Sony bought the entire Beatles catalog from Jackson’s estate in 2016 so stern probably licensed with Sony. However McCartney bought the catalog back this year after years of trying so i guess the license for the pin is now with McCartney.

If I had to pick just five songs to represent the Beatlemania era it would be:

She Loves You
I Want To Hold Your Hand
All My Loving
A Hard Days Night
Twist and Shout (or Please Please Me since Twist and Shout wasn't originally a Beatles song although their version is much better)

Can't Buy Me Love could be swapped in there too.

Video games can have massive budgets and the ability to spread costs over millions of units instead of thousands. Many video game production budgets rival or exceed that of feature films. GTA 5 had a budget of over 250 million:

https://wccftech.com/gta-v-most-expensive-video-game-history/

This statement explains it all, sub par license rights. No way Joe paid any where near a million dollars for these rights. I was wondering why they would not do Yellow Submarine, and this explains it all-thanks for the clarification.

I am torn on this whole title. One part of me wants to think it is cool and a refreshing change and the other half of me is soured by the choice to offer overpriced machines to the public. I like the machine but I hate their sales tactics.

Starting to think Ka-pow/Stern partnership is not good for the long term and overall health of this hobby(Wonder what Gary's father would think about this tactic? Is it all about the money nowadays?)

McFarlane Toys comes to mind. Many collectable / props companies do this today. Heck, Hallmark does this. From a business standpoint it doesn't matter if the item maintains value and has a strong secondary market.what matter is creating a precived value.

When UperDeck saturated the baseball card market, they profited greatly from the perception that baseball cards were collectibles. In turn they killed the value of those collectibles, but probably had a good run.

Do we know how many songs are included in the pin?

No.

You're talking about what I'm talking about. You can't make a sustained collectable market when you set out to make a collectable market. It can be great for Ty corp. selling beanie babies, but it seldom works out for the people buying them.

The only restriction they likely faced on that front was how much they were willing to pay, whilst maintaining some kind of continuity in the machine.

They could definitely pay more than the rumoured $1-2M total license cost and still make huge profits. But why do it when they can get away with less?

I guess it's obvious now that all Ka-pow machines will be reskins
It's the lowest cost path to market when Ka-pow and stern both have to make money off the machines

Maiden was the first fully original layout for a while. All the others were partly recycled, not just Ka-Pow.

The Beatles are Coming!! What we know and rumors about the upcoming Beatles PINBALL machine:

- Timeline
- Availability
- Features
- Pricing Rumors

https://thisweekinpinball.com/the-beatles-are-coming/

Despite being let down, I still want to play it.

Admittedly, I don’t know how pinball licensing works, but it strikes me a bit as unlogical that having a few more songs increases the cost of the license. Unless it is connected with the per play fees going on ASCAP or GEMA or similar, but even then the fewer the songs in the game, the more often the game will play a given song.

But I would also think that the main goal of the brand would be to ensure that the pinball game does not damage the brand. Ideally it should have an advertising effect. The Beatles is such an enormous business- why would they haggle over how many and which songs?

that's not true at all. Real superfans are sick of the "hits" and would likely be intrigued by this setlist!

Just go to the Stones forum any tour and read post after post of people whining about hearing Brown Sugar again.

I personally didn't even know the song It Won't Be Long. And now I do! It's great!

I was talking about the era mixing and having someone who doesn't understand the full history of the band designing a "collectors item"...

And with the Beatles, 70% of what they wrote are the "Hits". If you're sick of the Beatles hits, you're sick of the Beatles.

True!

I'll just point out one more time that like many, many things about this game we don't actually know what songs will be in the game. Iron Maiden has 6 song modes but another 6 or so songs in the game that aren't written on the playfield.

Sword and ramp designs are recycled. Also, it came after Maiden.

Can’t wait for more info to be released, only thing bugging me is only 5 known songs at the moment. If there are say 3-5 more that are selectable at game start I’d be 100% good with it!

Beatles will be at Pincinnati! (They should be available in time) Get your tickets now to check it out!

www.pincinnati.com

Well I am out, so I might as well get the hell out of this thread. I am better off spending my time looking for some affordable used Sterns that are under-rated. I still need to check out BBH, Sopranos, Monopoly, Aerosmith, Mustang, etc. So many good, affordable classics. Can't waste another minute of my time on this bs.

For everyone who gets suckered into this one-enjoy it and if it makes you happy-that is all that counts. I am a man of principle and sorry but this is nothing but a cash grab. I'm out, now get me out of here.

Get me out of here.gif

Great Pitch.jpg

Beatles Rock Band had EA money behind it which makes our little pinball hobby look like the change in your couch cushions. Also of note the game wasn't considered a success in the end though a lot of that had to do with the plastic guitar game genre dying out.

My dreams of a, 'Revolution #9' multiball are dashed.

The trick is to license all the songs from the same source.

Did you ever notice that movies like GOTG only use songs from a single companies catalog?

Or did you ever notice that at "greatest hits" album will have a live version of the band's biggest hit? That's often because the artist was with a different label at that time in their career, and it would cost too much money to get tracks from 2 different corps.

