My only prayer will be, that someday you'll care for me, but it's only make believe. Welcome everybody to Canada's Pinball Podcast. Happy Monday. Most of us are back at work. It's a new year, and I think all of us have been watching this new game from Stern Pinball. It's only make-believe the value of LE machines. I just saw today a Foo Fighter LE now for sale for $9,000 with low plays, and this is the problem now, everybody. We all know this. Unless you're living in a D&D vacuum, it's not about the game itself. This is Stern's big issue. It doesn't matter anymore what they put out at these prices. If we keep seeing these games lose so much value, how do you convince yourself to go in at these MSRP prices? We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the Dwight stream. I'm still confused as to why they allow Dwight to talk over the first gameplay footage we have of this machine, and they think that's going to sell them more games. Tomorrow, they're going to open up the doors in Chicago and get all of the shill content creators to tell you how great the game is. That's going to happen tomorrow. I will not be there. I will be at work. I'm not spending my own money. I would rather fly to Vegas and watch Jody all bored sitting in his chair as media are streaming the game. We're going to talk about Tales of the Arabian Nights is coming back. Are you excited about that? Alice parts are rolling in and Evil Dead's are about to go on the line. And I think we're all sort of in this weird sort of place right now in pinball. Let's just talk about the overall feeling right now in the hobby. I think a lot of us are in a really good place. And I mean that. I think a lot of us have come to peace with the new reality of how we can approach this hobby. And this is a brand new year, and I think it's a brand new sort of behavior for each and every one of us. I think the piece we've all achieved is that we can actually praise a pinball machine. We can give a company like Stern a lot of credit for putting a lot of awesome stuff into D&D. But we're also at peace with the fact that I don't need to buy the game this week. We're at peace with the fact that if I ever want to get a D&D and I like what I see, I can simply wait for the code to be finished and then I can go buy the machine for significantly less money than if I bought it right away. And that's a really liberating place to be. I don't need to fall victim to all of these content creators and distributors reminding me and spamming me all day long that they have Dungeons and Dragons for sale. Of course you do. And here's the reality, everybody. You know this. I know this. You know this. The LEs did not sell out. They didn't even come close to selling out. And now the game value is in trouble. It doesn't matter what happens now. It really doesn't. These streams are not going to change people's minds. You can tell just by watching the Dwight stream. I saw the stream at CES. You can tell. You're not going to see enough in a stream that's going to make you want to spend this much money on the game. Because most of you, be honest, you're not D&D fanatics. And so when you start to see more and more of this game, like saving the miners and saving this and doing this and going on this journey and defeating the dragon, it's just not going to be enough. None of this stuff is going to emotionally move you. None of this stuff is going to feel like you have to buy this game right now. And it's not an indictment on the game. It's just the reality of where pinball is at. And it's at the point now where people that proclaim they bought an LE this week, they look foolish. Like you really do look foolish because again, it's going to be a $10,000 machine in just a few months. And so look, I think while we're all at peace right now, I also think I have to say this. The reason we've come to peace with all of these launches recently over the last few years is there really hasn't been a juggernaut theme that everybody's wanted. Harry Potter is a huge theme. I would argue that as big as Harry Potter is, let's face it people, it's not really our generation's must-have fantasy theme. It isn't. We are much more into Lord of the Rings, much more into Star Wars, much more into Star Trek, right? There's geekier things that we are into. Harry Potter is like the next generation's sort of Star Wars. And so how many of you out there have seen the Harry Potter movies? I bet most of us have. Now, how many of you go back and watch them over and over again? You probably don't. How many of you out there quote Harry Potter movies all the time? How many of you can recite lines from the Harry Potter movies? How many of you think fondly about moments from those films and still think about it today? How many of you even read the books, right? So Harry Potter, it's a huge franchise, right? We're not dealing with small franchises in the world of pinball, right? Avatar is like the number one movie