. But that was one of the challenges is like, okay, we have a machine, but it's really broken down, and this thing's been played a lot. There's no replacement parts. How should it play? And so we try to fix it up ourselves to try to get a good simulation because we're trying to simulate what is really happening right there in front of us at that time. And you all know no two pinball machines are the same. No, they don't. Sure. I think oftentimes that's the reason of conjecture in the community about how something plays. everyone just needs to realize that everything, they're a physical beast and therefore they are going to play differently depending on where they are, how they're set up and it's really what Williams Pinball seems to be to me is it's the Zen Studios configuration of that particular pinball machine and people just need to realize that. I can tell you, that is true. The way that our machines play in our office and at the Budapest Pinball Museum, if you go and play those and then you play the game, I think that you're going to be like, oh yeah, they did it right. They did it right. Well, we were always saying that, and me and Jared both pointed out to Creature from the Black Lagoon as the prime source of this, because I was in a pinball league, and it seemed like everybody had those at their homes. And I played four different machines of Creature, not a single one of them played identical. And like big differences, just in terms of you'd launch the ball and how just that long arc coming around the ball and what it did, that first flipper hit, four different methods, all four different tables. So it was like, yeah, how are you going to – and these were nicely shopped tables too. They weren't, you know, routed tables out in the public. Totally. So if you want to talk about the challenge, I think that, you know, having a machine, having a machine that's in good shape and then realizing, hey, actually, we have two versions of the same machine, but they're not doing the same thing. What do we do with the game? That's been the biggest challenge, in my opinion, and especially when you try to make everybody happy and you're not. So that was when you guys first started with the machines. Now you've had a lot of times with these machines. Are you typically, when these machines come into the studio, are you having to do a lot of service to them to get them up and running, or are they in fairly good working condition that you can just go off of that with? They're in fairly good working condition. But what does take a lot of time is we break every single piece down, and then we model it and get it to size, and then it takes a lot of time. So, you know, but they're not coming in. We're never taking, like, a completely broken down machine that needs to be rebuilt. Although there's – actually, I shouldn't say that. There's one. There's one prize game that we found that is broken down, and we're getting it back and working. Oh, that's good. Jared, I feel we have a speculation podcast coming in our future on what that prize game will be. I love our looking down. I'll give you guys the little, yeah. The nod and the wink. So were you guys surprised at how long it took to do any of these conversions? I mean, obviously, on the one hand, you're not having to create the layout. You're not having to create the story. You're not having to create any of the content that way. but just the sheer reassembling and then the emulation, I imagine, probably took a little bit longer than you guys were initially expecting. Yes and no. There's things that, I mean, so overall, I'm really happy with how the process has gone, and I thought it was going to take longer. Like, my initial resource estimates were much bigger than what we actually ended up needing in a lot of regards. The things that are challenging, like getting our plastics, like the coloring on the plastics, you know, was challenging. Also the pro physics. Actually, it's a lot of work. That's why we haven't gone back through and added them yet into the other, the first, what, three packs? Yeah, three volumes. Yeah. So those elements have taken a lot of work and it's hard to retroactively go back and tweak things that we've already done. And I know if you understand game development, you might be like, oh, now you figured this out, just go back and push the button and make it all work the same It not like that So those things take a while But overall I really happy with how efficient we been And the team is awesome I mean these guys you know Deep and you know some of the guys on our team. I'm just so thankful for them that they love doing this and that they're so passionate about it. And it's a joy to work with them. Touching on an old touchy subject, the old censorship of the tables that's basically with what consoles are dealing with, and we constantly get asked this. Has there been any advancement with that? And more to the point, because we were all speculating about this with the potential of Jackbot being added into the table into the future, but that's entirely casino gambling. Is that kind of a reason why we haven't seen it yet? And how are we doing with the censorship in general, giving that as just an option to turn on and off on the consoles? so i can tell you this definitively that nothing is going to change with our esrb rating um for pinball fx3 so you're not going to see anything that'll fall outside of the scope of e10 plus on our current console platforms um on pc obviously we we figured out a solution yeah on on mobile um but right now on consoles we can't make a change so if if a change will happen in the table of before you uncensored you it would have to be something else entirely and if we interpolate this jared