Ouch.

My thoughts:

Game definitely can be fun, but JJP is attempting to set a new high bar for price and the value doesn't seem to be there. This likely would have been a hit at Stern pricing.

Toy Story 4 is an odd license. I bet if we looked at all Toy Story posts on pinside, no one asked for a game dedicated to movie #4.

Video pinball as a toy... not feeling that.

This whole idea of "broadening" pinball to families - we've seen this tried time and again - it never works. The pinball market is firmly established. Stern finally figured this out, and has it dialed in (no pun intended).

This title will sell, but it won't be a mega hit. For those wanting JJP to release 2 titles a year, maybe this is good news.

This has never proven to be a successful formula. The market is always pinheads who ALSO love the theme. And the remaining operators who buy mostly everything.

Fine, someone can point me to a Mustang owner who bought the pinball, or a doctor somewhere who love KISS, but those are outliers. You can't build a manufacturing business around that.

What cracked me up most about that video was how uncomfortable the "dad" was putting his hand on the girl's shoulder. It's like "please don't report me" while he was doing it, lol.

The "follow through" sales is a big assumption. If most of the initial orders went to their distributors, then those distributors need to sell their games before ordering more.

I find it interesting as well how much JJP is trumpeting this "news". It feels a little forced, like "The lady doth protest too much, methinks". Trying to get ahead of the story and maximize FOMO.

We'll know in a few weeks how the dust settled on this title.

Wow. Times have changed.

One compromise we have in my house which still exists now even with teenagers are the phones get surrendered in the kitchen for charging in the evening and they’re phone free for the rest of the night. We watch family TV together because they aren’t pulled away by their phones.

The Toy Story rumor has been around for so many years, is it possible it was always for the "new" movie coming, and the game was released all these years later?

Time hasn't been kind to TS4, and the release now seems odd.

I agree. These are basically "Premiums" and "LEs" but with different names (and prices).

What's amusing to me was the CE was an answer to Stern's SLE with Batman 66. However Stern has kept the SLE a special distinction only used one other time, whereas JJP has made it the new LE.

Best we've got is to compare the numbers in the Pinside owners database. It will at least paint a picture of overall trend.

That makes sense with how long there had been rumors of a TS pin coming from JJP.

He must have been made a sweet offer, since as reported he was working on James Bond for Stern. So the incentive was there to abandon that top license. I can't imagine him making the switch for anything short of "no compromise" pinball. But maybe Toy Story's soft response might change things around there.