What it comes down to for me if that I need more then a pop up ramp as the main mech in a game that costs $12k+. That’s the main mech in the game, even Pat said so.

In Toy Story besides the spinning disk there are no larger motorized custom mechs, there are no mini playfields and instead there’s just a small coil based mech as the main toy. I’m not seeing anywhere close to enough value in this game to justify a $12k+ purchase.

that video was very well done, love how they kept zooming in on each shot in the bottom middle screen

Is this based on actual data or wishful thinking?

Because the data that I have (online stores) contradicts your statement.

Of course, you can say “call around” but that’s not data, just speculation that there may be distributors who don’t list them on their website for MSRP and somehow will sell them for MSRP if you call them.

Stern has developed and optimized its pinball platform to be simple and modular, JJP is still using a pc. The reason JJP games look busy has nothing to do with quality or good design, in fact it’s the opposite. TS4 has cool lighting and little else from a pinball standpoint.

The only comparison that really matters is which companies games have mirco playfields and which ones dont...

You are right It’s Logan’s Run and what I remember about LR is Jenny Agutter in a see through toga thru most of movie!Jenny from American Werewolf in London

I'm not making a statement on who is using the BOM of materials better. I just think it's silly to act like TS LE cost the same to make as Godzilla Premium.

The building mech is a stepper motor with rails. If you look at 3D printers on amazon, you can get one for around $80, which has two sets of these motors with rails. Is the gate at the top of the building motorized? I thought it just caught something on it's way down.

I'm guessing it cost Stern around $40 for that mech. The motor for MechaGodzilla is probably even cheaper, let's say it cost them $20 dollars for that. Estimating around $60.

In terms of additional motors on TS LE, you have the Spinning Wheel Mechanism, which I would expect cost them around $20, and the shaker motor. Which I would expect costs them around $40. Estimating around $60. The cost of motors between these two games has to be really close.

This is probably the one mech where both games probably equal out in cost.

Does Godzilla use that estimated $60 in motor cost for a better effect, certainly! That is not the argument I'm making though.

When you start including things like the coil cost, the cost of the tablet, the cost to powder coat, the cost of the bigger screen, the invisi-glass, the sound system, the cost of over 300 rgb leds and hot rails. It's clear to me that Toy Story has to cost more to make.

Do you think otherwise?

Oof

Lol that intro to Carl Hardy’s Toy Story video, perfect reaction with the Jim Carey clip.

BOM is only a portion of the costs of manufacturing a pinball machine.
Just looking at BOM doesn't give an accurate picture of total costs.
Anybody with manufacturing experience knows this.

I think it’s strange for someone to call this a failure. CE’s sold out in what, 10 minutes? My distributor says demand for the LE’s is strong. Sounds like a success to me. I can’t wait to play it!

This game looks like a ton of fun to me. Not a fan of the theme but its not off putting. Looks like a lot more fun to shoot than GnR, and POTC. Hopefully get to play this at Pintastic.

Why do poeple keep saying this. CEs from jjp directly did sell out, but you can still find them. A lot of them sold so people can try to flip them. So you can argue those are still for sale, too.

I think you underestimate the cost of a building mech like Godzilla. The volumes aren’t there to make this cheap to custom manufacture. The volumes are terrible. Too low for some Chinese factory to crank them out for a few bucks and too high to have them done by shops in the USA.
We have the same “problem” with some of the products where I work and I’m often blown away how expensive things can be.

That’s also why TS4 has generic cake topper figurines that you can buy from Aliexpress.

I agree, it’s probably going to sell ok, I’ll see it on location the places near me have TBL and other high dollar games.

It’s just not a theme for me (I love the first two films and especially TS2). TS4 is mostly about Forky and Bo Peep (who is like Ray in the new SW films).

Find me any at MSRP

https://www.jerseyjackpinball.com/distributors/

start calling....

It’s a good example of building credibility. I like that he isn’t big enough to become buddy-buddy with the manufacturers and a shill.

I also question whether the LE can really be considered "limited." I don't believe GnR sold 5,000 total units and I have a very hard time believing the LE will sell 5,000 units at this price point.

The game play has definitely sold me - this game looks really fun. I love the ramp. Price unfortunately will keep me away, too much $.

Recession could quash pin prices hard if it lingers for a long time. I would definitely be careful spending big dollars overpaying for pins right now.

I prefer FAX. Do you have a list of distributors FAX numbers?

It has been several years since I bought my Dialed In. Can somebody please refresh my memory on how pricing works. I know the JJP site says the LE is $12k, is that the minimum that the distributors can sell them for or do they have some flexibility?