that means well let's see he just said they're working on ps5 and an xbox new console new rating oh okay um um let's uh go on also just in terms of we have heard that uh i know that uh i think when we were talking to Deep on one of these, that yes, alphanumerics are in the future, that people don't have to worry about that, because people are like, oh my god, we're not going to see them! And then they get all panicky, because all that's left of the DMDs are obviously the licensed stuff. But so we know that alphanumerics are coming in the future. What about something like Pinball 2000? I know that there's only two official releases with the Star Wars and Revenge from Mars, and then the third that was almost finished, which was Wizard Blocks, and I know people have assembled fully working versions of those. Are those at all in the potential future with Williams? I'd just say right now it's not exactly our focus. There's other things that would be in front of those. So just to answer the question, honestly, I guess, it's not an immediate thing that we're doing. There's a lot in front of that. Okay. Sounds like it's a bit of a someday maybe. I won't rule it out, but I'll tell you, it's not in the next six months or nine months. Yeah, right. If we're scraping the barrel and we need something, hey, look at that. Let's move on a little bit over to the mobile side of the Williams app and just Zen in general. you had mentioned this was back back when FX3 first came out that the original plan was to eventually update the mobile app to be just like FX3 and I'm assuming that was for the Zen side of things since then obviously then you guys got Williams and all the focus has been on the Williams app so the question is will there ever be a similar graphics and physics update to the Zen tables that are out there, even if it's not in an official FX3 mobile app, or is there still things happening on the mobile side of things that kind of will update all those tables? Sorry, I maybe didn't completely follow. So will the mobile game look more like FX3, or will FX3 look more like the mobile game? No, will the mobile... So the current Zen app with all the Xen originals on it. Will that eventually get upgraded to look a little bit more like FX3, function more like FX3? Because I know some of those tables needed to... They're basically still FX2 models. They're not FX3 modeled kind of thing. So I'm just curious to know if that's still on the table for all the Xen originals, or is it pretty much that's kind of frozen in time now, we're doing nothing but williams uh pinball app yeah i'd say that's a little frozen in time but there's but there's another uh like a bigger force actually behind that um as you know the mobile the mobile gaming market is massive like it's it's by far the leading uh it's global the most users most devices brands have changed the way that they do things on uh on mobile platforms And so, you know, Zen, we were kind of grandfathered in, so to speak, with this, like, ability to have a platform with a bunch of IP in it. Now those same type of IPs want to be front and center. They want the app branded with their IP. They don't want to be behind something or side by side with something. So, you know, so you see our progression from Zen to Aliens, Bethesda, and then to Williams. You're more likely to see things on mobile that are all one IP. And the metagame is wrapped around that. And it's just its own entity. So on console and PC, it's still cool to have a pinball platform and lots of stuff. But on mobile, the business is just run differently. Brands do things differently than they did back then. So there's a few things that work there. And then we've done really well with Williams. We can talk about that more if you like. But that's kind of where we are in terms of the strategy and the way things are progressing on mobile for us. And brands have a lot to do with that, obviously, with our pinball games. Yeah, that's kind of where I was leading into, which is the Williams app has gone through a couple of evolutions just within the terms of the pricing model, but it seems to have found a steady with probably the last three releases that have gone on. So I'm just kind of curious to know, is that pretty much the case that you've found the sweet spot? This is where the app is going to kind of expected to be in terms of pricing and how it functions? yeah i think so um we've we've progressed a lot in mobile uh williams is by far our i would say like economically it's our best producer in terms of when users come in what do they do and what kind of return do we get for them and i know that sounds horrible but i mean that's just the nature of mobile mobile games we try not to we we try not to embrace the evil that is like with you know i feel like in mobile gaming we still you know i think we hopefully who are finding a balance of it. But the reality is people come in, and this is, for most people, their primary gaming platform, and this is how they spend money, this is how they play a game. So we have to be successful there. I know there's a segment of the market that, and like you guys in this kind of player group, that you just want to buy the game, you just want to play it, you just give it to me. But sorry, you guys are like a small fraction of the percentage of all the people on mobile. Yeah. I think we started to realize that as time went on, like the variations in pricing and stuff like that in the app that you're sort of experimenting with to find the common ground. We quickly realized that mobile apps, like even though like if you compare it to something like Pimble. Okay, which had, you know, a buy it now DLC with no idea of like the freemium model. It's a very different