Last night I did a service call for a couple to fix their neglected machine. They had no idea people still made pinball machines. When I mentioned The Beatles and its price tag, they didn't bat an eye and were mildly interested. They were well off with their kids out of the house and looking for toys to buy. (Also it was a lucrative service call for myself and now I'm trying to find them a Pac-Man arcade)

People are really underestimating how many rich people think pinball is a cool toy, and overestimating how many of these things Stern are actually building. Finding 100, 250, etc. rich people looking for toys isn't as hard as some people are making it out to be.

Supreme is different. It was a contract game built by Stern. It's not a Stern game. Note the lack of Stern branding on it (other than the box it comes in), nothing on their website, not offered to dealers like a normal game, etc. If The Beatles group approached Stern to pay for 1,964 machines upfront and then they would manage the sales...then it would be like Supreme.

Stern is taking a risk on this game being profitable in the long run. I think it will be, but it's stupid how people compare Supreme and Beatles just because they have a high price tag and people want to shit on something they generally can't have.

At least compare it to Batman 66 SLE which was a blatant gashgrab.

Why does it bother people so much that Stern sold out to distributors that they have to grasp at these straws? It's like people are rooting for Stern to fail, which is mornonic because it would slowly crash the whole industry. It can't be about the prices because the insane price markups on the LE/SLE don't even go straight to Stern's pockets. Are people just that upset that they feel like Stern squandered a great license, a license that people are simultaneously saying they have little interest in?

This whole thread is just a weird circle jerk of negativity.