That may be true but in this instance he's the face of Stern, for this customer and no doubt others.

Distilling this down to the simple facts. If a broken switch indirectly costs circa $200 to repair, and/or involves significant downtime, then it's just plain anti-consumer behaviour. I would not be particularly happy with someone basically telling me "sucks to be you pal" on the phone, even if they are being honest.

There's no reason for them to be designed that way other than - as Chad candidly put it - to explicitly make end user repair difficult if not impossible, and to serve as a secondary revenue stream.

Not being facetious but why wouldn't it fry everything it's connected to? That's exactly the sort of behaviour fuses exist to protect against.

Schematics and sales volume would ensure that GB would be maintainable in 10 years time, long after Stern stopped caring about it or held realistic prospects of monetising it further.

I don't think it's exclusively a Stern thing, but I do think it's dangerous to engineer games in such a way that obsolescence or failure is "built in", in the sense that components that could be built to last longer, or be easier to reproduce, are explicitly not done that way because to do so would impact a secondary revenue stream.

Obviously it is working for Stern now because they are one of only a few players in the game, but one does consider the maxim that you can shear a sheep many times but you can only skin it once. Burn operators and consumers with egregious board costs and they might stop buying new Sterns entirely..

A counterpoint, perhaps, is that if he sent the board in to Stern now perhaps he might get some goodwill. If he ignored the fact that the relocated node board is broken and it gives him another year or two without incident and he tries to have the same conversation about goodwill then - maybe he won't be so lucky.

If it were me I think I'd look to sending the node board back to Stern and if they turn around and say "soz you need to stump up $219 for a new one" then you just decline and get your board back and carry on using it in the new location. Obviously if its on route and making money then its a different proposition.

Maybe I'm being a bit simple but didn't B/W pins all come with schematics? The reason B/W wouldn't have had to deal with Rottendog et al back in the day would surely have been quite simply because they would've been cost effective for operators, especially within maintenance contracts or whatever. Rottendog filled a void after B/W had long since stopped supporting their products (or even really existed).

What about the proprietary closed-source code programmed into the chips? Without that you're manufacturing a paperweight surely?

I guess it comes down to expectations.

WPC games had schematics and as a result are still running 25+ years later.

I have a Stern Tron LE which being SAM is apparently more resilient. How much more resilient is up for debate. That said the ramps on it are unobtainium now, and it's "only" 7 years old.

Should I expect my Tron to have a serviceable life of <10 years? Is it unrealistic for me to expect it to have a similar lifespan to WPC games?

Not being funny but so long as people carry on buying their pins sight unseen (see Munsters) then it won't matter what's said.

As things stand now they have no incentive to really give out schematics, other than for PR reasons. They would make more money from a secondary revenue stream selling replacement boards than empowering owners to fix things themselves, or worse - giving third parties the opportunity to make and sell parts themselves.

I'd be happy if schematics came out for games that they considered to be no longer financially viable, but it doesn't seem like that's going to happen either.

Planned obsolescence as a business concept doesn't work in pinball for one simple reason - the products that people are forced to replace don't exist in a newer, more robust (or whatever) form.

If my Tron breaks down, I want it to work again. I don't want to be told, for example, that "Iron Maiden is better tech, XYZ on the playfield has moved on so much". I don't want Iron Maiden, I want Tron. If I wanted Iron Maiden I'd buy Iron Maiden, as well as Tron, or instead of.

I get that companies need to make money, and planned obsolescence is an unspoken but widely practised tactic, but planned obsolescence doesn't work in pinball because the theme is a critical part of the attraction.

Apple - for example - come out with new, faster iPhones and laptops and what-have-you every year, and the last one - which until the day before the keynote is hot stuff - is suddenly yesterdays news. But critically the new iPhone behaves in the same way as the one it replaces, and people buying them aren't losing out (other than money).

If my Tron breaks and the boards aren't available anymore because Stern decided that they can't be bothered to make them anymore (the ramps are already unobtainium), what am I supposed to do? Forget that Tron ever existed and buy the latest, greatest Stern pin - until that fails?

Also as a final point - planned obsolescence doesn't have to mean that Stern (or any company) have decided on an arbitrary lifespan, it can also mean that the board design, materials, etc are specced in such a way - e.g. due to cost cutting, etc - that they have a practical life expectancy by design.

Good point. I should've qualified what I said, but yes I agree. I guess the question then becomes - how do (and should) Stern turn a yearly profit selling both to operators and end users?

As regards Space Shuttle vs Munsters, what if I don't like Munsters? What if I don't like the theme of any of the new machines? What if I really just like Tron a whole lot?

I might be being a bit slow but in so far as cars and TVs go generally newer models of cars and TVs are always better in almost every respect, and offer the same "experience". There is an argument to be made that you might have an attachment to a old Mustang or something, because of how it looks, but if you just want a functional car then a newer model will do the same job if not better. What I mean is if all you care about is that you have a car then cost notwithstanding a newer car will always be better.

Likewise TVs - do people have a desire to hold on to old TVs? Newer ones are bigger, more energy efficient, have more features, etc. I can't think of a reason someone would want to hold on to an old CRT TV when they could get an LCD/OLED one that is objectively better in every way.

I like the Tron pin because I like Tron. Playing Munsters wouldn't satisfy me in the same way, it wouldn't be the same experience even if technically I'm still playing pinball. There is a discernable difference between the experience and affinity towards one pin vs another, and cars or TVs, I think.

Also - if you want to hold on to your old car you have options to keep it going, even if that means going to specialists or whatever. I accept that part of it. In other words, if my Tron board fails and my only option is to go to a specialist because the manufacturer isn't interested in supporting it anymore, and having to pay more to maintain it, at least that's an option. Without schematics, moulds, etc it's not an option for obsolete pins.

Fair enough, consider myself educated

Give me a break.. it's not as if mods add any real load to these boards. In 99% of cases they're a few watts at most. If they aren't built with that kind of tolerance then that's bad design pure and simple.

I guess that assumes that Stern are interested to find out the cause of failures. If they already have a good idea of the lifespan of components then their attitude might simply be that customers are expected to suck it up and buy new node boards.

I think you can read a lot into how long a manufacturer is prepared to stand behind their products in terms of offered warranty, and the fact that the warranty on node boards on a brand new pin is 2 months speaks volumes in my opinion.

Consider me educated I assumed there would be some overhead built into the board design.

Having one distro for an entire country seems a bit sketchy to me? Or is that typical?

Curiously a lot of pages that used to exist on Stern's website are no longer available... e.g. https://sternpinball.com/find-a-commercial-distributor, https://sternpinball.com/buy/commercial-distributors

I know of at least 2 official ones. Hard to say for sure since Stern have pulled the distributor page. I can't find it anywhere on their website anymore.

EDIT: I might be thinking of retailers. There's at least 3 retailers, and it seems Electrocoin appears to be the exclusive distributor in the UK, so perhaps the Aussie situation isn't unusual.