type of business model. and it's something that really isn't going to go away. But doing it right is the really important part because, as you probably would have found, certainly in the very tiny, tiny segment that Chris and I fall into and probably a lot of the fans fall into, you probably would have got a fair bit of vocal feedback about some of the different experiments being run throughout the course. Yeah, totally. And not to pivot this conversation suddenly, but this is why I really got behind Apple Arcade. and we put Dreadnoughtical out on Apple Arcade. I feel like this is a way that we can have really good games in a mobile environment that aren't trying to do all the monetization gimmicks and the gotcha systems and all this. You can just pay a subscription and get access to all these great games that are super high quality. That's the way that I would love. I hope that it goes more in that direction. Yeah, it seems really interesting because you get to try the game out, and if you like it, you just keep playing it. But if you don't, you move on and find something else. Like, it's pretty good. I think it's one of the best values in games, like Xbox Game Pass, Apple Arcade, these kind of things where it's a monthly subscription and always new games and tons of stuff and things that you would never have tried. Yeah. You know, I think that for me, you know, I can give my kid her iPad and she just can play whatever she wants there and I'm not worried that I'm going to get a bazillion in-app purchase requests or she somehow figured out it's about $500 on nothing. The credit card from hell. Smurfberries. Buy the Smurfberries. Yeah. Speaking, though, with trying things out, and this has been a question that I've had personally and then trying to explain it to people, the pro physics and the visual enhancements that are in the Williams app, Obviously, you're not able to engage them until you've grinded for quite a while. And there's a lot of people that, if this is their only platform, they don't see what the big deal is. Why is everybody going nuts over the physics? Because they're not playing with the Williams physics. They're playing with the more player-friendly version of the Zen physics, as we like to call it. So the non-pro version. And I've always felt that it would be so beneficial to just give people that taste, give them that sample. Has there been any movement with the limited time events, which usually are only six days long, throwing that stuff in there so that people can get a taste of it so they know what they're actually grinding towards, getting those table parts for to understand what it is they actually want to buy. So then if they want to purchase outright the Pro Pack, they know what they're spending their money on, basically. Yeah, this is going to sound really weird to you. The majority of those people don't want to play with Pro Physics. they it's it's too difficult for them they get frustrated um they like the more gamey kind of floaty feel so we've gone ahead with what what do the majority of people hopefully want it like retention is the big thing you want to keep people in the game you don't want to turn users so we found we find that the majority and it's an overwhelming it's in the 99 point something percentage um wow of people who play the game want to they like it's too hard for them on the pro physics and that's kind of a nature of pinball is it's a difficult game it was designed to eat your quarters um you're not sure you know so um i i think of pinball as a mass market game i look at it people know it like tetris and slots and i want them to come into the game i want them to feel good, have fun, and stick around and hopefully spend some money. But if they're enjoying themselves, that's great. For the guys who want more of the challenge, I mean, you know, if there was a way that we could just automatically put you into some bucket and say, all right, we know exactly who you are. We're working on that. There's AI technology that we're working on based on number of taps on the, you know, the phone and all these different things to know what kind of a player you are to maybe put you in a different bucket in the game that says you're going to get this stuff now. so you know these are possibilities but i just say the overwhelming uh overwhelming overwhelmingly amount of pinball players that we have are just casual fun people who love star wars or love marvel um the williams app itself is maybe a little different because that's more nostalgic these are people who grew up playing these games but a lot of those guys man some of them are the really good players but they're gonna hand to their kid and their kid now is playing completely different way. So the AI gets messed up, right? You're this kind of player. What just happened? Now you're a frantic, like you don't know what's going on and you can't, there's no time. These are actual game design challenges. That's really interesting. A suggestion from the comment section here is that because the app is getting quite large with the amount of tables that are there to unlock, is there a chance that you can maybe select which tables you want to focus on for getting the table parts, or is that still going to be just relegated to when there's a limited time event happening? I could talk with the guys who are managing the game. That seems feasible, you know, and you're right. I mean, at a point you have, what's the tyranny of choice? Right. Do you guys know this one? Yeah, because we're at 18 tables right now, and even that's starting to get, wait, which one do i want to actually play right now yeah um that's the need for the random table you know random uh but yeah you know when i when i go to buy