I think it’s well-established Gene didn’t lose any money, he just realized he could have asked way more and “lost 2g” extra he could have charged everyone.

He could have also sold those machines for $10,000 each and returned the deposits. I was offered 10K by two different people when mine arrived in a box. Gene came through...and I gave him a new old stock Evel Knievel mechanical pinball backglass as a reward for going through with this commitment. Todd

Hoping everyone is ok and feeling well

covirama (resized).png

5 bots already liked it

They just posted a short powerpoint, here is the main screen shot.

After all 10000 likes they have 95 people on the interest list - they are happy - I would be super worried.

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I'm a big fan of them considering all people on the waitlist as basically confirmed to order one

Easy for you to say: I'm one of the people on the list and had no idea that meant I was ordering a machine!

I guess you didn't read the small print.

You're now legally committed to buy their next three pins.

SHIT!!!!

you know it is going to be a wreck, but you just cant help but be mesmerized

I got on the list very early on out of curiosity before this thread really started, there is no commitment, they just think they are serious inquiries....

I think 95% of the people who are on the list are just that curious but I have never received any information haha unless they already scratched me....

They think 95 people are interested in ordering a game based on a feature list saying it’ll have flippers and pinballs and a cabinet and head? No clue what theme.. no idea what it will look like… uh huh. Ballarama please go see the RAZA thread. Less than 100 orders with known theme, layout,art, and a known designer (for better or worse) + at the time, supposedly unlimited funds to get these amazing games out.

Trust me, when some of those deeproot peeps get ahold of this thread, they will put money down ASAP!

haha - they removed their post from their facebook on thanking the 95 people on the list - maybe they have realised the numbers are not great

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https://ballaramapinball.com.au/

new website, easier on the eyes, but the upcoming Australian election will have less BS

Innovation is cool but that’s not enough if a game doesn’t play well. How does it feel? Our pinball games are fast, precise, organised and with rulesets that include tantalisingly obscure top level goals. Once you’ve played you won’t want to stop.

I doubt they have built a whitewood, let alone stared coding it

Pretty sure that is the same website, nothing exciting at all - would not know it was about pinball really - has no pinball soul.

They may have started a whitewood as Grant would of got on to that but I reckon Ian is one of these types that since he has patents in place we won't see a thing until they are locked in as he sounds very cautious and protective which is fine. I reckon the excuse of the process of patents changing is BS - I reckon some chat here and then he did some research he has probably realised some things are not as original as he thought so he has had to go back to the drawing board and re-submit which only extends the time until reveal - lucky to be this year. Given these delays on just releasing the kickstarter and showing us images shows that what ever he promises in build and deliver time will not happen on time.

Originally he was going to release the kickstarter late 2021 but wanted higher facebook followers - he has doubled that since that podcast, and he stated it would be at the end of March / early April 2022 but no show.... yet

I reckon, you are right!

I noticed the growth of their Facebook has tapered off significantly as of late. I'm guessing they paid for 10k followers. 141 followers for them sounds much more likely of what they would have as a pinball "company" without a product or a very engaging social media approach.

Paying for fake followers is a real head scratcher as does not mean people are going to buy their pinball - people want to see pinball content, play the pinball, and the longer the smoke and mirrors is around the more people will move on

Look at Spooky, they have 11k followers but they build games, go to shows and are in the US and have lots of connections

Look at Haggis, they have 3.5k followers and have showed a heap of videos, made some games and have a factory and are in Aus

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Getting a lot of followers might help them get more traction in the almighty algorithms that rule what content people see. Granted, they have piss poor engagement which is what the algorithms really use when surfacing content.

It might also trick some dumb investors

but there is no interesting, meaningful content just yellow and blue words .....

Look at how they use social media. They don't know how it works. I don't think it's surprising if they thought buying likes would get them more attention.

Buying likes is the surest way to kill a Facebook page. FB only releases posts to a small subset of your likers to see if it's a decent post. If the engagement is there (shares. comments, and likes in that order) FB progressively allows other page likers to see the post. If you've bought likes, then the initial "test release" of the post just goes mainly to the fake likes and thus gets almost zero engagement. So then FB thinks it's a crap post and doesn't release it any further.