This has to be the biggest let down I’ve seen in here. I hope Whodey can see this from the other side. Lol

Overpaying on anything right now is a bad idea. Wait until people that just bought a house see the value next year.

This entire post is spot on, but this sentence sums it up for me.

As a carnival theme, it looks like a really fun game. The videos of gameplay are impressive.

But Toy Story isn't about carnivals.

This isn't the "Toy Story Pinball" that so many of us have dreamed of for years. JJP could have made a timeless classic about timeless characters and timeless stories.

Instead, we get the weakest film in the franchise (one which I saw once and will never, ever see again) featuring Toy Story adjacent characters. All for 12k/15k.

It feels like JJP got Disney'd into a corner, and the result is something fans don't really want. Speaking as a Disney World annual passholder, this is par for the course these days. Considering what could've been, it's a shame.

I feel like I owe the designers and JJP an apology. Why? Well I had expectations that were maybe not practical AND JJP probably can't say anything about it. This is what happens when you work with a company like Disney. They are control freaks. So maybe we need to back off the TS4 vs. TS1-3 bashing just a bit? Because the only other option would have been to walk away from the deal entirely and they would not have been able to say why w/o Disney going after them. If they cancelled the pin, we would have flamed JJP up and down right?

Now as for the lack of toys/mechs on the machine? There I personally think they could have made some different choices? I would gladly of swapped out the LCD for a true upper playfield or maybe claw like mech that was in JunkYard or something? That to me is the biggest miss.

With that said, I have watched the video and am more curious about the game now. Will I order right now? Nope, but I will seek out the game and play it a bunch and maybe it will grow on me.

I do think a lot of us had some strong reactions and some of them were over the top. We need to remember there are people that worked years on this game and judging without playing is probably not fair.

This is just my 2 cents...

Let's have fun and play some pinball?

Dave

Yep - Cheap money is drying up fast, expect a big Fed hike today and another next month.

Anyone who bought a house in the first half of the year will feel the pain for sure.

Not a single person on this thread has seen this game in person. No one has touched it... or flipped it. Yet, the amount of grown-adult tantrum outbursts and foot stomping is topping the charts, even for this crazy website.

Hilarious. Well done, Pinside. You've outdone yourself!

The best part is I’m not selling my house ever.So as the over inflated prices settle my property taxes goes down

Fuck Disney! They screwed up Star Wars and they screwed JJP twice now!I would never do business with these control freak assholes ever again!Work with Sega to make a Sonic Spinball or Warner Bros on a Matrix pin. Walk away if you can’t build the way you need to be successful

Disney stanks like tuna bait.

Really not the place for this, but this thread and site are largely filled with horse farts, myself very much included, so....

First game I bought was Houdini. Could have had at the time a WoZ, Dialed-In, Hobbit, and I regret that to this day.

That said, build quality is fantastic! I do appreciate non licensed themes, but the work that David Thiel did on those games, along with the genuinely incomparable JP de Win, and Keith and Joe's coding add unique elements that go beyond build quality. Sometimes I find their coding work obtuse to master obviously, but those key differences go way beyond build quailty.

I was the sole person, think so anyway, that mentioned yesterday that I'd LOVE to have seen this game grafted onto Oktoberfest. That game had so, so many pluses, maybe in ways more than I see here, but licensing, and theme balance matter more than what AP is strong at currently.

Art design, LCD integration is genuinely amateur in comparison compared to what de Win does, and I am NOT happy saying that at all. It's really does separate AP's games from JJP and Stern in a significant way. I don't know if that's a nepotism issue, but clearly that needs handled more than your code or Josh's or build quality.

Stern has blown me away with their development in these ways, and you can see great advancements throughout their games over the years, though their font usage is entirely insufferable all too often.

Anyway, some quick thoughts there. I hope/d AP would be a disruptor, but after 4 games, the direction still feels aimless, and even an overpriced half ass mess like this, still clearly feels more relevant than what AP is offering to this point.

Again, I dearly want better from AP. We all have. The industry clearly needs better competition. I definitely know I will never buy a NIB JJP again with these pricing structures and the owner's mindsets of cost saving over Jack's original vision of innovation over anything else. That JJP is clearly dead.

Time to step it up AP. Pull the pieces together fully, and you have an open shot. Bring on the Nordman, and Oursler's last game! We're waiting...anxiously!

3CF098FE-EDF4-4106-817C-713422AA9417 (resized).jpeg

I’m shocked at the hate! Let’s be nice!

I would like for you guys to make The Matrix pinball.