toothpaste and it's my and usually you know if i get stuck with that job and i'm like uh what toothpaste you know um this is this is actually uh off the list of questions but i remember you discussing um the uh where you were doing Dave and Buster's testing on the pinball cabinets, you were saying that it works better if you have less choice on those. Because, again, it's a whole what toothpaste do I choose problem when you're walking up to it. I don't know if you could talk about how that's been going, like the site tests. But, yeah, it's been quiet for a bit. But, yeah, I don't know. It is. Well, yeah, if we want to go into pinball machines now, we totally can because I can give you the full update. Is that good? Do it. Okay. Do it. So to answer your question yeah we found that three pinball tables is the optimal amount And you also don want to allow the user to have to scroll all the way across It all out of view It all needs to be in view at the same time So all three of those have to rotate. Once it goes out of view and they start swiping back and forth, you have run into a lot of problems from people accidentally starting a game that they didn't want to start or that are just spending a lot of time swiping. Right. So we found that three is the optimal. let them choose on the screen the tests are going uh really well we've we've been we're in casinos we're in a dave and busters we're in a mario and dreddy uh kart racing in florida we're in some independent pizza locations some barcades we're in logan's arcade in chicago um i think what are we at we must be at 30 locations now with different form factors not all of them are the big lit up a crazy looking one some of them are more standard looking game um but we have some machines where they're turned on just totally free to free play you don't don't spend any money we have some credit credit card swipe or apple pay google pay wireless and then we have some which are redemption models and all the data coming in is giving us like sending us in directions for how to basically support different business models and commercial locations um right now if you want to if you're in a location, you can actually call Pinball Arcade up, and they'll give you, like, here's the three different options, the three different business models we can give you, and we will ship you the game, and it can be live in your location. So IAPA in Florida, that was in November, was kind of a big kickoff for that. We got a bunch of machines put in, and then, of course, this situation just happened where there's no, you know, no locations are shutting down, and people are afraid to go out. So I assume our data is going to go completely flat here and for the foreseeable future, so we're probably going to see some delay. But we have been ramping. It's been a really nice ramp. We're getting good acceptance. We know it's a process because hardcore pinballers will come in and they'll be like, this is garbage, I'm never playing this. And then a couple days later you find out they are playing it and they're having a great time. So there's acceptance going on. There's people understanding what this is, what we're trying to be, what we're not trying to be. There's a lot to come with that. I think with how we can do esports, how we can do global events, how we can do competition, how the pinball community can bond and be connected in a fun community. So a lot to come still. And then you may have seen at CES we had an announcement with Arcade 1-Up. Yeah, we saw that. Yeah, just a little bit of news. I think we milked about two or three podcasts out of that, so yeah. Before you go into that too though, Mel, you know, I've got a large living room. I'd be happy to, you know, offer plenty of data with one of those machines. Just saying. I mean, if they're not getting any play anywhere else, you know, whatever the one that's in Southern California, they can ship it right over here. So, yeah, tell us what you can about 1UP. So, yeah, the thing with Arcade 1UP is really cool because, you know, So I saw pinball machines as like, first of all, the whole thing is organic. You know, we turned on vertical monitor support. It was an ask from the community on Steam. We turned it on so you guys could play with your screens, you know, vertical orientation, the way pinball should be played. And then suddenly guys started building machines in their garage, and then we had a guy in VP Cabs. He decides, I want to make a business. He pitches Shark Tank. He gets a deal. I mean like it's just like I kept blowing my mind I'm like whoa okay maybe you know I never thought that this could really happen but then sure enough step by step organically just started happening um and I realized I was like you know this could like really kind of close the loop on this ecosystem that we've built we've got console pc mobile we have vr now we got a physical presence like in the game of pinball like I said it's like a tetris slot style thing everybody wants to play everyone wants to play on every device pinball is a machine to begin with um and there's always been two things that have uh blocked mass market pinball machine adoption like guys we all want every pinball machine in our house right uh yeah of course anybody who's listening to this right now anybody a part of our community um you know i have a fishtails machine it's broken down it's not working when it is it breaks down again um so you know you have a say like a and it's big it's really big i have it in my garage i can't fit into my house but if we could solve the size issue make it so it doesn't take up a huge amount of space and then the price most guys you know you can find something for six grand um brand new ones at eight and a half and