I don't really have any more to share about Wes. I believe he has good intentions here. I'm sure running a successful arcade and pinball manufacturing company is his goal. I'm sure he would be happy to meet with anyone who has questions at the Expo. It's very clear to me they have no plans on scamming anyone. They will need more capital and lots of help to build this machine. I can sympathize with their optimism. As for myself, I value relationships over money and possessions and I am very open-minded. If you get in on a pre-order, it's a gamble with any company. I made it clear that if you can't afford to lose all the money you put in, don't do it. They may fail but if you tell me I can't do something I set my mind to, you'll be watching me do it. Let's hope the scepticism ignites a fire in these men and they prove all the doubters wrong.

wow.. it funded! so after taxes, and the bots that dont pony up the money.. not much left for building pins.

good luck to the team, hope you can follow through and build what you set out to do!

Probably obvious, but two things that probably explain why they used a KS failsafe service - Friends and family who are not on pinside, and who aren't savvy enough to spot the shills on KS were probably there to help kick in some $$ at the end to help reach the goal.

Lastly, and probably the main reason to ride out the KS sham even with a persentage of money lost- they have now been branded as being "Successful" on Kickstarter, which can be very useful for showing market interest to gain investment $$/ investors.

Again, I'm flabbergasted that they used these tactics on a KS with such a low number of backers, but I'm certain this kind of thing happens pretty frequently, just usually not as obvious.

Some very wise words right there!

I don't think it would be hard to find enough pinside members to pony up $100,000 to speculate on a wanna be pinball manufacturer. There are a lot of successful and wealthy folks here as members that can gamble on $8,000 and if they lose it, not a big deal. There are also folks like me who plan to own a few machines and would rather wait on people owning their 2nd Vonnie D Pinball before looking into owning their own Vonnie D Pin.

You don't become successful and wealthy by making dumb decisions.

A lot of people have become successful and wealthy due to dumb luck. My point wasnt about the rise from middle to upper middle or upper class though. It was that some simply have more money and can afford to lose it. I paid $4870 for a NIB IMVE but with my budget i dont have $8,000 to drop on a speculative pin project. I can tell you there are enough members here to come up with $100,000.

fishy.png

My point while a few get lucky most are smart. And by smart I mean smart enough not to play this game.

Edit: posted in wrong thread

So they "bot" $90k funds to get $10k in real funds?

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$100k is only about 12 $8000 machines (with some deficits made up by those LE and LLE models and the smaller categories), so it's not unreasonable to assume they could sell that many presales, but what is nuts is how they went about it. Unlike the other boutiques, who might be able to get at least that many sign ups over time, by going through kickstarter, they were getting 100% of the money up front instead of on a refundable payment schedule. I think if you ask the other boutiques how that kind of proposition would go down with the moneybags pinside collectors you are describing, you might get a weary laugh.

Unlike your $4870 you spent on a machine you can see and know will arrive in a few months at most, asking $8000 upfront for a machine like this that only exists in promises from people who we had little reason to believe in the first place is a very different proposition. Add to that the context of this project coming at the tail end of a preorder era with tons of broken promises and missed deadlines where collector enthusiasm and patience is wearing thin, and you have an even less likely scenario. Add to that the abysmal PR campaign these guys ran, and all the continual digging displayed in this thread, and I am left with a ton of skepticism. I think those presales would have to come from mostly outside the pinside community, which is possible considering the wider audience a kickstarter staff pick gets. But still, that much money showing that little with that demo video? Still doesn't add up.

Even if this is 100% legit despite ALL the evidence we have seen, there is still the total lack of logic that they can actually create that many games and ramp up actual production on just that presales cash. So even if they get all that money, it's still highly unlikely they get to shipping games without additional capital.

Seriously, there are plenty of other projects out there that are much more fleshed out with none of the stink and suspicion on them, who have refundable payment plans who would absolutely benefit from this kind of blind faith investment. If somehow this is legit and these guys sucked $100k out of the market that could have supported hese other projects, then I hope to god they can figure out how to actually deliver those games. In some ways, a bot-scam to milk a fraction of that money might be preferable as it limits the damage, but it would do serious damage to the new pin market. Maybe we are all wrong and we will eat our words when games actually ship, but seeing as how this forum is their primary audience, they have a lot of work to do if they hope to sell many more that those initial pre-orders.

