Ever watch The curse of Oak island? That entire show is build up with little reward. Just pure drama. And people watch it.

You’d need tiny cameras in the game on the apron or on the playfield plastics.

10 years ago, nobody thought people would want to watch others play video games. Today, Fortnite has a $100 million yearly prize pool. But, everyone knows about video games and the player base is gigantic. Most young people play video games.

People don't know about pinball. They certainly don't know about competitive pinball. People don't have access to pinball. Player base is small (but growing).

Pinball is limited by being pinball, not by any lack of entertainment value. The current streamers do a great job and I always find the broadcasts to be entertaining when the commentators are focused on the action. I think broadcast pinball is doing just fine without ESPN.

Broadcasting of pinball events has grown by leaps and bounds but will always be limited by pinballs lack of popularity among the masses.

Lets be realistic: ESPN, or any sports network for that matter, is broadcasting events and sports that will draw viewers, so that sponsors and advertisers are willing to pay for coverage and timeslots (ie: how they make money).

With traditional sports, this is much easier for a number of reasons:
1. Familiarity. Kids (especially now), grow up playing traditional sports. They understand the rules of the games and can relate to them.
2. Accessibility: Name me one person that hasn't played basketball, baseball or football with friends at some point or another. You wanna try to be like Mike or LeBron? Just throw on some shoes and meet your buddies down at the playground....for free. Not many have true unlimited access to pinball machines.
3. Personality. People know the players in a lot of other sports. Even if they don't, there are a lot of interesting personalities that can be latched onto to sell interest. Did you ever see the King of Kong? That movie was awesome, but without the egomaniacal train-wreck portrayal of Billy Mitchell, it'd just be 2 dudes playing an arcade game. Not sure who this would be in the pinball world.
4. Vested interest. Team sports have a city or country they represent, and the outcome affects standings and has repercussions for other teams not playing as well.
5. Action! Lots going on and things can quickly change in who has the upper hand. No singular focus on one player for hours on end.

Cornhole has #1 and 2 cold.... And probably hoping for #3 considering some interesting people play it. Even that stupid American ninja warrior could claim a couple of these to keep it afloat. 2/3rds of that show is focused on individual personalities.

Pinball, while totally awesome, probably couldn't sell any of these points. Maybe if the top players were seriously crazy and things like &#!t-talking during play at that level was encouraged in-game, it could sell. But as is, likely never going to be the case.

The ACL Championship was essentially an hour-long infomercial paid by Johnsonville Brats.

There are millions of people that play Cornhole and eat brats in between football games (and other events) so the advertising $ makes sense.

Figure that model out for pinball and you could be on TV too.

Next up ... Spikeball. Not sure where that $ is coming from.

I don't know about in the game, but you could have stand-off camera holders that slip into the glass channel and hold mini cameras 6" or so above the game that could be utilized to grab special angles.

With games getting smacked around by players and vibration of mechanics would cameras attached to the machines be a good idea? Likely not.

My other gaming passion is Street Fighter. The biggest tournament of the year, Evo, has had the top 8 broadcast on ESPN the past couple years. It's been pretty successful numbers wise I believe. ESPN is obviously open to interesting alternative gaming content.

Here's the thing though: they're not gonna just bring an audience to you, you've got to bring one to them.

When I tune into the top 8 of a Street Fighter tournament on Twitch I'll probably see 100,000 people watching. When I tune into a PAPA broadcast I see more like 400.

Until pinball can successfully bring in the eyeballs and format there's no case to go to a network and say "hey let's partner up here, it will be good for both of us".

This is true, but the numbers aren't as bad as they look. Within a day or two most big pinball streams will have thousands of views beyond those who were watching live.

New York City Pinball Championships had 3-400 live viewers, and now, a month later, almost 7,000. PAPA circuit final has 10,000 views and it wasn't particularly exciting.

There are people who want to see this stuff and. Something to build on.

I think it was during the final game at the last PAPA (could be wrong but it was a major tournament) and there was way less than 1000 viewers online streaming the match.

Who is going to green light pinball on espn when it pulls those kind of numbers. Who do you sell the advertising too?

How much does it cost to be the sponsor of a tournament compared to paying for a 30 second spot on ESPN?

To sell pinball to a broadcaster you'd have to show real world numbers to convince them it would make them money.

What do you think they'd say when they saw the world championship final round had only double digit viewers?

Pinball is right where it should be, streamed on-line to satisfy the 'dozens' that watch it.

Duplicate post

PERIOD

It's hard to think televised pinball competition would ever be as exciting as the annual punkin chunkin competition used to be.

bs-md-pumpkin-cannon-explosion-lawsuit-20170816 (resized).jpg

Watching pinball is just boring as hell for all but the most hardcore fans. It works for streaming because the niche viewers can find the niche content. On ESPN it would be god awful and nobody would watch anyways.

You know they show lumberjack competitions and world's strongest man on ESPN?
Pinball has enough interest. Need an interested production team.

Ever been to one of those lumberjack competitions? I have. In a way, they are actually kind of fun. Especially since a lot of the competitions are head to head. And they last like 30 seconds per round. And you get to watch people in suspenders fall off logs.

Now..... Ever tried to sit and just watch people play a 20-60 minute game of pinball from a distance if you aren't playing too? Yawn.

