Sure it does - D&B are the kind of resources people use to decide if they will extend someone credit terms, etc and is used as a indicator of the risk or past performance of a company in paying their bills.

You don't need to know how far in debt they are, or to whom, when the question is "Do these guys pay their bills?".

A report like this mean when they goto another supplier and say "We'd like to order a bunch of supplies.. and we'd like NET60 terms" - the supplier is going to go... "uhh... payment up front - no net terms" - which if you are in a cash crunch... makes things even harder.

Simply because you need to PAY to have access to the data - not that the data is confidential.

Well for the D&B report to go 'poor' in the first place.. you need behavior to move it that way
Not interested in paying to update? You aren't concerned with barriers to getting credit and terms with suppliers... as a MANUFACTURING COMPANY? Yeah, that passes the sniff test...

Translation: We think we can press on besides our past transgressions and we have what we need to succeed...

But we heard that story before too..

Not really... they keep buying game after game unseen after having prior games turn out to be turds. People still want to believe and can't help themselves.

People gave JPOP money for game #3 before he even delivered anything but some art created by someone else... if that doesn't tell you how eager some people are..

You do know... that the Stern you know today did not survive that storm.. Stern as you know it today is a rebranding of two previously failed companies. Stern Electronics which sold out to Data East (in the time period of this article)... which sold out to Sega after the next pinball downturn... which sold to Gary Stern.. after failing to survive the downturn.

Gary has proven to be thrifty to survive the lean times of the 2000s... but he didn't survive the bust of 1985

The SEI to DE transition is certainly misquoted a bunch.. but the only reference I see to counter it is the one post from Orin back in RGP days (the one linked from pinwiki). What did DE acquire to start their pinball? Just people assembled by Gary? And how did Gary detach from SEI... and what happened to SEI assets? Stern Pinball claims to have access to them now.. so where is that continuity? Any insight keefer?

And people pinched a fit when robin tried to take the edit power away from users... cases like the above are real and a detriment.

Woah.. time warp on that website. Screw who has the best LED kits.. who has the best AT string to optimize their USR??

I'll take it over not getting to play it at all But I'm in the same boat.. I don't like waiting in lines just to play a single game or so.. if their is little to no line I'll jump in. Lucky for us Joe@pinstar brings a lot of these types of games (woz, amh, etc) to the shows in PA and we get to play them there without too much drama.

Jjp demonstrated there was market demand for a 'luxury' version of games while stern had been trying year after year to cut as much of the game out as possible under the guise that keeping the price down was mandatory for success. But in doing so stern had started to cut 'muscle' out of the game, not just fat. The market prices went up not because of more supply (which is what drives prices dow) but rather proving demand was there for an upscale product the sole supplier was not offering

Once the higher end was doing well, that softens expectations on low end price and those get to creep up as well in the vacuum created

They also did a lot of other product expansion too... The take away is the new partner forced new product thinking vs gary's chasing the penny pinching operator as 90% of their market.

Isn't innocent so cute??

Well lets walk through it
- you say people would happily line up and prepay for JJP3 and JJP4. Based on what? Do we agree there is a big difference between prepaying for the 'pending' game and games further down the line? From a company that has a 100% hit ratio when it comes to prolonged delays?

Ignore Skit-B and JPop - would people really do that in numbers? They haven't before.. and every JJP *DELIVERABLE* up till now would be working against that

- you say "Or maybe it wasn't about money at all and was just because of other stuff."
I agree neither of us know the details... but what we do know is they were already late in showing something they were facing their own deadline on and the market was doubting them. They had to show something.. else face the pitchforks because even more confidence would be lost

- you say "But I'm confident that Hobbit production will start soon...and JJP will move away from the prepay model as soon as they can"
Confident based on what? Pretty much everything but 'it has to happen eventually' eats at this kind of confidence. JJP continues to show signs of cash flow issues... JJP has not come through with promises to resolve their manufacturing constraints... they haven't done much IMO to show they won't repeat the same teething problems inbetween prototype and production

- you say "That created delays"
You ignore how late that game shown was itself. And for all the playfield tweaking happening since then - what of all the other game code that should have seen this new delay as EXTRA time? No, it too is very far behind and needing every bit of this 'EXTRA' time to just keep up.. and will the game even be complete at launch? No peeps on that front...

I say innocence because... your optimism seems to be from closing your eyes to past and current performance and hoping for the best. IMO - their actions don't match that optimism. I do think Hobbit will get built... but I am scared on what it means to actually get all the pre-orders built and frankly have a degree of concern they won't get all built.

No flames from me.. thx for the feedback.

So what do you think a shit, late delivered Hobbit would cause? This? Because that's what expo was..

All the defenses about 'they had to improve the game' ignore the game was already late.. and still isn't done. Forget about production for a minute.. the game itself isn't done yet.. a year+ late. The rework didn't cause the initial delays, the rework alone isn't responsible for the additional delays.

I get (and agree) - doing the game right and reworking it was the right thing to do. But it is not a 'get out of jail free' card for the past delays or the current delays with no confident timeline.