That these guys don't know this (or Natalie didn't tell them) is an indication of how woeful their marketing nous is. There is also the small point that bragging about such obviously fake likers shows that they are ok with upfront telling a big fat lie.

I still check out this thread and their FB page because the whole thing is comedy gold. It's literally a "how to" guide to running a start up - ie everything they do, do the opposite!

“Innovation is cool but that’s not enough if a game doesn’t play well. How does it feel? Our pinball games are fast, precise, organised and with rulesets that include tantalisingly obscure top level goals. Once you’ve played you won’t want to stop.”

This should be rewritten:

Innovation is cool, but that’s not enough. It needs words to go with it, lots of them, amazingly long, like scrumptious, slickalistic, butterlicious, fantasmagorical. Written in awesome colors no less ! See, nothing is ordinary about Ballarama. And these aren't just any words and colors. Natalie painstakingly tested them with our 10,000 followers so we knew we got them 100% right. And once you read those words and see those colors you know you just have to have it, don’t you ?

And suckers, they need suckers, and pinball is not in short supply apparently.

What the hell?! I missed this in skimming the website. How can they make these statements when they don’t have any pinball games made? We have no indication they have more than ideas and feature lists.

It reads and looks to me as if china is building pinball machines and paid a frontman...

I think we would see actual games for sale if that were the case.
I'm still trying to decide if Ballarama is going to be a fund raising scam, or if they are really misguided enough to think they can finance a pinball manufacturing company this way.

Don’t ascribe malice to that which can be adequately explained by stupidity

Past week's updates:

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Ballarama in local news.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/former-montreal-mayoral-candidate-balarama-211637864.html

Looks to be another trainwreck.

no updates / posts for a month now and they will have to repush the socials as there numbers a dropping a little due to no activity and will soon be under the 10000

also their patents are starting to lapse as well

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I imagine no updates till he gets the patents sorted out because he thinks they’re that special.

Feels like Ballarama is blowing a golden opportunity to own the moment as the #1 fake pinball company with deeproot in recent news lull.

It is quite possible that those patents aren't really lapsed. Perhaps they were provisionals and have been replaced with the full filing as we do in the US. Note that the same patent names are used with the filing date in 2022 one day before the 2021 filing. For US provisionals you have 1 year from the filing date to get the non-provisional in. I'm not sure how it works in Australia, but it seems the more likely explanation here.

Also if anything like it is in the US we won't know anything about the validity of the patents for several years. It is often a very slow process from filing to patent examiner evaluation.

have been watching the patents from early days of the thread, they claimed the patent process changed and needed re-submission around the start of this year BUT I reackon based on previous poor investigation and research he discovered that his design already existed so had to amend and re-submit and start the process again. This is the person who thought the original AFM came out in the mid 70's and wanted to challenge the person who corrected him.

Not quite sure where Haggis is on this either. A very confusing thread. Are games being delivered, are the not!?!?

Let's not bring Haggis into the conversation. They're totally different than the Ballarama and deeproots of the world. They're struggling yet making progress vs never having a chance.

I'm just noting the similarities that's it. Missed timelines, lack of communication. . Those seem to be pretty good indicators that things aren't going well.

You have to admit something is weird about that thread, some game was shipped two weeks ago, but no one has seen it yet...

Meh, meh, and meh.

I agree things aren’t sunshine and rainbows over there, but they do actually deliver games to customers (however slowly). They may go out of business. I don’t know. But it’s not a comical trainwreck where it should be obvious to anyone with common sense that it’s a disaster.

My guess is they’re just facing the same sort of chip and part shortages, and very long shipping times like everyone else.

I think they can pull out of it if they stick it through

Cool, wasn't necessarily lumping them in there and have nothing against Haggis. If games are being delivered that's cool.

To be fair to Haggis ONE Fathom has made it to a customer so far...

And 60-70 celts. Completely different to this other "investors throw your money in the toilet" start up.

No social media updates in more than a month. Regular content is critical for keeping your tens of thousands of followers engaged.

That's probably even on a good day. I think mine, when all said and done was 4-5 years (I did drag my feet some).

Elon claims there are way too many spambots on Facebook...

Is he buying that too?

(Sorry Zitt, we know you mean Twitter.)

There was a recent study released claiming something like 70% of Elon's followers were suspicious and inorganic. Someone countered and said part of the study was flawed and it was about 51% LOL