Lumberjack shit was awesome...always remember Ron Eslinger taking care of business!

The catapults that they build are cool as hell. And who doesn't like smashing a pumpkin?

You got the catapults/trebuchet for the EM crowd and the canons for the more modern crowd; perfect!

And of course it was one of those newfangled cannons that exploded sending two people to the hospital that put an end to it all.

Operator Error?

I've watched the replay several times now, and all I can come up with is a cheaply built cabinet.

Oh damn pull the ripcord.

Sure didn't look too stable when it fired.

Yeah when something, eXpecially a "cannon," is shaking and convulsing like that I'm gonna go ahead and back away quickly.

ESPN should Televise pinside threads.

A ton of people play cornhole. Not nearly as many people play pinball. That's my guess.

I also bet that in the lumberjack competitions the winnner of their biggest event gets more than $15k.

Why? Cornhole is played by so many times more people and so many more demographic groups. When I first saw cornhole on TV, I even mentioned that it was the nail in the coffin of pinball ever being on TV in any real way. Face it, pinball will never, ever be mainstream enough to be on TV. Especially not live. It will also never make it as a reality show.

Next time you are watching the National Pinball Championship streaming live and notice there are only 150 people watching, you will understand why ESPN made the decision that they did. I see complete bullshit twitch channels with idiotic sounding people talking over some shooter game with thousands of people streaming.

Maybe pinball is like curling? People don’t know how awesome it is because they haven’t been exposed to it in the right way. BC16A672-F8CE-4CC8-B760-6EE6E5E7010A (resized).jpeg

First of all, Curling is awesome! Pinball works best with the simple games. EM'S and early SS with quick ball times are the best way to get people into watching pinball. Sitting through 2 hours of LOTR won't gain any converts. Quick, exciting action is what people want and I believe we could do that in a highlights type format with our very own Crazy Levi commentating.

Yes I'm aware of that and what do you think the reason is? Because they can make money off of it and sell advertising slots.

I'm a pinball fan (obviously) but ask most non-pinball people if they'd rather watch a strong man competition or a game of pinball.

All sports are basically unwatchable, as far as I'm concerned. I will even TiVo blast through Packers games in 20 minutes when I'm watching alone.

Sure, editing could make pinball coverage seem just as "exciting" as anything else, but the games are too different to make it interesting to the layman. With the diversity of rule sets, wildly different playfields, et cetera, it would be too esoteric for Joe Sixpack to wrap his head around.

Imagine if every golf course had different rules, or every football field had different dimensions and yard lines, or every cornhole board had randomly placed holes...

Without a level playing field, the public will be too confused. And if it was a level playing field, the pinball would not roll back toward the flippers!

I think the ball residing under the glass in such a small arena is a limiting factor. Maybe playing with the glass off where you can have an air ball hit someone would make it more enjoyable to watch.

Please PM as many details about this issue as you can remember. We've never had a report of a failed MB start, but if there's an issue there, we want to resolve it before our next major update (coming soon - tons of bug fixes). Is it possible you were in a mode (MB unavailable during modes) or maybe in a multi-player game where somebody else had locked 4 balls rather than you? (There's no lock stealing in LL-EE). Any chance this was captured on stream?

- Gerry
https://www.multimorphic.com

I have personally seen John Madden Football being played competitively on ESPN.

I don't know man. Seems like they'll show anything. I could see pinball sandwiched between the Tetherball Championships and tractor pulls at 1 am, couldn't you?

I couldn't... fathom..... sitting on my couch watching people play pinball on tv.

Watching a high-level game of pinball being played is mostly tedious, drawn-out, and confusing—the bad television trifecta!

We’d need more games like TNA for televised competition...really fast with very straightforward gameplay and easy-to-follow rules.

If people don’t understand the game they don’t understand the stakes, and when there are no stakes there’s no tension. Live sports is about tension.

This Tilt brought to you by Progressive! Did you slam tilt your car into a building? Call us now for a free quote!

An enormously popular game that sells millions and millions of copies every year. Easy to understand and follow, fast moving. It's a good choice really.

Have you ever watched people play video games? It's at least as boring as watching pinball. Maybe even more!!

But they know that. Most of the "coverage" was standard reality TV fare of people bickering and plotting. I was fascinated!

"Dude.. WHY DID YOU CALL A COVER 2?! It was a fix!!!"

Flipping With The Stars - Celebrity Split Flipper Competition

That would get eyeballs.

Do you watch that on TV or twitch?

This highlights how e-sports work - they don't play a diverse list of games with different mechanics and goals - they play a SINGLE GAME, like DOTA, or Starcraft 2, or Fortnite.

So, maybe "p-sports" needs to play a single machine like TNA.

See this is what I'm talking about. I'm much more interested in hearing what we could rip off from "successful" esports than I am in hearing about how esports are successful and pinball cannot be.

I've sampled enough of the "big" esports to know the commentators yell a lot and don't try to emulate baseball commentary. So that's I do.

Anybody got any other ideas?

Esports works because there are 10s of millions of players playing competitively on line every day all year long.
Pinball doesn't work because there are hundreds of people playing competitively, every random weekend.

95% of PINSIDE members don't even watch competitive pinball NOW!

Hopefully Deeproot has a day 6 in the plans to solve this unsolvable problem.