above some maybe a little lower depending on what's going on so you got size and space arcade went up came to us um with a great prototype and we saw that, Holy cow, you guys have solved space and price. And maybe now it's available for people who want to own pinball machines to, to have one. And so we've been working on getting the feel as authentic as possible. Of course, it's running our software, which we're very proud of, um, with star Wars and Williams so far being announced. Um, and you know, these are going to be sold at Walmart and target and Costco and big box stores with Amazon. I'm hoping that we can really, you know, give people that real, authentic pinball experience that they've been waiting and maybe couldn't afford before in the space that they didn't have. So I'm really personally excited about it. And I think it's a real game changer. Can you tell us by any chance what, I know that the prototypes are running the Steam version of games, but I don't expect that they're going to put a computer into their cab. Do you know, is it going to be a mobile platform like Android running it, or is it something completely custom software built that's going to be running these games? So actually, Chris, right now I can't confirm with you what version we're going with. We're going to make that call, so we're testing a lot of different things, and it's there's an intersection of price and quality, and there's certain benchmarks that we're not willing to go below. I can tell you, we don't want anything below 50 frames per second. That's the big one. We all know pinball sucks if it goes below that. Ideally, 60 FPS. The graphical quality has to be there. There's a lot we can do. This first go-around, you're not likely to have a lot of online features and connection and everything, but Gen 2 or maybe between Gen 1 and 2, we can turn on a really, really awesome engaging fun community um presence and ability for these machines to like be really alive um and that's what excites me you know i i love to play games my friends and i have a lot of people who always want to play pinball with me but um if i know that like i have a like a machine and i just jump on it and it's cool and it's fun like i'm gonna be doing that i'm gonna ditch my controller i'm gonna ditch my my ipad and i'm gonna be playing that baby all night long yeah for sure I think I'm sort of thinking with what you're seeing in your location testing at the moment, that I fully expect a lot of those lessons you're learning there are probably going to translate into Generation 2 of the arcade one-up cabinets as far as community and the ability to play online and these things that may or may not happen. But I mean, there's a lot of, I mean, the data you're already collecting out there in the field will surely inform those decisions. It absolutely is. because, you know, we, I know when we get together on these calls, we come up with all sorts of cool ideas and like things that are possible. And that's totally true. You start to put it into actual practice. Maybe you build a feature, you throw it out there, you see what sticks. And then, you know, everybody, this is what everybody's doing now in the game. And so you want to build that out. We are, we're getting all those data points. We're getting, we're, we are being data driven. We want to give the most amount of enjoyment to the most amount of people. and so having machines in the field are absolutely contributing to our ability to deliver a really fun in-home experience for people Do you think that like right now with the prototype obviously games like Attack from Mars don't need a plunger but is that something that maybe we can expect to see also wind up coming to some of these wind-up cabinets as certain tables don't have just an automatic launch they're going to need the plunger for skill shot kind of uh base play anyway yeah um so you know uh can't again not confirming hardware spec or anything yeah there's always a touch there's a touch screen possibility there's a button um and the button could also be the you know the launch button could be a magna save too um or on you know i don't whether there's one on the side like if you have two buttons the flipper and the magna um there's different configurations right now um that that we're nearly final, and then once it's all final, the worst thing I could do is spit something out and then we change it. So I don't want to save until the form factor is locked. We know it's going in the box. Here it is. But basically, these are all things that you guys have obviously been thinking about and trying to figure out what needs to go where and why and how. Yeah. Lock bar. How does it feel? The width of the thing, the height, the angle of the screen. I mean, like the DMD positioning, all these things have gone through so many iterations and prototyping and different phases. You know, in our work that we did with the commercial machines sped up because we, you know, we announced this thing in January. We're launching this year. And so if we didn't do all this work in the commercial side, I think we would have been starting from scratch in zero. So back from the very beginning of my story, when we just turned on vertical monitor orientation, it's led us all the way now to like this point. physical pinball. