Pretty disappointing first crack at connectivity honestly. This feels like a knee jerk response to Scorbit and not stepping back and finding ways to make the game more engaging for the player with no constraints. For example, why QR codes and not some sort of wireless connectivity like bluetooth or NFC? Another example, why not have a rich app that lets you see how you drained and helps you learn how to not drain the same way. Doing an awkward QR code dance for leaderboards and a personal scoreboards is a bit of a let down. Hopefully, this is just a v1 and they're thinking of more but pretty me too offering to start.

Would an off the shelf Bluetooth or NFC module really require certification? Wouldn't the off the shelf radio module already have FCC and UL certifications and therefore Stern could just pull it in?

You're probably right on the QR code interaction being better for the normal player. I probably have a prejudice against them because of all the marketing people using them in such silly ways.

Great to hear. Would love nothing more than seeing you guys be creative here and not just check the "connected" checkbox.

How would you associate game plays to players with just a QR code on the game? The only thing you could go off of is timestamps for the games and the timestamp of the player scanning the QR code into their phone. You'd have to do some sort of matching game on the backend which would unveil a slew of use cases that might not be accurate. For example, what if either the phone or the pinball machine are offline when the QR code is scanned or the game is started. While the solution sounds device centric, by scanning a players QR code you can at least accurately say this game is being played by player xyz and even store a bit of personalization in the QR code itself like player initials or name.

Not taking money unless there is internet connectivity is a pretty huge leap here.

The network is reliable is the #1 fallacy of distributed computing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_computing

Agree with you that adding hardware costs is a questionable decision but Stern believes in this concept enough to at least find a UX that allows for the machine to store and send the game data when the machine is offline so it can send the data when the machine goes back online. Remember a lot of these machines are being setup in basements, rural areas and countries with poor ISPs, so network connectivity is not a given.

It's a business decision dude and Stern made the decision that "table stakes" was not needing their users to need an internet connection. Again, I actually agree with you but for most IoT products Stern's decision to support offline is the norm especially when you have an HMI involved.

To answer your points directly.
1. Fixed locations helps wifi for reliability because you don't typically have handoffs and hops but see fallacy 5. Nothing stops the network topology around a static location from changing. ISPs can and do change the network. Locations can and do change their network equipment and in leased buildings it might be unknown and not under their control.
2. Most IoT doesn't use REST because HTTP is fat. MQTT, COAP, binary or protocol buffers are the norm.
3. again a business decision that Stern believes getting game data is valuable enough to build more reliability than just a network

I think we're saying the same things just differently flynnibus and debating semantics.

My knee jerk reaction was why not just put a $5 bluetooth radio in the machines for us die hards and build a super rich experience. Stern obviously believes that getting an average person to download an app or signup on a website to track their games is incredibly valuable. So, they are going to jump through a a lot of hoops to make that happen including offloading all network requirements to their device. The addition of the QR scanner on the machine itself is curious though because in a morning it feels like we've already come up with 2-3 software only solutions already that seem comparable. The most curious use case they are supporting is the not needing a smart phone. I envy the people that don't need have a smart phone but that 1 use case seems to be the hard one to overcome without the need to get the user to identify their profile, in this case with a QR code.

Yeah, as we've talked all this through the decision makes a lot of sense. They want the average person to create an account and a QR code is the least friction. As much as I'd like to believe that bluetooth could work here the last thing any player would want on location is to deal with pairing. Although, bluetooth 5 theoretically does have better non-pairing functions but then you run into only newer phones supporting bluetooth 5 and no support for people without phones. Agree on the NFC, god that tech is just an absolute disaster for anything real.

Apologies to Stern, my knee jerk reaction on the use of QR reader was dead wrong. Hoping this turns out amazing and we look back in a couple of years and can't even remember playing without connectivity. I look forward to printing out my profile's QR code and dropping quarters.

Think this will come with an open API? I know scorbit had that on their backlog.

Was wondering the same thing. It would be great if there was an API.

In GG we trust.

Privacy policy for IC was actually better than I thought it'd be. I was expecting clauses for selling your data straight up but that's not in the privacy policy yet. Two biggest red flags were geolocation collection and sharing your data for joint promotions. Geolocation is weird because they already know the location of the game so why track the player?

The only thing I can think of is that the auth token is shared with their store. So, if it was compromised, someone could get payment info.

That and even the most innocuous messages can be a security vulnerability. It's too easy to accidentally expose inner workings.

The account probably has a birthdate under 13.

In the United States, you cannot collect personal data for anyone under 13 without the parent's permission because of the COPPA law. In the EU, GDPR protects personal data of children under 13-16 without parental permission.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_Online_Privacy_Protection_Act

https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/reform/rights-citizens/how-my-personal-data-protected/can-personal-data-about-children-be-collected_en

The latest firmware calls api.sternpinball.io when booting regardless of setting 55. I pulled a pcap before any of the new videos started being downloaded, so not sure if the ads are coming from their cdn or their API domain. Hopefully, the former so when they get ad blocked, the rest of insider connect still works.

Per the Gomez & Elwin video for Jaws, 4:10 mark, you "connect with your chums and collect shark teeth to unlock special modes."

Or just use median and not mean then the Eric Stones of the world would need to play non-stop to really change the outcome of the population.

Yeah, since they are already batch processing all of this anyway, you might as well use percentile or 50th percentile (median). That solves the Eric Stone problem.

They still need a way to normalize the games though to remove the BM66 skew. That's a hard problem. You can use a weighted average per game but the leaderboard becomes a head scratcher that would require a decoder ring.