Guardians of the Galaxy has a third movie coming out sometime this year or next, so it would make perfect sense to do a run then. Maybe even with a code update to pull in some scene or character from the third movie, if Stern can swing that. Including Thor somehow would be great.

FWIW, my April build Avengers had fairly tight glass, but it loosened up without me doing anything - after ten or so removals, it almost slides down by itself now.

GOTG is the modern Stern where the premium-ness is least important. There's very little gameplay difference, just toys and cosmetics. Stern could be targeting operators to have them on hand for when the next GOTG movie releases next year. (It might seem a bit early for that. Timing on the license deal might be a factor.)

Maybe Mando's are on the line, but nobody here wants them, so that's why we aren't seeing any posts.

On "better at Pro level": also Star Wars. The premium hyperloop is just a noisy and distracting temporary ball lock. (Oh this isn't the unpopular opinions thread?)

This is correct. Your state tax form will ask for a "use tax", where you declare anything you bought from out of state that wasn't sales-taxed.

Yeah, they seem to clear out the backlog for everything they've run in 2022, besides Godzilla. Mando, Rush, AIQ are pretty readily available, Deadpool is only a bit scarcer, and Jurassic is getting there presently. Pretty sure they'll do the same with Led Zep, GOTG, SW, and probably Jurassic. It's only GZ that's the big outlier with demand they haven't been able to fill when they try.

This. Everybody thought that AIQ and Deadpool were also hopelessly backlogged going into their production runs this year, but then both turned out to be pretty well available if you hunted around a bit. A fair number of distros had them for MSRP, and plenty of flippers sold for only slightly over. It's more likely that both Jurassic and Godzilla follow that model than to keep being wild outliers. Stern is pretty good at building to demand for each model as they do it.

And SW Pro

Hyperloop haters unite

What we don't know is if it's going to be up next right away after the GZ backlog, or late in the month after the first run of the new cornerstone.

I guess so - let's assume Stern knows what they're doing. Or it might not be exactly that the home editions have high demand, it could be more like Elvira has less demand, given the price, so is a lower priority.

Exchange rate matters. AUD is currently 2/3 of USD, so 14950 for the premium is 9960 USD. Between that and shipping to Australia, that's about what I would expect. Really only the LE is crazy there.

Has Stern pulled an Addams Family on themselves? Way back when, Addams was so popular on location that operators didn't need or want anything else. Is this happening again with the likes of Star Wars and Godzilla crowding out everything else?

It's quite possible Stranger Things was discontinued because the license expired, but then the renewed interest led to renewing the license, hence a vault run.

But the hint said a SAM DMD specifically. Avatar sure makes the most sense with another movie coming out and it was never vaulted before.

This isn't how it works, they don't decide "we're vaulting some SAM" and then pick one. They've already decided which one, based on demand and licensing, and just tossed "some DMD SAM" as a teaser hint to us.

I once missed out on Ruling the Universe for lack of Super Jets because one bumper wasn't working and there wasn't enough action for the others to rack up enough hits.

For everyone asking "is Iron Maiden done or not" - the obvious answer is that it's not determined yet. Stern hasn't decided either way. They don't have any reason to officially declare it done, so they may as well leave the question open. They'll wait and see if there's ever enough demand for another run, and if/when it makes sense to put it on the line among everything else competing for demand.

Pretty much everybody on here who runs a location says that Star Wars is always the top earner by a mile. It's a giant magnet for kids to run up to and parents to drop the coins, more than any other of the licensed franchises. Same for home use, it's the biggest kid-parent franchise by far.

Yeah, Rush seems to be the definition of something that will have no long term legs. All the Rush fans bought one right away and it's not like there's any new Rush fans still being created. And the pinballing isn't amazing enough to transcend the dad-rock genre like Iron Maiden did. Iron Maiden makes you feel badass, Rush's vibe is to make you feel silly. Rush's ceiling for demand is no higher than Led Zeppelin and probably lower.