of all time in terms of box office gross, not adjusted for inflation because then it's still gone with the wind, but it's still like at the top of the most money a movie has ever made. and they make a pinball version of it and it flops. So it's going to be interesting when Harry Potter comes out. And King Kong also is a really cool theme. But again, it's not something that each and every one of us has this sort of like carnal, emotional desire to finally get a King Kong pinball machine. It's not what you've been wishing for. Look, it's going to do great. I think both Harry Potter and King Kong are going to do phenomenally well for their respective companies. One's going to do phenomenally well because it's going to be Jersey Jack's return to wide body games with a lot of magic in it. And the theme alone is going to sell like 6,000 units of that Harry Potter game, probably more. I don know At these prices that a lot of money they making And then Keith Elwin in King Kong is going to do just fine And because those games are right around the corner it another reason why we at peace with not buying a D&D. Now, people are going to buy D&D, absolutely. I'm not rooting against Stern. I've noticed this lately this week. I think some of us secretly want Stern Pinball. Maybe not even secretly. Maybe publicly. I think a lot of us sort of want Stern to learn a lesson that you took prices too high, that you burned a lot of LE collectors with the remakes. I think there's like a silent, maybe it is a silent majority of people in the pinball buying world that kind of are happy not spending money and buying every new Stern release. And I think the market is actually reinforcing those people's decisions. I don't think they're malicious. I don't think they're vindictive. But it does feel like just maybe, people, just maybe modern Stern pricing is where it's at because we're paying for that humongous factory they moved into. And since they've been in that big factory, they haven't been cranking out hit after hit after hit. The IP and the licenses they've been bringing to market haven't been big enough to support that kind of factory. And I think Stern's in a little bit of trouble. I really do. I don't know how they're going to navigate this and keep launching machines at these prices time and time again. But that's their problem to figure out. It's not mine. We all know the solution to that problem. They're not going to lower prices. So they're going to have to bring big themes out. I hope they ink a deal with Dutch Pinball to make Back to the Future. I don't think that deal's done. I'm not sure it's even going to happen. But think about it like this. After King Kong, we normally know what is next from Stern Pinball. I'm going to tell you right now what I've heard. That John Borg is releasing the next two cornerstone games from Stern Pinball after Keith Elwin's King Kong. Now, I think one of those games, and maybe they're now going to consider it a cornerstone because of how Metallica did, but I think one of those games is going to be Tron coming back into the pinball world. With Dungeons & Dragons sales not being great and LE sales being pretty flat, that means D&D is not going to be a game that catches on and has a lot of sales momentum behind it. And so then what is Stern going to do over the next three and a half, four months between D&D on the line and King Kong, I think we might see, as Jason Knapp says, a return of maybe something like Ghostbusters. Maybe they're going to bring Jaws 50th anniversary out to sort of bridge the gap. But all of these moves now get really interesting from Stern Pinball because they're not used to any of this. They're really not. You got to remember, everybody, since I've been following this hobby. It's been about 12 years now. We've never seen Stern Pinball buyers lose so much money now over the last three years. This is unprecedented territory. And I think a lot of those buyers now have woken up and they know the new reality and they're just waiting on the sidelines. And the thing is this, as they wait on the sidelines and watch all these games lose so much value. It's not even a conversation about whether or not the game is good. It's not a conversation about whether or not it's fun or this or that. It's just a conversation around it makes no sense, right? When something makes no sense, you know what I'm saying? Like if there was a pizzeria, let's use an analogy. If there was a pizzeria that every single pizza pie was a hundred dollars, would you even care to know how those pizzas taste? Would you even go in there and order one. And imagine this, that same pizzeria that makes those pizzas. Imagine if the next day, I'm just kind of truncating the timelines here. Imagine if the next day you could walk in and order the same pizza for like 50 bucks. Would you go the day before if the next day you could get the same exact thing for so much less money? And that's where we're at. And