Price increases are never a good thing. Necessary sometimes, sure. But good? Disagree.

Every three or four months I see countless "THIS will be my last NIB purchase" posts.

I don't have a problem, I can quit any time I want!

Me too,,,,,,,, until my next dream theme is made..like Godzilla, rush, Sabbath, bttf , :lol

I’m in on BTTF if that’s the next title.

Everyone cracked the shits when jjp increased their price by a $1000 bucks but at least they honoured the price for the people who had already ordered .
Sterns new connected system looks alright but nothing Blow Away like they were saying .
George doesn't say you will have to pay for it , but more importantly he doesn't say it's free .

I see nothing in this video that makes me think I need or want this.

I do hate what all the new aprons will look like now.

That apron in the video is generic. Each game will get art specific to the license by the artist (as I've done one or two) - so don't worry yet until you see them I'm guessing the licensing approvals might be why the generic one is used in these videos.

I'm actually quite curious how it will work, I think goals would be a nice addon, keeps the game fun (sort of like pinball arcade )
The quests are probably mostly (only) going to be for the US. For the rest I guess it is also interesting for them, they can probably gets some user info this way, even though Gomez says you can adjust this.

EDIT: though not $1000 increase worth of extra fun....

Wonder what the upgrade set costs, they say inexpensive, but what is inexpensive? $100? $150? or $600??
If it brings some extra fun and I can buy it as an addon for my existing games for somewhere near a $100-$150, then it would be worth it.
Anything above that probably not.

You only get a verified score if it's on location , tell me if you know the operator , you can't take the glass off and muck around with it . They've copied , pin venture , or whatever it's called , where you download the app and if you do certain things you can get some merchandise .
It could be a pain in the ass to login each time you play .

My wild guess is the upgrade will be $299

Well I guess compared to the absurdly increasing prices of the pins, then it does sound quite inexpensive....

Also , there was no mention of you being able to update code .

Any annual fees? Do you think .

Can the hardware be removed from machines that have it preinstalled and moved to another machine? If so, when the machines that have been backordered since long before this was announced finally ship, there will be plenty of people who don't have any use for it happy to sell it if it recovers some of the price increase between the original ship date and the actual one.

I suppose it will have new firmware and can be enabled/disabled from the settings

Do I have the choice of putting the cost of this into the game play instead?

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If distributors aren't locked into getting a specific number of games at at given price then why would stern ship anything over the last few weeks with the price increase coming?

Streaming ads was one of the first things I though of and I really hope they don't go there.

boy those $7777.00 Aliens are looking great now !

I'd hope the hardware cost covers at least a year or two.

They mentioned using the system to try to drive interest in other games, so sounds like targeted advertisements will be in the future.

I can see it now "Welcome user, we see you like playing Batman66, you should really go down the street to Fred's Bar and try Deadpool." on the LCD of the machine. It might even pull up the walking directions on your phone to help you get to Fred's Bar.

I see Stern trying to break into the secondary market in multiple ways here, and trying to take a piece of secondary game sales.

Lets say Stern sells a Back To The Future pro for $6,400 and includes an "activation fee" in that price, with 6 months of Stern Insider connected. It has OTA updates, new code, online connectivity, all your dreams and then after that it's $10 per month per game to maintain the new features.

Lets say that I then sell Back To The Future to you for $6,000 a year down the road because I want to buy Weird Al's Polka Party. I don't want to keep paying Stern $10 per month for a game I no longer own to maintain the service and/or any expansion packs they may have sold me so I go to Stern.com and cancel my Stern Insider connection for Back To The Future. You suddenly lose the new code you had, and it reverts to a previous state. Now in order for you to unlock the features you have to pay a $100 activation fee and pay $10 per month. You also have to rebuy and new code or expansion packs I had previously purchased.

This is a very slippery slope.

Do you know what would really piss me off were I an operator? Ads within my bar directing patrons to other establishments. The pins would go if that option could not be disabled.

Hopefully for everyone , it's free forever , to equal JJP .

I have no interest in this insider connection BS.
On the other hand Weird Al’s Polka Party sounds like the best new title in a very long time!

I’m sure we’ll see a monthly fee like Nintendo membership. What’s another $9.99 per month?

I agree 100%. However, this is from the same company selling $1k toppers.

And you know Al would be all over the callouts. They would be great. Whacky, energetic, etc.

Just think of the mods. Spatulas, hamsters, ball of twine, firehose, Segway, accordion, and more..

I get all of people's concerns here - but temper them. I know George was focused on creating added value for buyers first and foremost - not added costs.
I've never seen or heard of 'always online' check ins, activation fees or gas-station advertising

I’m excited for achievements and things. This sounds cool! No sense getting worked up until we have all of the details.

Fact: Copper cost about the same as it did in 2011. There was a large dip in the price between 2011 and 2020, and now it's back at 2011 levels.

How much was Stern retail at release for 2011 Tron Legacy Pro ($5699)? Transformers ($5699)? There's not $100 of copper in a Stern machine, let alone $1000. With the price increase, we should be about $1000 more than those 2011 pro machines - and copper costs THE SAME as 2011.

https://www.macrotrends.net/1476/copper-prices-historical-chart-data

Tron and Transformers were WAY less than that.

Yep, my late run Tron (decals with CLU translite) was $4400 shipped to my door. Still kick myself for selling it. Ugh.

That was MSRP. Street was $1k or more less. For the purposes of this "it's the copper!" deconstruction, I'm just comparing MSRP to MSRP because street to street isn't well-documented.

But even with that comparison, it's clear this price hike is mostly an opportunistic money grab. Actual hit is like 20% MAYYYBE 25% of what Stern is grabbing for. But JJP got $1000, so Stern wants that, too - despite having an anemic BOM compared to JJP.

Idk about all of you, but after bttf, and hopefully a Bill and Ted’s I won’t have a use for anymore nib. Except if Lebowski, and Ferris Bueler, remake Addams, remake STNG, and maybe a few others but that’s it!

LOL

Why did they even announce this without having all the details ready? People are making assumptions and then there's insiders saying "wait until you have all the details" while not even denying some of the assumptions.

There's no doubt this will be great for Stern and all invested parties. Great for players? I guess we'll see but I get the sense they're holding back some of these details because they're not exactly consumer friendly details.

Agree. Double Up vote.

Worse thought - does this mean connected pins get ads pushed to them for attract mode? I could *absolutely* see Stern doing this.

Hmm, Insider Connected.

Next stop…. DLC.

Because they were trying to lessen the blow of the price increase I guess. But, I agree. They should have waited to announce this and the price hike when the feature was completely ready. Or, at least when they released the next game.

Why spend years coming up with this and then slowly dip your toes into the pool. This should be fanfare and excitement of how this is making our lives better. Instead we get: "here is new hardware that is in every single new game, and we will let you know what it might do as we figure out which features to focus on." Gomez even said on the interview that they shipped products that were incomplete because they were spending time on this, yet it is still not ready to be detailed at roll out? (Obviously it rolls out in September, but why not announce it all at once. This seems more like they are scared to announce it, because there will be costs in the coming features).

Nah, the ads they push to your pin for the attract mode will pay for that...at first, to make it go down easier. Online pinball from Stern will be abused by them like crazy.

Not yet!

You finally get Sterns version of the pinbar!

Quitting is easy, I’ve done it many times

We are still talking about stern right? Nothing is free.