I love AIQ, but I'll agree its layout doesn't fit its theme. AIQ should have had big bash toys for Thanos and the villains, and the zoomy oops-all-ramps layout should have been another game, Rush would have been a good fit for that since the songs are so flowy.

There is no real recession. The negative growth is an illusion of badly analyzed year-over-year numbers. The 2022 numbers look bad only because they are being compared to year-2021 numbers that were artificially high because of time-shifted pent-up demand from the 2020 pandemic year. Compare anything from 2022 to 2019 and it looks close enough to normal for a three-year period.

Thought experiment: What if Stranger Things had exactly the same gameplay but instead was titled and themed Attack From Mars: Saucer Of Rage? Replace the demogorgon with a saucer with the same hole to blow it up. How popular would this have been?

And this is what Stern doesn't know regarding demand - how many deposits will be cancelled on finding a machine from another source. Perhaps even for multiple distributors per person.

I think this happened with AIQ last year - everybody thought it was still backlogged compared to its demand, then the distributors turned out to have quite a few available, and anecdotally there were a fair number of posts on here about cancelling a deposit.

Stern has to err on the side of underfilling demand rather than overfilling. Coming up short makes for some unhappy would-be customers but doesn't damage the business and you can get around to them later. Overfilling demand means you blew money on unsold inventory and that can kill a business.

Because there's a new movie coming out, so it might attract enough interest from operators to put on location for casuals, who don't care if it's a one-shot game or a wizard mode is missing. But I'd doubt it's really worth Stern's time as compared to using their capacity on Godzilla and Elvira. Stern might have come to the same conclusion about the rumored Avatar vault, particularly after that new movie came and went from theaters without being much of a big deal.

A run now might make sense. A run in November doesn't, this season will be well past public mindshare by then.

As for SW and AIQ, a July/August timeframe scheduled now is pretty tentative in any event. Stern will do them when they have a critical mass of orders and enough parts. If either of those doesn't come together then they'll get pushed off, like Maiden was for quite a while.

Yeah, license deals often have a minimum number of units - or if the minimum isn't actually produced and sold, the licensee still pays the licensor as if they were.

Pinball Arcade talked about this on occasion for their licenses - I remember someone saying a minimum unit count of either 50k or 80k was required for Paramount for either STTNG or TZ or both. (Wouldn't be that much for a physical machine as opposed to a software download.)

The reason they didn't for Bond seems to be media rights, to the various movies/actors/characters involved. It's still an organizational failure that that didn't get sorted out for good before the release, but at least there is a reason other than just laziness or backlog.

(Side note - playing Rush is such a breath of fresh air compared to so many of the other licenses, since Rush was done with full source media and participation from the stars, rather than cheaping out for cartoon/comic or in-house graphical assets, or canned movie quotes or soundalike audio.)

oops, double post

There's a video tour of Stern by Jack Danger here:

Star Wars is still right up at the top of the earnings lists for location owners. It's still a bigger magnet for kids and casuals than any other of Stern's franchises.

I hope Stern learns from this fiasco about Bond's licensing/assets/code. Once a game gets a bad rep for something like that, it never really recovers.

Yeah I don't get AIQ either. Where are these going? The license is past its peak (the Thanos movies were years ago now), it can't be a particularly big earner on location, nobody talks about it as a keep-forever machine or Marvel collectible, and secondhand premiums are already down to mid $8k.

But Star Wars apparently does have insatiable demand - there are a ton of GenX-age SW fans who will buy it and keep it forever, and it still keeps earning tons on location.

I think Bond's layout works for the theme. Bond should be busy and gadgety, with tricky corners and narrow escapes.

I think people just don't think to look around for ads and listings. I made the same mistake regarding Hot Wheels on another thread, when I said I wanted one but hadn't seen any, and got several replies citing in-stock distributor listings.

This is true. I'm one of those Covid buyers (job went remote permanently so I moved to a big cheap house in the suburbs), and I bought two NIB last year, but not more since, what I've been doing is trading from the slots I have. Of course the increased supply of used from people like me will push prices down. (Particularly for AIQ.)

