The Great British Podcast Episode 34

UK pinball hosts discuss market disruption from new Stern distributor, pricing corrections, and venue challenges.

Synopsis

Scott Rundell and DOMINO Pinball: Neil McRae discuss their return to podcasting after a two-month hiatus, covering recent pinball events including TPF (The Pinball Factory), IFPA World Championships, and newly played games like Yukon, Pokemon, and Ghostbusters. The bulk of the episode focuses on UK market dynamics following Pinball Heaven's appointment as a direct Stern distributor, price corrections that dropped Stern machines by roughly £2,000 across all tiers, supply chain challenges, venue difficulties, and secondary market pricing behavior. They also discuss code update delays at Stern, the Walking Dead remaster's licensing challenges, and the used market for classic machines.

Highlights

• Stern dropped UK pricing by approximately £2,000 across all tiers (Pro ~£7,000-7,500, Premium ~£9,100, LE ~£12,500) following introduction of Pinball Heaven as direct distributor
• Ghostbusters code update took over a year to complete and made every scoop a ball save, drastically increasing high scores from ~1 billion to 10+ billion
• Walking Dead remaster has licensing challenges preventing old DMD animations from being featured, but these issues have been resolved and the feature will be implemented
• UK had only one Stern distributor (Electrocoin) for a long time, creating high margin-on-margin costs that made boutique manufacturers cheaper than Stern
• Stern is experiencing code backlog and has released too many games in recent years, stretching coding resources
• UK pub venue market is in severe decline due to government policy, making it difficult to place pinball machines in traditional venues
• Stern reached out to Phil (Pinball Heaven) to become a distributor to disrupt the market and improve sales in UK
• Pokémon (Pro) machines sold in high volume on first container shipment to UK despite early code limitations
• Pokemon ranked 247th on Pinside due to code issues, with comparison to John Wick's early version struggles
• Germany also introduced a second distributor (Freddy's) alongside Electrocoin to address pricing and distribution issues

Entities

• Electrocoin· company
• Pinball Heaven· company
• Stern Pinball· company
• Pinball Republic· company|venue
• IFPA World Championships· event
• TPF· event
• Deadpool· game
• Dungeons and Dragons· game
• Ghostbusters (LE)· game
• Metallica (LE)· game
• Pokemon· game
• Stranger Things (Premium/LE)· game
• The Walking Dead Remastered (Premium/LE)· game
• Transformers· game
• Winchester· game
• Yukon· game
• Andy Foster· person
• DOMINO Pinball: Neil McRae· person
• Gary Stern· person
• John· person
• Martin Mills· person
• Phil· person
• Scott Rundell· person
• Yen· person
• District 82 Pinball· venue