Quoted from Rarehero:
Yes I have. I’ve repeated myself enough times. If you chose to ignore the very real & logical reasons why it will never happen, that’s on you and your selective reading.
If you mean repeating crap like your last list... yes, you haven’t made any real arguments
“ No one wants to pay for pinball code updates when the game already cost $6k-$15k. At that price, you’ve paid for all future support”
— this is an opinion where you are projecting your brief onto everyone without looking at the realities of the market. People paid full price for other things, and still buy upgrades. They still pay full price for their games, and still pay stern for cosmetic upgrades like art blades, armor, etc. this “they already paid and wont pay again” has been debunked by actual practice over and over again... both inside and outside of pinball.
“Jesus, they can barely finish games within 2-3 years of release”
— you’re comparing a mindset for SUPPORT to how they would address creating content to SELL. They are different things and you’d staff them differently when its a direct revenue generator. You’re look at an apple and projecting how the orange would taste.
“There’s no market logic in pinball that makes any sense to introduce paid upgrades.”
— except the market that exists today and is EXPLODING right now... where people are paying stern and every tom dick n harry for even cosmetic upgrades.. let alone functional, game play adding ones.
“They don’t have the resources”
— they didn’t have the resources to do high res art and video before either. And know what... it changed when they wanted it to! Again, don’t pigeon hole yourself because of how they are now verse where they could be if they wanted to be.
“The user base isn’t there to justify it”
— there is a question of attach rates and how much pricing needs to be to make it worth your while.. but the user base is there. As proven everyday as mod makers are falling outta trees left and right because the market IS there. Pinball people are paying for their games, their apps, their digital rentals, their streaming, their table packs, their mods... heck even podcasts and twitch streams. This idea of a coal->diamond tightass is not the center of the market anymore.
“The licenses will be expired by the time they could get around to it”
— the licenses agreements are whatever they chose to make them. How is pinball this magically industry that somehow Licensed constrained verse every other industry? Would it cost more? Maybe... but again, these are revenue generating projects... it’s a cost you account for.
You aren’t making sound arguments against it...
Personally I don’t see it on Stern’s near term roadmap not because it can’t be done, or because it wouldn’t work... but because Stern is too risk adverse and too set in their ways.
Literally... every new revenue stream or innovation Stern has gotten into in the last few years is something other people had already proven and stern was just catching up not to be a dinosaur. Merchandise, accessories, “fan clubs”, high def video, modular component architecture, off the shelf real time os, etc etc etc. stern still can get their online functionality to market while the rest of the arcade segment was doing it over a decade ago...
The only real risk they’ve taken is the repeated attempts at finding the pro-sumer pinball machine in ThePin.
DLC isn’t unachievable with pinball - Stern is just notbold enough to lead.