Do they need to pump games out much faster? Well, anything would be much faster than now. But if Hobbit and game 3 are released this year, then one game every 10-12 months would be fine IMO. The market is expanding, and they'll have 3 very different titles in their catalogue, none of which will go out of production soon. I think they risk overwhelming themselves if they aim for ~3 a year, much like Heighway could. A period of consolidation and cost reduction as production increases would benefit them more than prolific releases.

This is the unspoken truth about innumerable companies in disparate industries the world over. People will wax lyrical about how unethical, potentially illegal and outrageous it is, yet shower praise on the same companies who made it after starting like this, or idolise entrepreuneurs who got their big break doing this - in some cases 'robbing' being very close to literal robbery.

I don't necessarily think there's a way around it for some startups, when things go badly and delays occur. Probably like JJP until they survived long enough for a big investment last year. You'd like to think that isn't the starting plan, though it is the tried and tested fallback. But when you combine tremendous naivete of both buyers (pre-orderers) and sellers (JPop) with paralysis through incompetence and perfectionism (JPop) ... you're going to get a horrendous mess. The latter absolutely is far more common than the former (JJP) in the start up world, and pinball is too small for too many instances of the latter to occur.

JJP should be more than financially secure now, provided Hobbit sells well on release ... but if they have the same pre-order model for game 3, then alarm bells should ring as they're purely taking advantage of those foolish enough to do it, and further conditioning people to an unhealthy practice that will definitely result in more shit shows in future.

Probably not much if they're continuing to fit out the factory and hire more people, whilst developing more games. I'm sure that cash helped keep the lights on and pay people's wages, but it will have been gone long ago and their sunk costs will have been massive, and I assume the investments in the company announced last summer will have dwarfed any pre-order money.

Start up manufacturing operations tend to be hugely greedy on cash. One of the things they have to be very wary of is taking on too much debt or selling too many shares in the company too quickly for investment, as cash flies out of the till so quickly. Further lending or VC rounds can then be very painful.

I invested in a startup manufacturer a couple of years ago (different sector) who are doing very well ... but the cash has typically lasted them a quarter of the time they anticipated for each of the latter funding rounds, as they ramp up production, buy more machinery and hire more staff. By my understanding, this is pretty typical.

I didn't read context fully, sorry. Still applies though.

No idea.

They're final hardware. Barring calamity there won't be any immediate hardware revisions as a result of feedback from them. It will just inform setup and assembly of the games soon to be released, and possibly any necessary code fixes at the 11th hour.

Only bother with OIS. Not digital. Digital's pretty awful.

Game looks very pretty.

Is there one of those rule flowcharts for WOZ?

Thanks. Is that updated with latest code changes? It says v06 so presumably it is 6.xx?

Bilbo would be a much better name.

I think GoT Pro benefits from the lack of upper PF, tbh. It looks really out of place and ugly, as if it has just been dropped on top of the game, and really interupts the great flow that the Pro exhibits.

I was more struck by just how huge a difference there is in display technology and the amount of thought and effort that goes into it, plus the lighting. Display looks wack for '16 on GB imo, and the lighting is really sad. People are doing backflips about the cabinet art, which I agree looks superb, but then say the lighting and DMD don't matter, despite those being the interactive visual elements; once you're playing the game you don't even see the cabinet art.

What's the technical / official name for the 'hammered' or mottled powdercoats? Is there one?

They will have been coding game #3 since the moment it moved off the drawing board as a concept. Coding doesn't start when there's a fully built prototype delivered. I would assume, being a newly founded modern operation, they do a lot of virtual prototyping like Heighway do, which probably means the code will be relatively far along by the time they're moving through prototypical iterations.

I highly doubt WOZ will be abandoned just yet, and The Hobbit? Didn't they say they have ~20 of a planned ~120 Smaug speech samples (which hook to his playfield model) implemented? They clearly plan on doing a bunch more, though I'm sure a lot of the basic software framework is shared with WOZ, so it won't need nearly as many updates.