You know it's a turd when Stern disables the comments on its own YouTube video.....
You say Hello and I say Goodbye

I don't know about you guys but I am waiting for the Monkees Vault edition to come out. They were a huge influence on the Beatles.

monkees (resized).jpg

I second a Monkees pin!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Plus you have all the video from the TV show for the LCD monitor!!!!!

More of a white album guy.

If nothing from that album is on this game it's going to be a failure in my mind...

The Monkees were after the Beatles. "Dumb and Dumber" reference?

joke (resized).jpg

Already amended my post.

Although I do wonder if the TV Monkees stuff influenced what the Beatles did in video content. I would have to go back and research dates. I am not sure about the chronology of all that.

Based on Joe’s last interview it sounds like this is his final Kapow “boutique” pin

That would be fine by me.
I don't know why Stern does not do what Deeproot says they are going to do and price each game differently based on costs rather than nickel and dime parts out of each game. I believe there would be more satisfied customers that way.

you cant even find the video on their youtube page or a youtube search, its unlisted now (they did this after a few hours). you have to find a link to it from when it was listed lol

edit: before they disabled comments it had about triple the thumbs downs as ups lol

You don't price your product based on costs... costs dictate the minimums you must cover... not what you sell at. You price your product based on how you market it... ensuring you can cover costs and expected margins.

Until deeproot is transparent on what they are actually building - you shouldn't use them as any landmark on successful product strategies.

$250 million in sales vs $20-$25 million in sales. 10x or more the budget.

The movie? Yes. The pin, not so much. Lots of reused ideas from prior pins.

If you want to get reductive, there are very few pins that don't recycle ideas. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Like Metallica and GotG are extremely similar, but they're both good games.

Like even with The Beatles, yes it's Seawitch with some tweaks, but it's still pretty different than anything Stern has made in years. Seawitch is a good game and there are some interesting changes for The Beatles.

I think Deadpool is a mediocre game, but it's not because it reused the sword ramp from LOTR (that's a cool ramp!)

Very surprised there isn't an owners thread yet.. I wonder why?

Easy on $250 million in sales, Beatles Rockband was not really considered a success. Hammonix's say life time it got to 3 million in sales but I think that number is drastically inflated. It had 1.9 million by the end of 2009, no idea how they ever sold another million after that. They probably pulled 100 million in revenue. You are very correct though it's dev budget was probable 25-50 million probably 25 times what Stern will spend. Plus Harmonix payed licensing on top of that. Beatles Rockband was basically the death of the entire music gaming genre, many considered it a flop. I was very surprised Stern gambled on it. I was at EA at the time (still am) and everyone was so hyped for it, expected it to be a monster hit, Rockband was killing it at the time. It barely crawled its way to profitability.

Regardless of what the actual vs inflated numbers were (I hated BRB), the POINT was only that BRB had a MUCH larger budget than B-itch, and therefore a LOT more music.

Obviously I did not mean based on costs alone. My statement was meant to be broad not narrow. I just meant that I would like to see the games each be priced individually rather than forcing designers to limit the BOM to a particular number.

If one designer thinks they have a great design that could be sold for $6000 and another designer has a great design that could be sold for $8000 (obviously factoring in the businesses profit demands), then let them build them that way.

Easy on calling GotG a good game. It's not in the same universe as Metallica. Layout, I'll give you that. The game? Not even close. GotG is still a mess, and will probably be an X-Men casuality, meaning even if they DO eventually make it a good game, it will forever be tainted with the stink of the first year out when it sucked balls.

And I was just replying to the post that called Cesspool original. It's not. Clunky pin (it's a Gomez!) with a number of recycled ideas.

Sometimes they would record the "same song" but with totally different meanings.

Pleasant Valley Sunday and Penny Lane came out at the same time and are both the same theme; observations about the simple town around them.

While the Beatles are idealistic, the Monkees are cynical under a saccharine sweet glaze.

This is counter to most pricing and business thinking. You don't want to price individual items in the same family based on their ACTUAL value... all you do is end up cutting out your margin you are normally expecting to pickup across the board. You use pricing to distinguish what you WANT someone to think the value is. Normally there is a competitive angle there too.. but that piece is less 1 : 1 in the pinball market today.

I'm sure Stern is setting their BOM based on what they think the market will tolerate for the product. Benefits for 'more profits' come from volume. Raising the BOM is a risk... because any failure will be that much more of an impact. Given Gary's accounting background... you can see how they would easily follow this line of thinking. You have a target selling price... build the best you can within that.. because the market may not like your 'no limits' pin and we've lost even MORE money on that flop.. vs a flop that stuck to the target costs.

It just seems like just about every successful item that sells has different options at different price points. From paper products to cell phones to cars, they all have competing of different priced products (different models) from the same manufacturers.

I agree Stern shoots themselves in the foot with pinheads and collectors when they ship before the code is feature complete, yet it's dumb to let old software bring your opinion down on the machine as it exists today. Batman 66 was shit when it came out and now it's one of the best Stern games. GotG was boring when it came out, and now it's a solid game.