Wow. It took me three evenings to read this thread. I may need to take a few days to recover before I start wading farther back into JPop lore.
After all the bluster, Deeproot's latest interview is really puzzling.
Other manufacturers' near-term strategies seem pretty clear:
- Stern claims to have 13 different games in production right now. If there's a game you're prepared to pay NIB prices for, Stern is probably selling it.
- JJP likewise has pretty much their full lineup available in one form or another, although they may have largely saturated the market for these pins.
- Spooky: 'We have Rick & Morty. Please send us money at your earliest convenience.'
- American Pinball: 'You don't want Rick & Morty. What you want is Hot Wheels. What we want is your money.'
Normally, when you've only announced one specific product, the smart move would be to copy Spooky and AP -- attempt to market the living daylights out of that product. Instead Deeproot seems to be diving headlong into the Osborne effect, downplaying RAZA in favor of... what, exactly? Some terribly exciting future product which can't yet be discussed because... why, exactly?
It's a strategy that makes utterly no sense if the company is actually trying to make a near-to-mid-term business out of selling pinball machines. It only makes sense when I think about it as being targeted to investors, not players. Someone mentioned this earlier in the thread (and I'm sorry I'm not giving you credit, but I'm not wading through this thing again): the moment you start to act like you're actually trying to make money, your investors immediately start grading you based on how well you're doing it. So if DR predicts that sales of RAZA will be tepid, it makes an odd sort of corporate sense to say 'no, no, this doesn't count, this is just a test, what you really want is the shiny machine behind the curtain.'
Of course, that's a dubious long-term strategy, because they do eventually need to earn money, and that has to be done by selling people the machines they have rather than the machines they wish they will eventually have. But it's also true that sometimes your long-term strategy has to be 'Survive long enough to worry about having a long-term strategy.'
Midlothian, TX
