This product’s success comes down to selling price. If the game is priced at $10k like Beatles gold, it will sell badly and the amount of complaining will become unbearable. If it costs $2k, I would gamble and buy one and am guessing many other pinball collectors would too. There would be lots of comparisons made to the pro, but the atmosphere on Pinside will be chillaxed and more accepting.
In reality this pseudo-pin will only be available through Costco, not current distributors and it will cost exactly ... $4,500. That is too much for a machine that isn’t quite a pro and it will fail imo. The obvious goal is to price it at the sweet spot. With Deeproot’s fully featured games rumored to be $5k and seeing this is less pin, i believe the price needs to be under $3k to reach masses and tap into the unserved community.
While the game will cost Stern less than $2k to make, they need/expect to earn $2k per game in order to bother making them. Simple accounting shows us $2k Stern cost plus $2k Stern profit plus $500 Costco/distributor profit equals a pricetag I don’t wanna see. We’ll know for sure in four hours.