(Topic ID: 327919)

Stern Leadership Changes

By CrazyLevi

1 year ago


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  • 247 posts
  • 103 Pinsiders participating
  • Latest reply 11 months ago by Bmad21
  • Topic is favorited by 16 Pinsiders

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    -6
    #88 1 year ago
    Quoted from ray-dude:

    One hell of a run for Gary. Congratulations to him and all he's done for the industry over decades

    You mean make bland fan layouts and cookie cut layouts apealing. Python would trash Stern for that.

    -6
    #93 1 year ago
    Quoted from CrazyLevi:

    Python ran a pinball company and it was out of business in two years.
    If Pinside ran Stern they’d be tits up in a week!!

    Sterns model is simply fueled by "whats trendy" gottlieb did that on some baises but on the other hand Stern has hugged the carbon copy design method so that it can splash a theme on it and call it a day.

    Its the same layout that will get laid out with a theme thats gonna get dated quickly. Lic. Themes date a game quicker.

    Take a band pin metallica. Once the remaining orginal members of metalica yeet it over thats it that era it is done and yet Stern has clinged on the idea of nostalgia makes money.

    Gottlieb creatativity needs to return and it starts when people say no to unispiring fan layouts.

    So much for the advancement of the hobby witg Stern banking and managing to sell the idea of the same fan layout with nothing else with liscence art work alover it.

    #165 1 year ago

    Its the belief stern cannot do wrong. Im going to say it (this forum is going to loose their minds) Cary Hardy was wrong about layout aspects.

    It should not be newb thing to look at the likeness of the layouts.

    And to the point of profit here.

    That is what pinball has alway been about, making operators money. The main group of people that the big four were making for was a machine to put on location and make money.

    Show me a flyer that did not have the point of making money.

    #189 1 year ago
    Quoted from underlord:

    Ouch. Is that guy Neil still kicking?
    Geez I’d bet he’s feeling the fool forever, speaking of idiotic CEO’s.

    Did you listen to the williams system 2000 podcast from silverball chron? Give the guy a break.

    -1
    #198 1 year ago
    Quoted from underlord:

    Nope. Enlighten please…

    WMS was in a heap with pinball. Neal Nicastro saw the writing on the wall.

    Let me break it to you that we live in a world were shockingly yes run on money. Neal saw fit to let them go to give it a try with pinball 2000 while the pinball division was being funded by its gambling cousin, slots.

    on the other hand, had Williams not purchased Bally and let them die off then it would have saved their rear end but no, williams go too big and they failed in the pinball market.

    Jpop was the designer of starwars had he listened to gomez and lawor he wouldnt crashed the ship.

    Neal was a buisness man and sometimes you have to balence the books and order to keep WMS afloat he had to trim the tree and the most sense to do it where they were loosing money and that was pinball.

    Listen up williams fanboys and cultests williams stepped on their own rakes but they cant unglue thrmselves from their rear to see the choices that killed them.

    They got too big and it crashed them, the only thing that kept Bally alive was just a name on a pinball machine.

    Neal was the only one that kept the WMS name from sinking but this hobby were so drunk on williams pinball they cant see straight and the hobby crucified the guy that had to make that choice.

    At the end of the day the books and the acountants have the final say in all things pinball including today.

    Stern and williams produced unispiring fans layouts with themes on them and you guys lap it up like its the greatest thing in on the planets.

    The only other company Gottlieb did get creative but the community was cruel and cold as ice and killed them so they could have godesses. but now she's gone the hobby is left with Stern, no matter how much crap layouts stern throws onto a playfeild all they need to do is wave a theme and everyone just ask "how much" Stern could put a pop bumper with two flippers with a paid license and someone would sink thousands into that.

    3 months later
    -3
    #245 11 months ago
    Quoted from Compy:

    I respect this line of thinking and see where you're coming from. The part that many people forget was that WMS was a publicly traded company. Neil had an obligation to the board and the shareholders to make decisions in the best interests of the company. Unfortunately that meant lopping off the pinball division. Now, the lack of execution on the sale of the IP to some other functioning entity is beyond me. frobozz I believe said it best that perhaps you don't want to sell it to someone (like Stern) that makes a killing off of it, making you look like an idiot to your shareholders.

    At the time Pinball 2000 was being designed, they had to get the entire system out the door in 18 months. You had design guys like Andy Eloff who were used to designing systems with ROM chips. This was at a time when spinning rust was expensive, and forget about Flash. They could only afford that for the developer prism cards. If they were worried about failure in the field (since most of the embedded space was still on ROM chips at the time) and Tom Uban could get XINA into a few megs of space, ROMs were most definitely the lowest cost option in terms of BOM, design time and field support.
    Had they been given more time, things like Compact Flash would've been used. Motherboards with integrated sound would've been used compared to the Cyrix based ones that were used in set top boxes, so you could ditch the DCS hardware, which eliminates the entire PRISM card. Nowadays there are enough embedded reference designs to be able to spin up a system on basic commodity hardware and have it be relatively fault tolerant.
    They just weren't given enough time, but having looked through that system in depth the past 10 years, they really did a fantastic job with the time and talent they had.

    They got to big and failed. They should have left bally in the dust, a gottlieb bally merger would have been more appropriate.

    But Williams thought they were bullet proof and bought bally. Never-mind midway was on a spending spree too when got picked up by Williams.

    It was Williams < Midway < Bally

    In short Williams got too big and spread too thin and add John Pop to the mix and then you have a recipe for bankruptcy.

    Williams didn't trim the tree to save the division they paid for it.

    -3
    #247 11 months ago
    Quoted from rotordave:

    You might wanna rethink that.
    They bought Bally around 1989.
    Between 1989 and 1999 they made a shit ton of money.
    It was the downturn in arcade machines across the board that made the pinball operation unprofitable. They had a bunch of people on Addams Family wages and now they’re hitting Champion Pub sales numbers.
    People want to vilify the boss guy - but it’s his job to make the shareholders money, at the end of the day.
    rd

    And where is Williams pinball division today, nada?

    WMS goofed big time. Nobody wants to admit that in this hobby. If you read back an earlier post I defended Neil N.

    But no, Williams was a victim of their own success and got too blind and big until it was too late again Bally should have died in the late 80s.

    But no, the market got saturated and Gottlieb got the raw stenchy deal out of it, until Williams pinball kicked the bucket three years later.

    Everyone wanted Williams but everything else got sacrificed to have it but it was short lived and they have but copy and paste sterns with a FOMO theme.

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