This scared me off. I loved my Ghostbusters LE, but I just sold it. Until I see better evidence for long-term reliability with Spike, I'm not risking it. I'll buy another GB down the road, but I feel like it's a ticking time bomb of wasted money right now.

It really irritates me that they took away the ability to work on games for myself. Until I see improved signs of reliability, I'm going to be very wary of Spike games.

Ghostbusters being on its own iteration of SPIKE is what bothered me the most. It's likely to be the least common set of boards to find in the future. With games going forward on a different version, they're going to be able to share parts and there should be available stock. When Ghostbusters goes out of production, how long will they keep boards on hand? How hard will it be to find a replacement?

I'd still find it wasteful to swap an entire board when it's just a transistor that needs to be replaced.

From a user's perspective, I've found no real benefits to SPIKE over SAM.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Maybe they had to remove the power line out of the main cabinet when they removed the interlock safety switch.

Edit: Wait, no. They removed the interlock after they moved the power switch.

SPIKE can probably be good one day, but it's just not a finished platform. Maybe that happens with SPIKE 3 or whatever, but it's just not fully baked as it is. When code updates are literally burning out node boards, you know there's work left to be done.

Star Wars had a code update that was causing a node board to fail, yes. It has been addressed though.