I know a lot of people don't want to have this conversation, right? They want to go back to the way pinball used to be. And I would love to go back to the way pinball used to be in which when a new game came out, we really looked at the game and discussed it on its own merits. But it's impossible now to separate the reality of where we are because I don't want to see anyone get burned. I don't want to see anyone make a mistake. And I think it's putting everybody at peace. I think it's putting everybody at peace. I bet a lot of you coming out of the holidays don't want to spend more money right now. And the good news is you don't have to. All right. You really don't have. I think that's going to be what defines the next few months. We're going to start to see, hopefully, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland go on the line at Dutch Pinball. We see all these parts from Lior coming in, and now they need to eventually, this month, there's only three more weeks left, get the game on the line if they want to get all 500 people their machines by 2025. Now, remember what they said. They said, if we don't get you your machine, then your deposit is refundable, which is good. And we're seeing on Pinside now people are still wanting to find spots. And when people want a spot for Alice, it seems like a spot opens up pretty quickly. You got to remember, 500 people have not spent $12,500 on the game or whatever it is, $12.99. Is it $12.99 or $12.05? they haven't spent anything other than $1,500 deposit. And so when those 500 people get asked to pay in full, of course there's going to be spots that open up. I do encourage each and every one of you to just be patient. If you want an Alice or an Evil Dead or a D&D, all three of those titles, you're going to be able to get one when you want one. Just wait till the games are made. Because that's the other thing too, right? Stern used to sell all these games, sell the LEs out before a single one was even made. And now once again, they're in uncharted territory. They have to go make now 740 D&D LEs and they're gonna make the LEs first. And those games are not spoken for. And now these distributors are gonna have to make a little bit of a difficult call. How many D&D LEs do I wanna have sitting in my warehouse where Stern is telling me I can sell this game for below And I know this game is never going to sell over that So the old days remember these distros you put games in vaults and then all of a sudden six months later they've got a $19,000 Godzilla LE for you. Those days are over. And so if you're a distro or a dealer, how many LEs are you going to order? How are you going to move all those LEs? And then to get those LEs, you got to place a big order for premiums and pros. And you also are now worried, well, how many people out there actually want to drop $9,700 on a D&D premium right now? And knowing that when King Kong comes out, that premium will be $7,500. So I say this to each and every one of you, let the dealers and the distros take the risk. Let them order the game and then you're going to be able to march in in just a few months and get any model you want of any pinball machine you want. It's not just D&D. Any pinball machine you want, watch how much cheaper they're going to become. It's going to be the year of the pinball buyer. You and I are going to have all the power in the world. It's not even going to be that hard to get a King Kong Ellie because it's going to be 13. I bet they raise the price on Kong. It'll probably be 13.6 and they're going to make a thousand of them. It's going to give you some second thoughts when they do Harry Potter CE and it's $15,000 and they make a thousand of them. It's going to be the same reaction. You know, I was watching a D&D video. You know, let's talk real quick about the Dwight video, then I want to talk about some of these other nerd and geek YouTube channels have been promoting Stern's D&D. But look, I watched the Dwight video. I just don't really understand if Dwight really knows how to communicate a storyline. I'm not really sure what's going on inside his head. I think he's a really smart engineer. I think he's a really smart coder, but I think Dwight needs to be paired up with someone who has a little bit more basic common sense storytelling abilities. I feel like he's always all over the place. Even as I watch the streams of the game and watch him explain it, I do feel like it's just jumping all over the place. I'll give you an example. The way like you can just start dragging multiball. Why? If this is a D&D journey. Shouldn't the dragon come out in unique moments and that's when you battle it? But the way they start the multiball, which is just spell dragon and then it starts, it reminds me of sort of Smaug multiball in The Hobbit and how easy it is to start that multiball. And is that just going to get annoying over time? How easy it is to do that. And you could tell, You could tell when