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He would have thought, hey, like that would have been where you ended up. As a software company, like we, we make, we make pinball software, you know, and now we've got, we've got capable partners who see the potential on the hardware side. You know, it's funny though, because didn't Mel, didn't you start at red octane doing controllers, you know, DDR pads and stuff like that? Yeah. See, so it's, it's coming full circle for you. Oh, yeah. I can tell you guys, yeah. Oh, yeah, I got some great stories. But back in those days, In The Groove with Dance Pads and then Guitar Hero, obviously with lots of guitars leading into Rock Band with drums and pieces. So, yeah, I've got a lot of experience on the hardware side. But Zen is a software company. Right, right, exactly. You're not getting into the hardware business. You're going to let others do that. something that we speculated about and I don't know how much you can touch upon this or not but I'm going to ask it anyway we kind of figured that with 1UP they're clearly going to have to be licensing for like say for putting out the Star Wars machine you know they have to secure all that licensing to be able to sell that have all the artwork there you guys already have the Star Wars license with your tables and I always point this towards with like what they just did with NBA Jam Well, that would work wonderfully because it's almost the exact same license that would be necessary for, say, NBA Fast Break on the pinball side of things. Do you feel that the two of you are going to be able to kind of combine your licensing efforts to really go after larger properties that might otherwise have been cost prohibitive for any one company to handle? Yeah, Chris, you're seeing the situation perfectly clear. Tastemakers is a parent company for our K1Up. Scott Bacharach, their CEO, has a tremendous amount of experience in licensing and has made tons of toys. And the guy is awesome. He's a visionary. It's been a thrill. I've been in rooms now with him, John D. Jolt, who was the founder of Zen, and myself and the four of us just start spitballing ideas. And you're just like, wait a minute, this is all possible. I think that you'll see collaborations between the two of us that probably couldn't have happened if it was just one of us trying to do it. and that's on the licensing side, the type of games that we can make. And now our opportunity that we can provide to licensors is bigger. We can give them a retail presence in a product that they can physically see and gives them a different dimension to the business and our pitch to them. And for us, of course, we're software, but now we've got the physical and the digital. I might say we're kind of driving the entire pinball space right now. no I don't doubt that yeah so for all of you who think that Zen is not interested in pinball anymore yeah there's something to be said there once upon a time back in the FX2 days when I was playing it on the PS3 we were able to do it wasn't head to head pinball but it was kind of like you could score races and time races where you could see the other person's meter kind of going across. It never made its way over to Steam, and I understand there wasn't much excitement of it at the time. Fast forward to today, though, especially with us all being locked away at home, and it's like, oh, man, what I would do to be able to go head-to-head, hot seat with somebody online. And I know that this is something that the guys over at Magic Pixel have worked out. I was wondering, is there any chance, momentum, glimmer of hope that Zen might be working on something similar? yeah um and i had to i had to be careful about this because of things that are in the works i have an official statement to read to you okay doesn't doesn't get more safe than that but let's go even if i cannot divulge anything confidential we are currently evaluating several very exciting game modes that fall into the online play category if not necessarily online hot seat head play trust me We have certainly some quite awesome game mode ideas in store for the future to come That was very legalese That would have been visited a number of times, I'm sure. I don't think I've ever given you an answer like that before, so now I've done it. We have a first. But you know what? I like it all the same, because again, it's speculation or rumor mill fodder for us, because it's better than going, no. Yeah. And also, you know, if you're being that particular about it, there's probably a very good reason for us, which we will try and extrapolate in future shows. Yeah. I mean, we want to keep some, you know, we always got to keep our edge, right? And there's great pinball competition out there, but I don't want to go too much into what we're doing because it's really, really cool. obviously when you know if you even go back five years ago we thought that we were in a pinball kind of peak stern pinball with their machines was also doing great Jersey Jack pinball was coming out we all thought that that was kind of like oh hey we're entering a new a new renaissance now you look at today and that seems quaint and by that's what the physical side of things but obviously the digital side of things has multiplied immensely where do you see this kind of going in you know five years from now well that's a good question um and we can look at history to maybe tell us that like you just said five years ago what you thought was big and now here we are it's that seems small but i mean pinball is a game that's been around longer than we've been alive um and uh and that's amazing you Because there's not many things that we can say that about. And today it's more relevant than ever and it's bigger than ever. I think that Asia is a really interesting place for us to try to figure out how to make pinball relevant. And we can see it happening. And I think when we add in the world's largest population centers to pinball acceptance and adoption and enjoyment, the opportunities are massive and immense. I think the game of pinball itself might have to have a little different look and feel to it for those