One tip, you might actually look up who the people you are lashing out against are before speaking.

Screen Shot 2014-07-27 at 1.15.34 PM.png
This guy back the game! Does he look familiar? I know I have seen this guy....Oh yeah!

Screen Shot 2014-07-27 at 1.16.29 PM.png
PUPPET SHOWMAN!

It's called "shill". At least the bots won't be disappointed!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2065029795/pinball-gremlins-pinball-machine

This would be blatant stupidity on Kickstarter if true. Christ on a cracker!

That sums up sooo much anymore. I think you just gave me a new daily saying.

I might be beating a dead horse here (*) but if you want to keep some sympathy among the pinsiders who were not initially hostile, try avoiding accusing others of mischief. Especially when talking about the guy who designed fantastic rulesets for several games.

(*) I left pinside for 48+ hours... with a good excuse : I was travelling to participate to a pin tournament
Came back with 100+ posts to read on that thread... which was great: drama, suspense, deception, suspicion... best reading I had since ages!

After fees and taxes how much will Vonnie D pinball actually receive? 70k? 60K? After they pay themselves a salary I'd be interested to know how much actually will be left for the creation of the game. The money raised through this KS seems like a drop in the bucket compared to what they will need to create the games already spoken for in the KS.

Custom plastic molds alone are what, $15k+? I really don't see how $100k is going to get a machine made... I don't have any experience in the area, but I would think R&D for modern pins is in the $1m++ range.

What are they using to run the game? Proc?

An old NES sitting in Vonnie's garage. They've also hacked the gamepad to interact with the flipper buttons.

Not sure that is going to support what they have suggested they are doing.

According to their Kickstarter, they have (or intend to make) proprietary boards. Given that no one on their team appears to be an electrical engineer, though, I kind of doubt they're making custom boards.

I thought I read somewhere that they are building their own hardware.

_{Post edited by Wolfmarsh: pinlynx beat me by 4 seconds.}

I'm doing my own hardware for Spaceballs, and I hope they aren't underestimating that effort. I've probably got a couple hundred or more hours into the controller design at this point. The ONLY reason I didn't go with P-ROC is because I wanted to do it for fun and I want to release all of the tech for free to the public.

If I were a company on a timeline, it would be silly not to use one of the existing platforms (PinHeck, P-ROC, FAST, etc..)

You know, this opens a whole can of worms with the entire KS system. If they are not diligent at avoiding these shills/bots, they are almost complicit, because they stand to benefit from more successful campaigns and more action on their system, as opposed to projects languishing with low support and success.

I now will be cynical about every KS I look at.... for good reason, until KS can demonstrate to me they are serious about avoiding these issues.

Depends on the size. Even if you're going aluminum mold vs steel, you're still looking at easily $5-$10k even for a typical sized toy (and that's with borrowing a mold base). Of course if you REALLY want to go budget you can build an RTV mold, but it's only good for about 25 shots before it begins to break down. Another cheap option would be to thermoform objects (like ramps), but that would be pretty limiting in what you can build. Really comes down to how many they intend to build I suppose.

P-ROC was mentioned in the video, I think. Could only stomach watching that once so could be wrong

Should be plenty.

I asked on their FB page and they said "Our game is being designed to run on an off the shelf BeagleBone Black computer with a proprietary board designed by Pinball Controllers, the people behind P-Roc."

Why wouldn't they just use a P-ROC? Or is Pinball Controllers building them a special aux board or something like that?

The "custom" board is most likely a standard P-ROC board manufactured to their specifications. They [pinballcontrollers] can unpopluate any connectors not used and can even custom screen a company's logo on the board to make it appear "proprietary".
That is my understanding, but they could chime in with the real answer.

This is correct. Our board will not have any connections we do not use, as a cost saving measure and a way to make the machine easier to work on. Any standard P-Roc board could be used to replace ours however.

The board is simply a less populated, but branded P-Roc, built to our specs. All P-Roc boards can replace a VDP P-Roc board, but a VDP P-Roc board can not replace a P-Roc board in another machine.

How is building a re-designed board cheaper than using a COTS part? Electrical components are cheap, time/labor to rework things are not. The time and effort spent making it idiot proof is futile, they will just make better idiots.

