Quoted from yancy:The. Line. Is. Everything. And I haven't seen any evidence that deerpoot has one.
I think he still has this vision that he will build a game interconnectivity framework that he can sell to the other companies and license their patent pending concepts like the cabinet features. (INSTEAD of being a pinball manufacturer) ( and things which stern and others will never pay for)
Like JPOP before him... believe if you just have great enough ideas, get it far enough people buy in, then sell the concept to someone else to complete. I think JPOP saw his peers doing designs and selling them to Stern, etc and wanted that to be him.
But this is a strategy to build an online platform you can't go in alone with... you need the business partnerships with the actual game companies and buy in to codevelop the stuff. If JJP and Stern have spent all their time building their own platforms inhouse... are they going to turn around and outlay cash and fees to another vendor to use their 'Xbox Live' equivalent?
I think someone could have sold this to the vendors before... and offer subscriptions to buyers.. but I think it might be late now, and I bet most don't want to buddy up with ol' Robert.
Should have spent his millions building the cloud service, and use his money to jump start the resource starved JJP/Stern. Offer development resources and people to them to implement the clients into their games and co-develop value added features. The biggest challenge would be likely fighting the idea of shared or common features across different companies.. and how custom to go. Then offer the service to end-users either direct or as a white label.
Scorebit is doing this model.. in a bit of a different path as they are basically a bolt-on vs integrated into the games... but that would be similar GTM concept.