places. So we might start, we might say, whoa, this is like a brand new way to play pinball. It's a ball and flippers, but it plays differently or it looks differently. You know, you can see pachinko, like with the Japanese, they love pachinko. It's a cultural thing. You know, in China, they actually, like Stern has done really well. They're getting pinball machines into China and we see the Chinese really loving pinball. Korea, not quite so much yet. Southeast Asia, Thailand, and Malaysia, and Indonesia, and Singapore, some of these emerging markets like India. I mean, God, imagine when they figure out what pinball is. So that's where I see it going. I see so far North America and Europe with our population size, China alone is bigger than USA and Europe combined by two times. So we have a lot of people that are going to be coming in, and the game might look a little different, might play a little different. They have different technology. There's new technology that we're intersecting. And pinball is always a game that is always first a platform because it's the thing that people know and understand. And every new store, every new device wants to have a pinball game or it's not complete. So I just think it's just going to be so much bigger. That's what I think is going to happen. Okay. I certainly think that with the introduction, just seeing how good 1UP's been doing with their arcade cabinets, once we heard these three-quarter scale pinball cabinets, to me it was just like, that's going to cause a huge jump. Just from people that, it's that cool factor, it's not going to take up a lot of space, you're going to have a lot of games on these things, and the price point's not the cost of what these typical virtual cabinets were. um i certainly see that as it's going to cause another boom of sorts yeah i i see it as well like chris like the the whole you know arcade furniture i think is what they're calling it at the moment in 2020 is it seems to be a thing that's going to be huge and you know just think of the impact that you'd see walking into a walmart or a costco and you see this box covered in Star Wars livery and you see pinball on it, you go, I have to have one of those. Like, it's just the attractiveness of it is almost overwhelming, I think. And it's going to be very interesting to see how this segment performs in 2020. I'll tell you guys a little thing. You know, back in 2007, Zen released pinball effects and Microsoft was shocked because we were like the number one Xbox Live game for years and years. Minecraft finally dethroned us. And it's always been this game that's kind of under the radar. But I think it was when we had the 10-year anniversary of Pinball FX, I was shocked. I was like, we are the original game as a service. We are the original free platform download within app purchasing. I can't believe we're still working on this thing after so many years, and it's bigger than ever. you know in and now i mean like industry trends and like the evolution of video games themselves have actually been patterned after things that zen did first and i can't believe that and and i just think that there's something inherent about pinball surviving for that long because it's like the game it's like it's like the the um survival of the fittest and pinball is that game very interesting yeah and i and i think you know it goes back to the whole passion so long as you guys have a passion for it um it conveys into it translates into the game itself yeah exactly and we all see it and that just keeps our passion going forward too and it's like uh we're there for the evolution to go forward with it and uh happy to be along for the ride wherever you guys take us yeah and i i listened to one of your podcasts recently and it was the one maybe you're talking about like what the heck is going on. There's no news from anybody. Yeah. Yep. We have, that's where we talk about stuff and things, things, the trademark. And no, I mean, I've found, you know, Zen has found itself in a position and I'm like myself, I don't consider myself to be like, I mean like I'm the pinball ambassador or whatever, but I have responsibility to get on here, stoke the fire, let everybody know that, Hey, don't worry. Nothing's dying. No one's going away from this. Like we are, We're in it for the long haul. We've got a lot of exciting stuff. And I wanted to come on and cheer everybody up a little bit. Well, I think you've done just that. Again, I think you've given us a lot of stuff to discuss in the future. It's good to know that things haven't come to a standstill at all and that instead you're busier than ever. So, I mean, it's great. I think I'm just reading through the notes. I've been crossing them off diligently as I've been going along. I think we might have two hanging notes that I think we haven't covered. One of those is being a question about control support for iOS. Any idea about what's happening there? Okay. Yeah, and thank you for sending this question because I had to get – let's see. We have it on our radar, not necessarily for the near future. There's cool things going on in the background, which are consuming our time. So it doesn't – let's see. I will say this. You know, I mentioned Apple Arcade, right? So, like, one of the mandatory requirements of being on Apple Arcade is controller support. So, there you go. Fair enough. Yeah, that's a fair thing to say. The other thing... What that means is that the pinball games are eventually going to be on Apple Arcade, Jared. That's translation there. Go ahead, Jared. Yeah, got it, got it. Roger Wilco. Somebody would have figured that out. I didn't need to say it. Exactly right. So the other one I think was, and I don't think we covered this one