This !

I was a long time Stern NIB buyer, but there is a pattern with them. If they think it will be an instant hit (GoT, SW, BM66) they will just not put in the effort to make it great. Be it the artwork or the game or the software, they just are not passionate about making the best they can. JJP proves this by making some great games that ooze with passion.

Also the fact that I am still waiting on a playfield swap for a ghosted GB does not help. It has been over a year now. I feel treated bad by them and therefore I will not buy again, not even GOTG if they make that even though it is a great theme for me. I gave them my trust too many times already. They do not stand by their product.

Actually there are a few for sale in Germany and Belgium. They do not sell at all even when they ask 2000 euro's less than it has cost.

I think the main reason why they are not for sale at the moment is that not a lot of people are willing to take a big loss and are hoping the software will improve drastically soon.

I had a BM66LE for a few months so I know the game very well. What amazed me about the game (not in a positive way) was the overly old fashioned design of the rotiserie. They use a normal motor with pins and switches while a simple stepper motor would have been much simpler and more reliable (in my opinion that is, I work a lot with steppers in 3D printers).

Now they boast that it is such a complicated design, but they fail to see that it is designed complicated. It really is not complicated at all if they would have used a more modern approach and not would have done it like 20 years ago. They already used steppers for the dragon in GoT so they know how to use them.

Luckily Stern just takes an old design, changes a few things and put a rotiserie on it and asks 15k

Not entirely true. The problem is that Stern delivers to distributors directly in the US. Over here there is one extra step, the importer. They get the machines from Stern and they sell it to the distributors. They also get a fair chunk of the pie and that is one reason why the games are priced much higher over here. It also does not help that there is a very little number of distributors so they do not have to compete with eachother. We never pay less than MSRP just because the distributors will not do it.

JJP does deliver directly to a distributor which in turn delivers it to other distributors, but they can ask the same price as the main distributor that gets them from JJP.

Please correct me if I am wrong on this, I am sure it works like this for a number of countries, not sure if it is true for all of Europe.

Ok different name, but we cannot buy from the distributor, only from the reseller. I know who the Stern distributor for Belgium is and they will not sell to anybody but their resellers.

The distributor for JJP is Freddy's pinball and there we can all buy a game directly.

This is not true for everything, as I have a WoZ standard currently for sale. I have it for sale because I wanted the ECLE version and I have found it and bought it. Literally every inquery about the WoZ is asking me to sell them the LE, even when it costs 2500 dollar more than what I ask for the standard. My standard even has the shaker and Invisiglass as extra's but still it will not sell.

Standard is the most limited version here in Europe because not many people want it.

Thanks for the explanation. Good write-up of the market over there, very interesting that it can differ so much. Same is true or US and EUR markets by the way. Prices are very different here as they are in the US especially for older BW games.

I believe the guy said that in person it was worse than on the pictures.

Ok, if you are so convinced, would you buy it from him seeing those pictures ? You know it will flatten out perfectly

Maybe he just got a bad playfield, that does not make him a liar and his problem is real. Maybe that is possible also ?

Sorry, you did.

Edit: wanted to add that we can go on about this all day, but in the end there is a bad playfield and you will not even consider the possibility that that can happen. So I am going to leave it at that. I hope you never have any problems with your machines such as I did with multiple nodeboards that took months to resolve and a bad playfield that has yet to be changed.