you saw the CES stream today, it's like Stern really wants to show off the dragon in action, right? So like, okay, let me show you how you start dragon multiball. And it is something that the player, the casual player can get to and see, which again is important, right? When you have a major mech in a game, you should be able to experience it every time you play a game. Now, will that be fun in the long run? We don't know yet. Will the way this game is coded be fun for you in the long run? It's a lot of D&D. It's a lot of D&D. It's a lot of geeky things going on. It's a lot of missions and modes that are all about the D&D world. And I don't know yet, right? I haven't really seen anything yet that has truly, really excited me or blown me away. And again, I think when I look at these modern Sterns right now, I'm still waiting for them to get better with the lighting. This game doesn't have expression lighting system in it. You know, there's nothing really new happening there. The dragon's mouth doesn't move. So when the dragon talks to you, it doesn't really create like a dynamic moment there. And people were showing how like the T-Rex could open and close its mouth all the time. Why couldn't they make the dragon do that? I get the dragon tracks you and that's really cool. It would have been nice to have seen both things happen. I like the shield that pops up. That's cool. But again, like I just don't know. I think like everybody else, I can't wait to jump on this machine because most of us don't have an emotional connection to D&D. I'm just not sure this thing is ever going to move us the way Lord of the Rings does. If you think about D&D versus Lord of the Rings, D&D has really cool mechs just like Lord of the Rings. But man, is this game ever going to get your energy level going? Are you ever going to feel excited in D&D the way you get excited to destroy the ring? And that's my worry about this game. And if I had $13,000 burning a hole in my pocket and I wanted a fantasy-themed pinball machine that just nails it, I would offer to buy a Lord of the Rings LE for $13,000 and go find someone who brass-plated it and put all the figures in it. I would rather own that. You know why? Because a Lord of the Rings LE will hold much better value than a D&D LE. I think everyone agrees about the artwork on D&D. They should have made the armor brass plated. It needs to be more special than this, everybody. I don't know what to tell you. I get it. It just doesn't look great. And I think that's another reason why LEs are not flying off the shelf. It just doesn't look great, especially after Metallica. So as I was watching the Sharp CES video, I also was getting served up by YouTube, other content creators in the geek space. There's this one nerd guy. I think it's like nerd impressionist or something like that. He wore a wizard hat. He has like 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. He talks all about the release of the game. But then he gets to the price. And this is the thing, right? He's like, I would love to have one of these. But, man, there are 13,000. They're $7,000 to $13,000. And then you read in the comments section, and it's funny because it's only pinball people that already buy pinball machines that are defending the price. Everyone who's just a D&D fan is like, are you kidding me? Like $7,000. Someone was like shocked that it costs $7,000. And then someone responds being like, dude, that's only the base level with stuff yanked out of it. If you want the top level it And that the reality people As much as you think there crossover it the same thing going to happen with Pokemon I get people spend a lot of money on rare Pokemon cards but it because they understand the market and those cards make them feel good. They're not going to drop $15,000 or $13,000 on a Pokemon pinball machine because A, they don't even care about pinball and B, everyone who loves Pokemon collectibles is not going to respect or hold it up as something worth having. So I just want to say to everybody out there, be patient. You're not going to have a hard time getting any of these games. And we got Tales of the Arabian Nights coming back from Pedretti Gaming. I heard this is going to happen in the next six months or so. It is the follow-up to Funhaus. Are they going to have Brian Allen do the art package? I think they should leave the art package as it is. It's one of the most beautiful games from the Bally Williams era. So I don't think they should touch it. I don't think they should make a new art package for it. It had much better art to begin with than Funhaus. But I worry that they're going to have a new art package on it. I'm just going to say this. I don't think most people care. I don't think most people care about the Funhaus remake. When I put up the Toten image on my Facebook page, most people don't care. Nobody has even started a pin side thread that says Kaneda is confirming that Toten is coming