either, is there any idea of time frame? Again, this is probably down to the fact you guys are rather busy at the moment. But is there a desire or a time frame to get volumes one to three with the newer physics that we've seen in the later packs on William's Pinball? Yes. There's actually an initiative to get ProPhysics on every Zen Studios Pinball table. Right. Every Zen? Oh, wait, wait. Even the originals, yes? Yes. Even Zen Original IP, our licensed stuff, we get it. So on the console PC side, we see the value of the ProPhysics, and that's what this player group wants. So, I mean, like I said, it's not just push a button, retroactively do it. It's an immense amount of work, but it's a top initiative. It's at the very top of the list. That's really good. All right, Jared, that was worth it right there just for that. I don't care what else was said. I'm happy. Exactly right. That's good news indeed. The only other thing, Jared, that I saw that was on our list of things that we kind of wanted to touch upon was tournaments within FX3. Obviously, you can create your own tournament, but as has been popping up on Reddit with people hosting their own tournaments where it's multi-table kind of tournament situations, and there's no way of doing that currently within FX3. is there a way of kind of implementing that kind of thing within fx3 or is that something that has to be saved for whenever next iteration of everything happens um yeah i think that that would have to be next iteration um you know a forward-looking thing i don't think we're gonna so again i have a statement look at me i i start to know when i start to walk up to the edge and i'm like okay The power and ingenuity of the community is always astounding and humbling. And at the same time, grassroot tournaments extending on the built-in feature set is just one of the most striking examples of what a dedicated pinball community is capable of. And while we cannot promise a direct support for this just yet, these are all still amazing things. All right. Well, I'm going to go over here to the comments real quick. This is one we didn't forward to you, and it is something that I'm interested in from the home market. But the question is, will official backglasses, active or passive, from Arcade 1-Up be added to FX3? In other words, are we going to see any time animated backglasses that can be on a second monitor for those of us with cab setups? Good question. Don't know how to answer that at the moment. I do know that you didn't have time for the official statement on that one there's a lot of good I mean there's a lot of good community created stuff now for the back glasses on cabinets and we're fine even with our IP just to kind of let that happen with even third party IPs that they seem to be like hey they're enjoying our artwork it's up on their screen I'd rather them be looking at ours than something else so it's generally those are okay as far as what we can do on arcade one up machines again it's Do we want to bite the, you know, like, can we do a cost-effective second monitor up there now, and how do we feed it? So, you know, it's tough. It's back in the prototyping. It's back in what is the final form factor, and how does that look? And I don't want to, like, again, say something that is unconfirmed at this point. Sure. But, look, that makes a better pen and cap experience. It would be awesome in games. you know, it's totally worth it for us to figure that out. And whenever we talk about pincaps and features, back glass is always a big part of that discussion and how to make them dynamic. So, sure. Because I know it's one of those things where I didn't pay hardly any attention to it at all because I didn't have a setup that could run cabinet mode. And now that I do, all of a sudden I'm like going, oh, this is what everybody was commenting about in the past. I mean, I went to the point that I went and I wasn't happy with the back glass kind of situation for the second monitor. I did a whole pack. We did a whole episode about that where I did every single Zen table that was out there and put it out there. And it was like, okay, I hope the same artwork's available whenever the next originals come out because I'm going to need to have a consistency. Yeah, right. All right. I think that's actually it. That is about it. We finally exhausted the questions. we did and we even got some bonus stuff out of Mel there that we weren't anticipating so unless there's anything else you want to spit at us there Mel I think we're at the end here yeah no I just you know always like to say thank you to you guys you do a fantastic job and I know you guys get to like beta test our tables and you help us out a lot so I really appreciate that and then anybody who's listening and stuck with Zen since 2007 by chance. You know, that's a long time to hang out together. And we appreciate your support. And thanks for sticking with us. Absolutely. Well, again, thank you, Mel, for coming on. We know you're, even in this time, you're crazy busy. We just happened to luck out that you weren't traveling anywhere. So, yeah, for me and Jared, Jared, I don't know when our next podcast is, but we've certainly got fodder to talk about in that next podcast. Yeah, definitely a lot of stuff and things to talk about. As is always the case. All right, folks. As usual, make sure you follow us on the Twitters. And make sure you follow Zen, too, because there's a ton of stuff that we get from there ourselves. So at Zen Studios, at Pinball... I think it's at Pinball Effects. Yeah. And then Mel is at Mel J. Kirk, I believe. Mel G. Mel G. Kirk. There we go. All right. Until then, thank you so much, Mel, and we'll see you all again soon. Bye-bye. All right. See you later.