I second that. A licensed theme can be both a pro and con. Have heard a ton of people say that would not buy woz, they just don't like the theme. I'm sure the recent 'rock band' themes have lost some sales from folks who just don't like those bands. Obviously a custom theme can be disliked as well, but at least it does not carry the licensing costs.

6 of the top 15 rated games are original themes.

Meanwhile Frank is over in the P-Roc forums getting help from Mocean, me and others. I guess we should beat up on him for not sharing the info (although I knew from talking with you at MGC, so Mocean, sorry I guess I could have let you know as well, I keep forgetting your east coast, not west coast)

Not sure I would go that far, but it would be unfortunate for many, many reasons if it does not get made.

I've talked with Scott on some ideas on getting the info on WOOLY out there and I encourage the fans here to spread the word to pinball fans that are not on pinside.

Hopefully Scott will reconsider having a drop dead date and be willing to take WOOLY on a spring tour to some of the shows outside the midwest, so more people can see this game in person, although I do understand that can be an expensive thing to do in both money and time off of work.

P-roc is being used in a bunch of games, so that is a good thing, and those parts should remain available for quite a while. I believe most of the parts are 'common parts', and maybe we will see Scott indicate that Pinballlife or someone else will be stocking a supply of any custom parts. He could also offer a 'support kit' that includes a second of any parts that folks are most concerned about.

Not sure if Scott indicated if the code is open source or not, even if it is not, he could arrange for the code to be in third party escrow so it could be made available if he was unresponsive to issues for a period of time. There are at least two people who have commented in this thread that are more than capable of solving issues with the software.

Frank is a nice guy, not really so sure about Scott

The reality is you can get a refund up until whatever the date is, so whether the check gets cashed or not is pretty much moot. I'm not totally clear on the benefit of using a check and having him hold it, unless you don't trust Scott to do the refund, and you seem to indicate that you do trust him. Plus, in reality, once you give him the check, nothing stops him from going and cashing it, so you are still having to trust him, so not sure the difference in trusting him not to cash the check vs trusting him to do the refund.

It is more of a pain for Scott to have some check sitting around, but obviously that is his call.

Scott, is it okay if send my $1,000 in all change? It would be mostly pennies and quarters.

if the track loops, when it loops does it start back at the beginning or at the offset?

Pretty sure Scott has done this, which is what got him to the price point he is at. Recognize that Stern isn't going to touch this under 1,000 units, and JJP does not have the capacity to take this on, especially given how much the could make on this vs making their own machines, so no point in bringing up their names.

Keep in mind there are also plenty of costs beyond the BOM that need to be covered by the price point and I'm sure he and Frank want to end up a little bit of change in their pocket.

Gee, not sure that is exciting news for everyone, more like exciting news for four people

Regardless, congrats on getting more of these built, I'm sure the new owners will be psyched to have one of such a limited run of this awesome pin.

Stern could certainly do this game for less than the 8K, but part of the price would be based on how much profit Gary wants and what Scott wants. But no doubt they could drive the cost of the BOM down significantly as well as assembly costs.

The fact that Scott could not get 100 people to drop $8K does not mean there is not a market for it at that price. Scott was facing a few major challenges. First off the, pre-pay model was already on life support by the time he took this to market. And even though it was a fully working prototype, there was no demonstrated ability to get get them built, which was certainly a big concern for some. Lets be honest, if Kevin could have gotten Predator built in a timely manner, that whole thing probably would not have blown up on him. Getting machines built is tough, just getting all the needed parts is a bitch. In reality Kevin's plan was not that different then what you guys did to build the four Woolys', it would have to just been doing that for a year to get them done.

Second, there is certainly an expectation now that a game for $8K is going to have RGB LEDs and to some, they expect a color display, without those, some would just not be willing to cross to that price point, so that was going to be a limit to the market at that price but at $6500, I don't think that is nearly the same issue.

Third, it is not very easy to market a boutique game and Scott obviously felt there was a limited window to generate sufficient interest to move forward. While pinside will spread the word, it represents just a small portion of the pin community. Getting greater visibility via shows etc would help, but the reality is the cost of doing that, would not necessarily get the needed results, without potentially wiping out any profit. Any other meaningfully form of marketing would also take a reasonable amount of capital, and with such razor thin margins, very hard to absorb that and not lose money on the project.

I have total respect for Scott that he was not willing to risk losing money in pursuit of getting these made. He crunched the numbers, and he saw what needed to happen to make it work, and the numbers just did not add up (something that jpop obviously never bothered to do).

I find this to be somewhat insulting, on several levels. First off, there are plenty of guys there I would not describe as old farts. Secondly, you clearly don't appreciate the value of experience. Third, it is also insulting to imply that an older guy can't be innovative (heck, I didn't earn my first patent until I was over 50, and would say I have been far more innovative in the last 10 years then the 20 before that). Not saying that some may stick to what they know and what has worked, and may be resistant to change, but to label an entire organization as 'old farts' shows a lack of respect.

As far as game not being totally coded at release. Stern needs to keep the production line moving and sometimes the varies components of that are not going to come together perfectly in sync. We have all come to learn that is the case, and yes, if you buy early you may be unhappy with the state of it, but upgrading is easy enough when updates are available. Sometimes the 'finishing' of the code may not be to the level wanted, but then again, not all games have or will have super deep rule sets, that does not make sense for Stern. Heck, if Wooly was made six months ago, the code would certainly not have been where it is now or potentially will be six months from now.

And how much do you think Stern would be willing to pay? How much to you think Scott/Frank would find acceptable?

