If a person does not want to educate themselves about the industry and how it operates both from the standpoint of manufacturing, cost of materials, technology, marketing, and licensing, don't complain about it.

Most of human knowledge is built on the backs of others. Then reviewed closely enough to discover if it is true or not. It is written in pages and passed on by words. It is how I have knowledge on a great many subjects I have never fully studied. It is also the reason humans advanced so quickly as communications improved. Today I can read what is written all over the world. And I can judge those writings to see if they fit the knowledge patterns I have accumulated in my lifetime.

From this statement it sounds like you have done this type of research into the licensing and manufacturing costs of pinball. I know that I will not be conducting this type of research, but I request that you share yours with the world. That way we can judge how close to the truth we feel it is and gain knowledge from it. Otherwise these words are hollow.

Walls of text.... saying nothing

1389487650-0 (resized).jpg

Here's a very nice video of SAM vs Spike.

Thanks for that video Clay, it very well explains the current situation with spike.

So even according to this Guy stern games are shit. Nice

I just watched this video and damn! This guy really blows the lid off Stern's cheap ass Spike system! This is very concerning going forward with all of Stern's new pinball machines! Replacement costs are completely off the chart vs their former SAM system.

I can't believe 12 people voted Spike as being more reliable and repair friendly. What a joke.

Once again people. Stop buying them. This guy
Is telling you that they are cheaply made toys that will not last. Give your money to another manufacturer that will make a quality product.

Star wars is my first spike game. Everything he says in the video is consistent with what I've seen poking around in the game. It is clear that much of this was done for cost cutting reasons. Repair time and cost go way up and the ability to dianose quickly goes down. Operators will and should hate it. I do like my star wars, but unless changes are made, including providing fused protection and the ability to repair a game quickly, it will be my first and only stern spike game I buy. We all know it's just a matter of when not if a game has an issue.

To be fair, jjp has done similar things eliminating bulbs and using node boards, but at least the system is fused and problems can be more easily diagnosed and fixed. Also, unlike stern, jjp appears to be going the opposite way on overall quality.

I can. Looks like a lot of "money" people here who just don't know how or care to know how to repair stuff. For them, repairing by replacing boards is way easier than actually fixing by swapping out a bad component.

Maybe, but that approach only works if the boards are actually available. Will that be the case several years down the line when Stern is onto Spike 4 or some other system--keeping in mind that the boards for the current Spike games are apparently not all compatible with each other? I'd like to think so, but am getting concerned for the longterm operability of my GB.

That's actually why I sold my GBLE. I love the game, but I want to be sure that it's not going to be a massively huge money sink. I had quite a few maintenance problems with it, and I just got scared off. I'll pick up a premium down the road if all is well, but I didn't want to roll the dice on Stern's ability to support the node board revision long term. Also, there are bugs they absolutely need to address in that game. It's unfinished at the code level.

Replace WoZ with GB in your statement and it's pretty much exactly why I got rid of the WoZ LE I had.

I've only had two node board issues so far with my Sterns (one GB, one GoT). *knocks on wood* Replacements came in two days direct from Stern, so down time was minimal.

Stern has you by the balls now. You buy one of their POS games and that board breaks you cant fix it and they hold the rights to it so no one else can make it. You bend over and buy one from them and if they don't have it available anymore you throw your precious stern game out with the trash. I am so glad I don't have any and never will. I hope they go belly up soon as they deserve it.

Unfortunately when a node board goes bad it's not a transistor, or capacitor. Forget about thru/hole vs. SMT for the moment as I think most people can probably muddle their way through replacing a SMT transistor or cap.

What the issue has become is communications failures. There are many, many devices on these boards that aid in the communications and program storage of information so it can communicate with the CPU and other node boards. There is no way to know which link on the node board has actually failed to stop the board from communicating. I have not seen any testing protocols on determining which communications part has failed to even begin to know what device to change. There are even some rather large SMT 4 sided chips on these boards which people without the proper tools or skills will not be able to change. That's assuming someone figured out that the chip is bad in the first place.

The major difference is that JJP is working to increase the reliability of their games while Stern is working to make them more difficult to maintain and less reliable. SPIKE is a nightmare and it's half-baked at best. It's the most problematic system they've had to date.

Has anyone actually called or emailed gary since his phone number and email was published? I would be bugging the shit out of him if I had one of these POS games that is falling apart.

Increasing reliability, like having to reboot the game if left on longer than 6 hours?

Here's an honest question ... Do you think Stern really wants to make their games less reliable and more difficult to maintain, thereby alienating the entire Operator market and a large chunk of the home market, and in turn, possibly folding up shop because they no longer sell games? You honestly think that's their game plan with Spike?

The original WOZ light boards were relatively dumb and inexpensive compared to Stern's node boards. Diagnosing which board had an issue wasn't too difficult and once found, the board could usually be bypassed and compensated for in the software so the game could stay playable until a replacement came in.

