There's a reason why months of field testing that JJP do (and Dutch did) should be standard practice, and why Stern mostly ceasing it (not even a few weeks of location testing on some new games) and others not doing it at all should be very worrisome.

Having seen the fallout of lack of testing, and insufficient revision in the past year, and realised just how heavily corners are being cut, I'd be very wary of buying games that are either not long, long into their production cycles (ideally at least a year) or which have not been heavily location tested prior to production. Some new machines coming to market are receiving essentially no long term durability or stress testing (albeit I imagine Stern must still do some on automated test rigs in house).

Good on JJP for not pulling the game when pf damage started to occur, for PR reasons, and keeping it going, to see how bad the problem would become. That's vital data.

I can't imagine they'd receive a patent for that.

The 'pin cafe' in London, TILT, that I've been to (one of only two in UK) ... I would be amazed if WOZ hasn't been their number one earner since it went in well over a year ago. Every time I've visited and there have been any number of people there, it has always been the most busy machine by far ... and they have other crowd pleasers like Hobbit, MM, MB, CC, CV, GB, ST, GoT etc.

Funhouse.

ST Pro and LE (not sure if Premium revealed at exactly same time) were launched 4 years ago now. A lot has changed since then unfortunately.

They haven't been putting games on location to test for months with recent releases, sometimes a couple of weeks. Certainly BM'66 got nothing, nor did SM VE. I think GB Pro was put out on location before consumers received any units, but production had already started by then.

That is nothing to do with pre-production testing ... and the Premium pfs are the same as LEs, which had already gone out.