The licensing topic is interesting. Farsight has said in the past that the type of licenses that modern games (implying Stern) use are far too expensive for them. Heck, they had to have Kickstarters for 20-year-old movie and TV show licenses. If Stern rolls a digital recreation license into their initial agreement when doing a new pin, then I could see this working.

Seems like it would make recent pins like Star Trek, X-Men, etc. hard to do. I wonder if they'll be able to do Metallica. Metallica seemed pretty loose with restrictions and mostly into it for the love of the game rather than to make money.

Overall I'm curious if their strategy is geared towards out-of-production releases, or simultaneous releases with new tables as an advertising tool.

Also, the multiple app thing sounds annoying. This better come to PC and not just mobile as well.

Anything is feasible given enough time and money, but I don't think you're quite being realistic.

You are talking about 4 different platforms / app stores run by 4 different companies. If you want to have your software distributed on their platform, you play by their rules and go through them. They handle accounts, payments, authorizations, distribution, etc. It would be a large, complicated undertaking for Farsight to somehow tie all of these disparate systems and user accounts together. I don't know exactly how these APIs work, but it seems like they'd be doubling up on a lot of the same work - work that is usually saved by using an existing platform in the first place.

Zen Studios has said the same thing. They fully support any and all cross-buy type initiatives (PS3 to Vita, etc.) within the same ecosystem, but it's just not realistic to have anything that crosses ecosystems like you are describing. We aren't talking about EA or Ubisoft here.

You act like Farsight has all this in place, then some suit said, "Nah...let's just make those suckers pay multiple times".

If Farsight was distributing everything themselves through their own website or something and you paid and downloaded it directly though them and every version of the game used the same user accounts, it would be different. If that were the case and they made you buy, say, each table on the Mac version and PC version separately, then I would agree and call it greed.

What "system" are you talking about? I believe your Farsight user account is only for high scores. Ownership/authorization is handled by the individual platforms, each with unique accounts that are in no way related. Completely separate systems and APIs. Steam can't authorize you to play the "Attack From Mars" DLC table on your computer because you bought the "Attack From Mars" DLC table on PSN. It has absolutely no way to know that.

Multiple people have tried to explain that there really are. I'm not being a Farsight apologist or anything; I've bought everything on Steam and would love to have access to it on iOS, too. But that's not the world we live in.