It's impossible to prevent cheating. It's not practical to even attempt it. And oh man, people will cheat. I cannot explain why someone would get satisfaction from taking the glass off and putting up a fake high score on the internet, but I can still promise you people will do it.

As such the integrity of the high scores would be compromised, and I'd never pay any attention to them whatsoever. That's removing all the "different setup and waxing etc" issues. It's just a non starter because people are jerks.

Off topic, but maybe vaguely amusing story:

When I read the topic title I thought you meant connected like NBA Fastbreak, where two pins would be connected locally. That's still an interesting idea to me, because it solves much of the cheating and setup issues if both games are physically next to each other.

Anyways, back in a simpler time, when Heighway wasn't a mess and Andrew and I were still talking and the future for Alien seemed brighter there was actually serious talk of Heighway going after the Predator license. I was against it personally, seemed like borrowing bad vibes, but Andrew thought maybe he could entice the Predator buyers or something by actually making a game. It obviously went nowhere, and for the best given what happened afterwards.

But during the time when the idea was kicked around I pitched something where if you owned both Alien and Predator you could link them together and play a special Alien vs Predator mode that would only occur when the games were connected. A ridiculous easter egg, but it would have been pretty cool.

If you're live streaming a game there's no point in any of this extra stuff though. Just live stream yourself playing right now, everyone can see your score, share with the world, have a good time.

Anyways, I'm simply saying that cheating is so trivially easy that it would make the feature of zero value to me personally. I'd never trust the scores, and I'd never care about adding my own. The cost for adding it to games, and maintaining an infrastructure doesn't feel worth it.

If a company feels differently and does it then more power to them! Just my personal take on why I don't feel like it's a particularly valuable feature.

Yup.

I'm not trying to rain on people's parade here, I get it, you want to play with your friends or something and you're not worried about it. But as a commercial feature it's just got too many issues that would ruin it as a mass market product. If I was making a pin I'd see those problems, realize the headaches they create, think about the extra cost and time it would take (and if we're adding cameras it's even more) and scrap it. Because pinball is a physical game, meant to be shared in a physical space.

Not everything needs to be played over the internet.