Everyone is blaming Disney for TS4-gate. The Mandalorian turned out to be amazing so what is really going on here. Sorry but the buck stops with JJP, they had the Toy Story licence for YEARS so have plenty of time to come up with something half-decent.

It's mind-boggling how they come up with something they consider to be the dog's bollocks with #nocornerscut which disappoints so many in the hobby. That JJP employee spouting off in the video about an epic game, world under glass, etc. They are dellusional!!! Why don't their marketing/design people get their act together and give people what they want at a price which will sell bucket loads.

And yet, they had their biggest sales day in history.

https://www.pinball-magazine.com/?p=4586

Maybe the Pinside hive mind is wrong!

Anyone concerned about how they cut back on the warranty for this pin or is this the norm (it seems to exactly match Stern's warranty when I checked against GZ Premium). Also if the machine sits at a distributor for 2 months, I guess you're SOL on the logic boards?

What is covered on the game? Our Limited Warranty covers only the items listed below (“Covered Parts”) from the date the machine is shipped to JJP’s authorized distributors (or directly to the original owner), for the period of time indicated (the “Warranty Period”):
1. Printed circuit boards (game logic). Warranty Period – Sixty (60) Days.
2. LCD monitor. Warranty Period - Two Hundred Seventy (270) Days.
What is not covered on the game? JJP’s Limited Warranty does not cover anything other than the Covered Parts during the Warranty Period.

It looks like a fun game to play, though I do hate the big LCD. At $12k I'm finding it hard to convince myself to take a risk on a product whose warranty inspires low confidence. They are specifically not covering the PF at all.

That’s only 2500 games. So they’re including distributor allocations

It’s also higher cause they jacked the price up bigly, lol. So real unit numbers are a better metric

JJP knew better and went forward anyway. They didn’t learn from the assets debacle with POTC even though Jack has come out since stating how important it is to have assets for the theme. Disney isn’t going to care whether a TS4 pinball is a success or not but it’s pretty important to JJP. If JJP had done a Toy Story pin like they did for WOZ they could have sold TS for years. But they bet that TS4 would be the same as TS and anyone who wanted a TS pin wouldn’t really care.

If they couldn’t afford to do Toy Story right they shouldn’t have done it at all. All they would have had to say is that a theme they were interested in was no longer economically viable. We would’ve known instantly what that meant and why. And, if we are to believe the roadmap leaked long ago, JJP was interested in Toy Story before TS4 was even a property so clearly TS4 was not the original intent for the theme.

I hope this isn’t the beginning of the end for JJP but it’s pretty clear the company Jack envisioned with WOZ is not one we will likely ever see. Too many missteps and compromises.

Imagine Quantum City instead of Dialed In, Pirates and Toy Story the way they should have been and silkscreened playfields.
Instead we have TS4 with cake toppers and a $10 tablet on a Mirco playfield offered up as what the best in pinball can be.

is this really any different than the crap that stern pulled with the mustang pinball where the pro had a measly 4 songs but the premium/LE had 8?

You must be new here.
JJP gutted the warranty quite some time ago.

Pinside is always negative. ALWAYS

Well Stern was able to get the original SW trilogy. Film clips and all. I believe something like 400-500 movie clips.

Yeah, no.

From the article:
"On Collector Edition games, we sold 1,000 games in two minutes, fifty seconds at $15,000 per game! Of that around 900 to distribution and 100 in direct sales from the JJP Website."

They sold 100 games. The other 900 were sold through to distributors. Huge difference. Distributors are currently selling those 900 and likely will be for the foreseeable future.

lol...how'd you guess. So sad I missed what seems to be the glory days of JJP. Still want to get in on a NIB table but with virtually no warranty it doesn't seem like a huge advantage over buying a well maintained used pin. Only problem is those prices are now on par/exceeding new!

Perhaps, or a large portion of those sales are flippers... No one knows for sure. I can honestly say I really don't get how this pin sold out that fast, I really don't. But that's my opinion and I get that.

Jeff

Have you seen Thanos' glove in AIQP? Now that's an aliexpress dollatree item if I've ever seen one. And your argument about volumes not being there is specious. You don't know they're "custom". Parts can easily be cannibalized and assembled from multiple other things (imports) and not need to be "custom". i.e. you can take a part from a mass produced item and fit it to purpose or design around it for a new assembly cheaper than having that part made "custom". Assembly and manufacture aren't the same thing.

Find one CE in stock at MSRP. I know a few dealers held some trying to get more. But the vast majority were sold in minutes.

I am really looking forward to playing this game. Now it is the long wait!