JJP has made 2200 WOZ plus a few TH in 5 yr Gary can change or not at his own pace

This is not at all the actual reason.

The real reason is much more interesting, and not labor related.

Stay tuned, the big reveal is probably a month or so away......

This doesn't sound good at all. Maybe I should think about cancelling.....hmmmmm

It's no big deal.

Nothing really is going to change for the end user.

Pinball has been manufactured the same way for almost 100 years.......

Ambiguous and vague. Way to fuel the Stern 'Doom and gloomers'...

The real answer has already been stated in this very thread.

And I fully understand why everyone who knows will not just come out and say it!

Been slashing and cutting since they had the industry to themselves.Bad or good economy doesn't seem to matter.

Barely any talk of them putting an LCD in their games anymore.JJp pushed Stern,but only so far.Stern will (try) and outlast all newcomers.

What start up,even JJP,who I love,could survive a flop without pre order money?Only Stern.

Stern is selling games at a record pace right now.

No need for them to go LCD if people are buying up everything they produce with DMD.

-

A few months ago when WNBJM was the number one earning game in the country, that REALLY proved to Stern that people play games because they are fun, not because they have a LCD.

I don't really care about LCD. I don't love the look of red DMDs either, but LCD doesn't excite me. Color DMD is the best of the display bunch, I feel. I wish we could just get color dots as a standard.

I've heard that Stern is heading into the casino gaming market, and the real reason that they moved to a larger factory.

flynnibus nailed it with his assessment of how we got to where we are with the manufacturers and current feature rich (compared 08, 09, 10) games and the high end market.

As far as JJP is concerned, sure, they've made less than 3,000 games (and are not a major competitor for Stern at this moment) but that's not really the point, the point is JJP took the risk and provded market viability for high end pins. You do not have to take over a market to prove viability.

I like the LCD much better than anything else out there, but since GB won't have an LCD, I'd gladly pay to upgrade GB to ColorDMD. Nothing else though.

That "number one game" business was total nonsense. Nobody actually took that seriously. They had like 20 WNBJMs on location around the country at the time.

That would be terrible news. What do you think killed pinball over at Williams?

I hope this is not the case. I know (well watched a documentary that stated) Vegas is planning on trying to get the younger generation in the Casino's with more "skill base" gambling machines as their customer base is getting older and declining out of their current market.

You are right, polling the top operators in the country is never a good way to determine the top earning games.

Ops pay $65 a year to read meter results that are total nonsense.

They don't call you Crazy for nothing.

They don't call you Crazy for your mad skills in picking up on sarcasm either.

So Stern are going to start making their own cabinets and playfields?

IMO, the best way for Stern to "talk" to customers is to have 1 video per week showing the games being built.

I don't know about 1 a week, but they have been releasing lots of videos the past few months of games on the line. They just did a live stream on their Facebook two days ago.

Since Stern doesn't give a shit about taking advantage of the vibrant colours, including metallics and whatnot, available from screen printing, I'm assuming they'll be digitally printing their own playfields in-house.

well thank you JJP for taking the price of NIB from $3500 to $8000

Screen printing - it ain't rocket science......

235031_(resized).jpg

235033_(resized).jpg

BB2-panoramica_(resized).jpg

Actually, the ONLY thing that killed pinball over at Williams, was Neil Nicastro.

He wanted pinball dead.

That's why he closed up the pinball division while it was making money.

That's why he refused to put the pinball division up for sale. Even when companies offered to buy it, he refused.

That's why he refused to move the pinball employees over to the the rest of the company. They had to apply for any job opening like someone off the street.

That's why when he finally sold the assets after letting them sit for years, he broke them up over 3 continents so no one company could have enough to build on.

It's more art than science (see: registration issues) and pressing "PRINT" is way easier. Stern already loves that muted 4-colour process crap anyway, might as well go digital.

I'm guessing if they hadn't entered the lucrative slot machine business five years earlier and been very successful at it, things might have been a little different. Big companies like to make money, and they knew where the money was.

I know from first hand knowledge he was offered $20M for the division by people very, very capable of making it a going concern, and turned it down.

The idea that he hated pinball is overblown, though - he was looking at it from an accounting perspective and stock price. You can't let someone take your failure and make it a success, that's bad for the bottom line.

Bally made slot machines since the 1930's, but that did not stop them from selling their pinball division when the time came.

Bally did not say, "Hmmm, let's close the pinball division, and just let everything rot. No sense in putting it up for sale..."

If they are entering the slot machine business, I think it's a good hedge against a pinball downturn. And we know there's an ebb and flow to pinball. These current sales figures won't last forever.
Stern isn't WMS and if slots can keep the company afloat during hard times, so be it. Never see Stern abandoning pinball.

Neil absolutely hated pinball, and all the personalities that were involved in it.

When you divest part of your business holdings, you expect the buyer to make a success out of it. A holding that is no longer a "good fit" for your company, will hopefully be a perfect fit for someone else's strategy.

When Bally sold it's pinball division to Williams, the Bally management knew Williams was going to make ongoing profits from the acquisition. Otherwise, why would Williams buy it, lol?

Near the end of Williams pinball, having to close out machines must not have been that profitable. On the other hand their slot machine business was taking off and they had a run of very successfull machines so from a business stand point it made sense. And stock prices and profit went up ever since.

The closeouts of those Cactus Canyons were AFTER Williams announced the closing of the pinball division.

Look on RGP where pinheads were even worried if rubber rings would still be available into the future.

(closeouts were normal in the pinball biz. TimeWarp was a huge selling game, but they made too many and in the end, a few could be picked up for $900 at some distributors (but only with standard flippers installed))

It's obvious to me, Jpop drove him bat shit crazy and caused him to hate pinball and close up shop

You skipped over the truth where in that period Gary was selling AC/DC, Metallica, ST, premiums, LEs, and more... and not NBA, CSI, and 24 as he was before. That's not by accident.

So why turn down 20M? 20M is good for the company, good for the stock price.

Unless he wanted it to die....personally.

I did not know they were offered 20M. But I did read Williams was sold for 1.5 billion a couple years ago.

You need to look around.. it was the people willing and eager to buy 6k+ games that drove the prices up.. not JJP per say. They just proved the market was there.

When people are spending $300 on toppers instead of $300 games like we used too... you can't blame the manufacturers...

Neil either wanted to kill Pinball personally, or his ego prevented him from selling off the division.

Either way, he's an asshole.

I guess the real question is who was going to buy Williams pinball when they could hardly give away games like CV and the rest of the industry was struggling to survive.

CV is not very good...

CV was thought of as a "gay" game and no one wanted it.

Revenge from Mars sold like 7000 units, so people were still buying Williams Pinball.

Good point but by then with most of the other companies already packing it up and lackluster sales on other games maybe by then it was too late. I remember when RFM came out it seemed more like a novelty, and I was hoping to see the next real pinball machine again.

I remember when RFM came out and we were all said because we knew Williams was ditching pinball

You'll have to come up with a viable alternative to why he wouldn't sell.

So far, I haven't heard one.

I wasn't sure what they were doing because the arcade still had lots of recent games. But I did say "OK, but the original is better so lets see the next real game you have to offer" Then they put SWE1 down and it was over.

Or maybe it just needed to look and play like the original.

Roger Sharpe alluded to as much in the "Tilt" documentary.....that Neil didn't want someone else to be successful with it.