And a side point - I think the NIB demand would soften first for the other manufacturers. Everybody still wants Godzilla, Deadpool, Foo; and will sometimes settle for cheap Mandos and TMNTs, and so what's not selling into those slots are Americans and Spookys.

I was about to say the same thing. AIQ is dropping down there with Mando and Turtles in terms of demand and value.

My guess would be Stern already has the parts on hand so may as well build the machines anyway. Can't exactly use a Captain Marvel wireform for anything else.

This would require a lot of development rework since those are all on older computing platforms. LOTR in particular is on Whitestar, which isn't much more than an embedded-class 6809 CPU, nowhere near managing a modern internet-connected technology stack. The other three you listed are SAM, which is somewhat more capable, but still far from Spike. Really you'd be talking about porting the software for any of these games to run on a modern Spike computer.

Yeah, it's reasonably accurate. Things shift around by a few weeks (remember EHOH getting delayed from like last September until early this year?) but in general Stern is doing what the reports here say they're doing. There's never been a case where something was listed for the next month then didn't happen at all, or when something that wasn't listed at all suddenly got a run that week.

The one thing that goes wrong here is when there's like four machines listed for the current month, and we're like already halfway through that month already... yeah you have to realize there's no way that's all fitting in, it's getting displaced into the next month.

It's a fair possibility. Other than Godzilla, most runs Stern has done since Covid have oversatisfied demand for that title at that moment. Most every run except GZ has resulted in stock available at dealers at least for a little while, even EHOH when they finally got to it. GZ is distorting perception since that's the one that everyone is chasing, but other than that most everything has been pretty readily available during their runs.

So is my Jurassic Park pro. Looks like Stern is pretty much caught up to demand all around. Now they need to get Venom cranking.

This. Stern has Addams-ed themselves, the last few years have been so successful that they've saturated the market. Spike 2 reliability and franchise licenses that don't become dated means that the machines they've already sold just stay in operation forever. There's no new wave of covid stay-at-home buyers now. Who's going to unload their Godzilla or Jurassic or Deadpool to buy new stuff, and who's still coming into the hobby to buy them?

Yeah, if you want to sell GZ Pro, do it now. Price won't go up until it's out of production which will be several years yet. Prices inflating on in-production games was a Covid mirage and won't happen again.

From what I notice on location, it's often the women that notice GOTG and pull over the bf/husband to play it. Chicks still dig Chris Pratt.

Yeah, operators (and notice it's only Pros), GOTG still earns well on location according to a couple operators around here. License is king for casuals.

In my experience it's usually the women who notice GOTG and drag over the bf/husband to play it. Chicks still dig Chris Pratt.

Maiden doesn't quite reach the top tier for me, because of the rule structure around the timed modes. If you don't hit shots during the first half of that tight timer, you're not going to complete it and you're just kinda stuck with nothing relevant to do until you can get out of it and start another. There's not enough reward for beating the timed modes (like JP's fossils) and you can't make partial progress and resume later where you left off (like GZ, DP, Foo, Rush.) Other than that, yeah, Maiden is great.

And Marvel Comics (as opposed to the movie studio) is pretty permissive with the licensing, Deadpool has been in production forever too. No reason to archive AIQ if they still think they can sell a few more.

Stern themselves probably don't know if Maiden will have another run. They know what the market is demanding and distributors are asking for. For any title, if there's enough demand and the licensing and part supply chain allows it, they'll do more. The most recent runs of Maiden and Stranger Things seemed to satisfy demand to that point, but if aftermarket sales slow and prices creep up again, more runs would be on the table.

Yeah, there's never any hard stop that Stern couldn't ever run a game again, it's always possible as long as licensing and parts allow it. If suddenly Rush demand surged again for some reason, they'd eventually run more. Stern has no reason to ever say a hard "no", just "not planned currently", as with Rush and likely Maiden and GOTG.