As I understand it, JJP has gone away from the more problematic daisy chained serial interface on their newer machines. Unfortunately, Stern went to the daisy chained interface.

They want to remove the ability for the home owner to service their game. They did that, actually. The problem is that they released a new system that wasn't ready. It's still not ready. The SPIKE system sucks. There's not any other way to put it than that. People update their games and it bricks their game because of a node communication failure. What can they do? Wait for Stern to send new boards. What happens in 4-5 years when they're 3-4 revisions down the line? Will they still be stocking your boards? If not, how costly will it be to find a replacement? Will you be able to find a replacement?

Whatever their intention, they're creating a future mess. Ghostbusters uses node board versions that aren't compatible with other games, so either Stern will have to warehouse a lot of replacement boards for future service needs or you're going to find big issues keeping those games going. Will an operator want to take the hundreds of dollars hit it will take to swap out a board once warranty runs out?

SPIKE feels very disposable, and it's not a good look.

Do you think they care? They have been consistently cheaping out on their game for years. Quality has become abysmal and prices have soared but the enablers still throw their money at them and bow down and make excuses. Why would they do anything different? They are laughing all the way to the bank. I don't know why I care or why it bothers me. Maybe its because there will be no more pins for me to buy 2nd hand in the future because stern POS will be all that is out there and they will all be falling apart junk.

You avoided answering my question.

Maybe I'm naïve, but I'm assuming that even if Stern discontinues the boards for older Spike games, they would at least license someone else to make them (or maybe they could be reverse-engineered?) rather than turn these games into massive paper weights. If it comes to that, keeping the games operable would obviously be expensive, but at least we could keep them alive.

More likely unintended consequences of reducing costs.

However, if they really see the majority of their business coming from home sales, they know people will pay whatever it takes to keep their $5k -$8k machines running.

If the board isn't available you cant buy it at any cost and you can throw it out and buy a new stern game. Im sure that is their plan. Maybe the P-Rock people can design something to make it work.

Do I think they want to make them harder to repair and maintain? Yes. They want to do it to make parts and service a viable revenue channel. They don't want you buying a transistor from a local electronics store for $2 to fix your game when they can sell you a $300 node board with a massive profit margin from their end.

That's what I believe as well. With any major infrastructure change in the pinball industry, comes growing pains. Pretty sure every manufacturer, ever, has gone through it.

And I'm sure every operator back in the day cursed every time it happened. "Solid state, wtf is this? What's wrong with EM's? They are just trying to save money, this sucks."

That was half the question. Here's the other half in case you stopped reading ...

I do believe in the talents of the pinball community and expect someone will eventually figure out how to repair or replace the node boards to keep the games operational if Stern no longer supports them. in the mean time though, you may be paying $300/board if it's out of warranty or you're not the original buyer (at Stern's discretion).

To be fully honest, it feels like the money guys want to squeeze as much as they can out of the industry now so that they can cash out. I can't say that's the case, but it sure looks like it.

SPIKE is the result of desperation (pinball is not as healthy as we think), the result of incompetent engineering (even armchair engineers can point out TONS of reasons why they should have done things differently), or it's a sign that cranking profit margins up is priority #1 regardless of end result. It's probably the second scenario, but none of them are encouraging.

Anybody who says that SPIKE is a step forward is either ignorant or lying. Objectively it's problematic. It can be revised into something better, but they're sure taking their sweet time getting there. We've already had several games put out on the platform, and they all have the same issues.

Bingo. Just like every time a major change has happened.

Though I have not heard of any node boards failing out of warranty yet. I haven't had to pay for any.

I certainly had to pay shipping costs to send back dead boards to a certain manufacturer every time. $30 bucks each time.

Doesn't it seem that all manufacturers games now have components that are not user/operator serviceable?

I haven't had a chance to peek under a Dialed In, but is every board under the hood able to be repaired with a $2 transistor?

It's not just the level of serviceability. It's flawed in its design on top of things. It's more prone to failure than any other Stern system that came before it. That's the real kicker. If something is very reliable, then we don't have to worry so much about how easy it is to service. When it's very prone to failure, you bet it matters.

i'm on the fence about selling my GB as well because of this very thing. The game is awesome. I love it. But 10 years from now, I don't want to be trying to find and scrounge node boards to keep it alive.

This could apply to any of the current manufacturers, couldn't it? Don't they all have some form of proprietary board in them?

Do you think Stern will say 'Good enough' and not try and make it more reliable?

In my experience so far, the Stern Spike's I have operated have been very reliable, running 14 plus hours a day with hundreds of plays a week. MMr has been rock solid as well.

It has never been the case that every board in a pinball machine could be fixed with a $2 transistor. However, the traditional electronic points of failure in a pinball machine are the drive transistors and the diodes protecting them. If I'm not mistaken, these are <$2 through hole components that are relatively easy to replace in JJP machines.