Considering they plastered their name on everything else, I would assume that is the case here... You'd be amazed how many people just want boards with their names silkscreened on them...

Besides, having a board reworked just to have only the connectors you need is an idiotic thing to do if you're looking to build the "most innovative pinball ever" (add other buzzwords and marketing hype..) That means that the second you want to expand, you have to re-tool and re-engineer parts of your platform that should really be consistent across multiple games if possible. Thankfully if they're adopting other aspects of the P-ROC platform, its all serialized and they can do that pretty easily... Don't rearchitect the board, just don't populate the connectors you don't need.

Also, having ports and connectors on the board that go unused don't really lead to ease of use and servicability... just look at laptops and PC motherboards... several unused connectors and you see the masses getting by just fine.

Then again, I'm just a technologist. I wish all new pinball ventures the best of luck

It generally isn't. Can't imagine doing it only to strip off unused stuff.. especially just connectors. Though, maybe at the build volumes of P-ROC it isn't quite getting economies of scale discounts on the components anyway.

It would not likely be removing connectors. Most likely it would be not populating certain MOSFETs that would be going unused. Ditching a few MOSFETs could shave a few dollars off a completed board.

Aaron
FAST Pinball

Yes.. so shave a few dollars per board, vs cost of removing parts (IE custom board). Unless it's really a matter of an operator pushing a few buttons to delete components, I don't see the sense in it (especially in the grand scheme of things, such as $5 compared to a $6,000 pinball machine).

One company I worked for built a board for the highest output (15 amps), but they needed to create 3 other boards (12A, 10A, 6A). Did we spin 4 separate boards? Nope, it was cheaper to make one board that ran 15A, and reprogram the lower ones to run at lower outputs.

I may be in the minority here, but imo every $5 shaved off a BoM counts...

that's fine. i'm just surprised that custom-building a board in low volume is cheaper than buying the standard mass-produced version, even if the custom one is minus a few components. seems like economies of scale, not to mention design and testing time, would more than offset the cost of a bit of hardware. i'm no expert, though.

:: shrug :: I have no idea. Whatever works for them works I suppose.

yeah, i'm sure they don't need pinside micromanaging their engineering decisions.

$5 off a BOM is nothing at the volumes VD pinball is promising. It's certainly not worth the custom production runs and management the of the new design at your vendor. Even Upchurch just said that you will be able to replace their custom design with a standard P-ROC.

This is a sales decision so they can try to create artificial product differentiation. And thus another poor management decision, imho. I'm pretty sure the cost savings could be achieved through volume if it wasn't some sort of pipe dream.

Vonnie, please post a screenshot of the funding when it goes through. You can black out any sensitive info.

/\ Agreed.. I mean I'm not an investor, so I shouldn't really care what Vonnie D does, but being a product designer by trade I know that if you want to justify cost savings, it better either be high volume, or if it's low volume there better be a good reason to do so (high cost savings, necessary change for design).

Of course this is all hearsay at this point, I'm sure the prototypes will be off-the-shelf parts. It would be dumb to spin boards now before the design is done, then realize later you're out of channels and you either have to scrap boards, or compromise the design.

Yeah, $5 buys a puppet video!

Yeah, I'm looking at this from a designer/project manager standpoint. Sure the BoM is less costly, but you are adding touch costs that likely far exceed the savings in the BoM.

If you are going to change anything, make the board the same, but make it the VD company color.

Is there a universal color for a VD?

Why don't you check out some photos and tell us. Actually, I don't want to know.

With through-hole parts like the MOSFETs I mentioned, leaving a few positions unpopulated only means that connecting a driver to that pin position would do nothing. From a hardware integrity standpoint it is the same as the pin never being used.

While $5 off of $6,000 isn't much, $5 off of a $50 bill of materials is significant. I think it is great that Gerry would be willing to do this. Every dollar counts. We intend to do the same on bulk orders to, as well as offer custom PCB designs when the customer desires. Sometimes a custom form factor allows for a dramatic improvement in build time and the one time expense of a custom design is worth it.

Sweating the $5 here and there is smart. This stuff adds up quickly.

Aaron
FAST Pinball

_{Post edited by fastpinball: They are MOSFETs not MOSTFETs Aaron! Geez!}