Not exactly. I run a Kia dealership and customers with failure level issues have the ability to contact Kia Consumer Affairs to help get resolutions to issues that are beyond the dealer’s responsibilities.

I would think that with the purchase of an LE pinball machine nearing the price of a Kia Forte base model that Stern would minimally extend the electronics warranty period out for straight up replacement boards and an additional period of time for customers to send in boards for repair if for no other reason than to gather enough data to determine commonality between failures to help them engineer a better product, cut down on support and ultimately grow more business by showing that they care for their customers.

Ultimately if they do find a common failure point after all of the above a recall that would cover original owners which would be facilitated by their distributors would seem logical, similar to the auto industry.

But hey, what do I know!

I didn’t say it wasn’t laughable!

The only way to see any of this change is to band together, either by collectively deciding to not buy new machines or to collectively file an action against Stern and see what happens.

If purchasers of NIB Stern games that have had failures (none yet here on 4 NIB... knock on wood) do nothing but bitch on Pinside or attempt to get resolution from Stern one off it is highly unlikely anything will ever change.

All things considered I am not sure there is enough data to really know failure rate.

You would need to know total number of units built, sold and in use. Build date of each machine and who assembled it at the factory. Where they are in use, environmental factors and play counts. Mods installed. Does the game have a shaker, factory installed or aftermarket.

If you really want to get somewhere with this someone should setup a google form that would ask these questions and more and log the responses to a spreadsheet and work toward building standardized responses in order to have a real data set to work from.

Just my $.02