Games like houdini and alice cooper are probably safer than you'd think, as they're all using P-ROC boards. More manufacturers using the boards means a better chance of replacement if any of the manufacturers dies out.

It's impossible to really speak to how reliable a board itself will be this soon. Early Bally boards are still quite reliable today, but early williams less so. Stern is probably safer than JJP as they're a bigger company. If any manufacturer's boards are going to be produced after they're gone, it'd be Stern.

Honestly, I don't think it's worth worrying about, at least for Stern. They're a large company with a lot of games out, and they're using the same boards in multiple games. Other manufacturers are still figuring out their board sets and keep changing them, or use lots of custom boards for each game, and might be a bit more dangerous down the road. Exception for games that use P-ROC like Houdini, TNA, etc. Even 40 years later most boards from the original wave of SS games when they were still figuring stuff out with sub-par electronics are still working fine; most boards now are going to be the same.

A few people do. Most probably can't. Then again that's mostly true of EMs too

Survivorship bias. Lots of them weren't solid machines, and now they're gone. There's no way to say for sure that the new distributed, surface mount design approach being used now will survive, since it hasn't yet. Stern can't know either, whether or not they're designing them to last. We've already seen multiple issues pop up that they hadn't foreseen.

Yeah, and they all use easy to replace through hole components. Which hopefully you can find, but sometimes you're still out of luck because they're just not made anymore.

But my point isn't that we can't fix issues that may come up, it's that just because Stern doesn't intend to make bad products doesn't mean they won't

Most electronic products don't cost $6k. And aren't filled with high power machinery.

As I said in my original post, I don't think it's worth worrying about, but some of the reasonings given don't hold up, and I'll point that out too. As much as they'll *probably* be okay, and if they're not the pinball community will *hopefully* be able to come up with fixes or replacements, it's just not something you can say with certainty, and it is a completely new+untested design paradigm

I've got two SPIKE games currently. Hell, I'd have bought an Alien if they were cheaper, and those boards were not confidence inducing. But then again I'm crazy

When people talk about them being disposable, I don't think they're talking about the whole machine. They're talking about how the parts are designed without repairability in mind. If a node board breaks, you get an entire new board, and either throw away the old one or send it to stern, who probably throws it away too (hopefully after studying what went wrong).

ThePinballCo-op was specifically talking about games not being designed with planned obsolescence. Eg, Stern still exists and is making new games. Designing the boards to not be repairable isn't the same as designing them to purposely break after a certain amount of time. The rest of the game is designed the same way games have been for years (not disposably), it's just the non-repairablity of the boards that are an issue in that sense. People are also worried about being able to repair their games if stern goes under, but that's a separate concern.