The concern with any new unproven electronic control system is that there may be other points of failure that are more difficult to find and more costly to repair. The original lighting system on WOZ and apparently the node boards in the new Spike system are two good examples.

JJP went through a few backwards compatible lighting board revisions on WOZ to improve reliability, then went with a new lighting system on the Hobbit to improve reliability even more. I have not heard of any basic design flaws or reliability issues with the new system.

i'm not sure, but it's always a main concern with me with buying any new game. For the people here that swap games out every 3 months and never fix anything, they don't care about what the system is made out of. even if it was electronics printed on a piece of cardboard, as long as it didnt' have any ghosting or the playfield didnt' get a dimple, they would be happy. :/

It comes down to, if you don't care about issues like this, you are not planning on being in the hobby very long.

Well said Neo. I've been in the hobby for over 20 years and have yet to send a board out for repair, so these things matter very much to me.

That being said, as an electronic engineer I feel comfortable troubleshooting to the component level and soldering.

People who are not feel comfortable with this are probably better off not touching their boards with a soldering iron. I can see an easy to swap replacement board being a good solution if the failure rate was low and/or the replacement cost was reasonable.

For example, you can by an iPad for $300 so a single node board for the same price seems ridiculous.

Wow.

Bit of an eye opener really. Don't think I want to keep my Spike games for more than a few years.

I firmly believe this is the case. But I have to admit I'm not as surprised or bitter about it as others seem to be. Maybe it's because I have to deal with financial investors on a daily basis?

They needed an investor and got one who is not coming from the pinball business. He was hired to make them profitable again and maximize earnings - this is exactly what is happening. The focus shifted from the product to the business model.

The investors success is typically not measured in sustainability but rather in "how much was gained until day X" (which is common in the US, but being German it's still a very strange approach to me). Who knows what the pinball market or general economic situation will look like in 10 years from now, so cash in as much as possible while "the good times last".

It would be interesting to know Gary's future plans. Is he already preparing to sell his company mid term and making it attractive to potential buyers by being able to present huge profit margins? Does he even have to care what happens to his games in 10 years from now?

the problem is, Gary has said he loves pinball, and everything about it. Investors or not. if he truly loved pinball. Making a game serviceable would be a main concern for him, and not an area to cut costs. If you are going to cut as many corners as Stern has been lately, at least share some of the cost cutting with the customers and make the games a little cheaper each release. Instead it goes up..not a little, but a TON every release.

Doing tech work on location machines for an operator in NYC I have already had numerous and sometimes repeat Node board issues with WWE, KISS LE and Batman66 LE. Not only are the machines down due to the boards failure they dont take in money, which is why they are on location in the first place.

Another aspect that field techs have to deal with regarding Spike is that it's embarrassing to show up for a repair on location only to not be able to repair the machine due to a Mode board failure and having to explain to the angry location owner why there is a machine down in a spot that could be making money with a dinner table.

A machine is down due to a non serviceable board. Said board costs up to $300 with what a $1 transistor could have solved. So now your not only down for the loss of income but also for the huge cost of the board.

A few times already, location owners have asked the operator to take the machines out due to the down time.

If Pinball is to return to the Public eye and grow again this system is basically suicide for the industry.

Its the same old small thinking. Build something cheap and fast for the quick buck and not made well and slow for the Big Bucks.

Penny Wise, Dollar Foolish.

If Spooky , American Pinball, JJP or any new mfg catch on and create serviceable systems they may slowly take over the Operator/Location Market.

It takes a very long time to build a good reputation and a very short time to destroy it. Once the customers catch on to getting ripped off they'll start looking for alternatives. That is true in pinball just like it is true in car manufacturing (Diesel scandal). Once your customer base has switched to a different brand they're not likely to ever return. While you can generate huge profits short term by cutting corners you can not build a loyal customer base for the long run.
For me, Metallica was my last Stern, I moved on to greener pastures.

I've owned a handful of machines over the past 15 years...all of them older board driven games...I've only ever had to fix minor things...I have been flirting with the idea of buying a newer spike Stern for the past few years but thanks to this thread and those who have contributed to it, I will never buy a spike Stern game either new or used!

I never thought of that. I guess it would suck to leave the machine unfixed.

If the spike communication protocol is known, then even in 20 years you would be able to design a new node board. The actual hardware used on them is not that important, as long as they understand the network protocol to talk to it.

Lucky for us the mission pinball framework project has already partly reverse engineered the spike networking protocol. The hope is that they are able to fully decode the protoco. Even better would it be if Stern release the protocol specification.

So the wait is for the full protocol spec and someone designing a third party node board.

You know, having stern make their own games obsolete in 10 years isnt' that far fetched. What better way to get someone to buy a new game, than to have one that you can't get going again. Bally/Williams has stated before that Diamond plate can be contributed to ruining their own market, as it was making games last way longer than they wanted. They wanted you to route a game for 5-8 years, hopefully it looks like such shit by that point, that you buy their newer model.