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The Great British Pinball Podcast
The Great British Pinball Podcast
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The Great British Podcast Episode 34

PodcastAnalysis updated today1 hr 43 min listen
From the creator

Send us Fan Mail Scott and Neil are back after a bit of a break from pinball...

Listen on The Great British Pinball Podcast

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

Notable quotes

“They basically got... Every kind of scoop became a ball save. So if you're in multiball, you could just have a constant ball save running.”
DOMINO Pinball: Neil McRae
“It's been out for at least six, seven months, maybe more... Stern is struggling with a lot of code stuff right now. I still think they should drop down the number of games they release in a year.”
Scott Rundell
“The problem they have is maintenance, right? There's a bowling alley spitting distance from my house that's got a Bond in it that is still running the original code where it says pending license or approval.”
Scott Rundell
“So effectively, we've seen like a 2,000 pounds, which is what, an equivalent of like 2,700-ish USD, reset off of every tier. It's massive.”
DOMINO Pinball: Neil McRae
“There's two things in sales. One, you need a good product. Two, you need to price it right. But three, you need channels to market. The more people selling your product, the more you'll sell.”
Scott Rundell
“There's people in this market that think because you've got a game up that you need cash... I'm not desperate. I'll just stick it in storage or give it to loan to friends.”
Martin Mills (Cyber Crichton), cited by Neil McRae
“You can offend a lot of people in the community by just lowballing them. And they'll just go, I'd just rather not sell to you. I'd burn it.”
DOMINO Pinball: Neil McRae
“So they'll get there, it'll be a great game. I think the Walking Dead remaster is getting the same grief.”
Scott Rundell
“I'm worried about the space thing, right? The only way you can release new games in my book is if you've got new people coming into the hobby who then can buy older games from everyone else.”
Scott Rundell
“If I didn't have one, I would probably bite his hand off for it, frankly, because I think it's a reasonable price. 10 grand for that game with wallets on it isn't unreasonable.”
Scott Rundell

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

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