back from Pedretti Gaming. Now, maybe people don't care because it's Pedretti Gaming. Maybe they want CGC to remake it. CGC is going to make more Medieval Madnesses soon. Then they're going to make Twilight Zone. Just feels like way too many people. All of these old games coming back. All of these new games coming out. Everything's $10,000 or more. I hope you guys all get like six figure bonuses because this whole hobby is about to just collapse under the weight of the extraordinary prices of everything new in box. Everyone who's buying these things is just buying such a big depreciating asset. It's going to be over sooner than you think. I don't mean the hobby is going to go away. I just mean these prices are going to have to go down. These prices are going to have to go down. It's just that simple. All right, what else is going on? Speaking of prices, there's a GoFundMe that just popped up to give Steven Bowden some money. Now, look, Steven Bowden was just let go by American Pinball. I'm not sure what's going on over there. People are getting fired. And now the company is hiring people to make games. I'm confused. I have no line of sight into what's going on. Steve was let go. And his dream of making pinball machines seems to have been thwarted. And that is sad. I think we all need to have some empathy, you know, have some empathy for people. I think Ryan McQuaid also sounds like in his Facebook post that he's also no longer at American Pinball. But here's the thing. As someone who has been fired three times in my career, my wife, Brenda, got let go at 530 in the morning by Meta. 60,000 people lost their jobs in one day. When you're a well-able-bodied adult and you get let go, you got to just go find a new job. And I don't think we should be setting up GoFundMe pages for people that are well-able-bodied and can go get work. This isn't a tragedy, okay? I understand GoFundMe is when a tragedy hits somebody, but this is not it. I also want to say that Steve did not set this page up. So I don't think anyone should say anything negative about Steve. It's some dude in Toronto who's doing this. I don't agree with it. I don't give money like this. It actually, I think, is a negative. I think it turns Steve into a little bit of a charity case. He's not. And again, he didn't do it. I hope he finds employment somewhere in pinball. And with so many pinball companies out there, and if you can add value, you'll find a job in pinball. It's just that simple. I think you just have to figure out how to add value. And the other thing, too, is you got to speak up. You got to speak up. I think a lot of people went over to American Pinball and they saw the themes that company was working on and they should have said something. They should have said something. We can't make this game and make money. This game is not going to be what we need to bring to market. We need to bring something with a lot more mainstream appeal. And they didn't. And that's it. That's it. Everybody's accountable. Everyone's got to be held accountable within a company. You guys are the ones who made the choices. It wasn't a podcaster. It wasn't anyone else. The reason why you guys aren't doing well is because of the choices all of you made. And ultimately, the market is brutal. Consumers will be brutal. If you don't bring a masterpiece into the pinball market, your game's going to be dead on arrival now. That's just the way it is. And when you go visit a company like Stern Pinball and you see how many people are putting so much work and effort into each game and you want to compete with these people, every decision you make needs to be spot on. You can't just wing it on any level. You can't wing it with what the theme will be, what the quality will be. No, it doesn't work anymore. Gang, it's 2025 now. None of you need more pinball machines. It's going to get really, really hard to sell games moving forward, especially at the prices, especially if the themes aren't great, and especially because I think a lot of you are just content. You've seen what this hobby's been like over the last decade or so. You realize that the LE Flex is over. The special moment of a new launch is now over with in just a matter of hours, right? It's like you see a new game, you see the videos, you hear all the hype. Nowadays, it just doesn't mean much anymore. It really doesn't. You're kind of over it in just a few hours. And the only value you're really getting in all the pinball is $5 a month for Canada's Pinball Podcast. That's going to give you two to three great shows a week, keep you entertained on the Patreon chat, do a great free Saturday show, all for $5 a freaking month for most of you. It doesn't get any better than that. Don't forget to vote for Canada for favorite pinball content creator and favorite podcaster in the twippies. I'm not sure why I'm not eligible as favorite streamer, But whatever, two out of three ain't bad, everybody. Have a great Monday.