In general Stern needs to sell X games to be profitable and that number is not 250. They need games that distributors and operators will want and Wooly may not be a theme that meets that criteria. It is not like there is zero cost to have Wooly ready to go. I'm sure many of the parts are not Stern parts. If needed parts don't exist, they need to be fabricated. The code would need modifications to not only work on their systems, but to use some of their standard things such as service menus, pricing options, etc.

I'm sure Gary and his leadership team are looking at the future and their need for designers and developers and when they feel they are going to need to replace people they will. Not like all of those guys are going to suddenly retire. Every person you hire impacts the bottom line, and Gary has shown he is smart guy in running a business. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

As has been said, so many times in pinside, in general, the licensing costs are not nearly as great as people seem to think the are and also bring tremendous value not just in name recognition, but assets, etc. Regardless, you should probably give some thought to these numbers before you say 'they should do this'. I'm pretty confident that Scott has talked with Stern and JJP and since nothing has happened in that regard, I have to assume the numbers did not work. Although, since you have been more closely involved, maybe you know something the rest of us don't. Maybe that will change if either JJP/Stern or someone else sees growing demand for this and more importantly a fit for their strategy. The existing companies all have employees on staff designing, engineering, coding and building games, so the value of a ready to go game from an outsider may not have the value you think it does. In addition, putting a small run game on the line has an opportunity cost associated with it. Is it better to run Wooly or a VE game? Possibly now with a larger factory that opportunity cost may not be as great, but the bottom line there is a lot more complexity to this than some folks here want to recognize.

I believe the question was regarding an innovative 'mechanical' toy. Regardless, there is no doubt there are many innovative things in the pin, especially around some concepts for home play. However, many items you list are qualified with 'has not been done for years' or something like that, which means they have been (and in some cases more recently then you think). One of the things I like about wooly, is that they did pull in some of the concepts from the 80s era games. There are also a few items you say have never been done and that is not the case, but it does not real matter and accordingly I will not go through the effort to highlight any of these discrepancies.

Obviously recycling of ideas and concepts has been a common occurrence since life on earth began, and certainly in pinball. However, lets be careful we don't put Scott/Frank into the jpop bucket of taking old ideas/concepts and claiming it is new and innovative, since I have not heard them say that, and I don't think they would.

Certainly credit them for all the things they have done, but please don't say something is innovative, just because it has not been done for 20 years.

Well now we know one of the four parts!!!! Just three more to go!

Anyone who has built a custom game knows exactly what Scott is talking about. I've had to fabricate more than a few parts for my machine, and in some cases I found parts that were close and then modified them to work. Doing that as a one off is fine, doing that for 20 or 30, not so much, but as Scott said, once you get to a 100 or more, it becomes more feasible to have them made.

That is absolutely true, you have been a huge supporter of wooly for a long time. The difference is now that you no longer have to split your love with Predator, Wooly gets it all, and maybe that is just too much love for any one pin

Well the fact that you now own one of 6, probably contributes to your love as well, which we all get. I am glad you were able to get your pin, but I would also point out that being such a fanatic about it, is sort of like putting salt in the wounds of those that wanted one and for now won't get one.

I believe over 50 people made deposits, so pretty sure some of those were from outside mn/wi

Do you really think Scott just gave up at the first roadblock? Do you think he did not look at tons of alternatives? Give the man some credit, and recognize that he has sliced and diced this a dozen ways to try to make it happen in a way that makes sense for him financially.

I'm sure he could design/engineer his way out of it, but probably not in a way that makes sense financially. The price point is already at the high end, adding another 500 or 1000 is not going to work. If he had gotten 100+ sign ups, then maybe the incremenal costs could be managed.

Even setting aside his time. Let's take the one drop target, it is made up of, I'd guess 10 parts, unless it is the type that can self drop, which is probably then 15 parts. Some are going to be springs and screws that can likely be found, but the weldment needs to be made. So first you need drawings, then you need tools and/or dies made, so right there you are in for more than a few thousand since the weldment is really four to eight distinct parts and each need tools and dies, and that is before you make the parts and assemble the drop target mech then take that total cost divide that over 50 games and the cost per game is significant then repeat for the other needed parts

In many ways the fresh blood is coming from the boutiques and start-ups, who knows, maybe when Stern does need to bring in someone new, they will look at what others in the community of done. Reality is Stern is an assembly line in everything they do and that ultimately limits thing. Revolutionary innovation (vs evolutionary innovation) will come from elsewhere, like P^3.

I would still call in evolutionary as it was the next logical step given advances in technology and similar use cases in other industries, and in reality could have be done far earlier, but not like Stern needed urgency around it. In fact, SPIKE is essentially a less capable and slower version of the P-ROC/P3-ROC + PDBs that are used in wooly and other machines, and that came around how many years before SPIKE? I guess if you really want you can add that to your long list of 'innovations in wooly', but be sure to give credit for that part to multimorphic. I think Heighway uses some smilier concepts as well, and that pre-dates SPIKE, but I'm not as familiar with their tech/capabilities to say for certain.

jpop

and this is why people who win the lottery end up bankrupt a few years later, and heck, no one has even started to ask you for money yet.

comparing p-roc to Heck is not really appropriate in this context. There is no way the Heck board right now could run wooly, without massive work on one or both ends. There are fundamental differences in what the boards do and how they do it. And not only would code need to be different, the entire 'wiring harness' would be different (and likely more expensive in both cost and time). Hard to see is the economics working with Heck, given the amount of re-engineering that would be required, not on a run of 200 machines.

In addition, I doubt that Charlie would object to using a different board set, I would tend to think he would be electronics agnostic when doing assembly work on a contract basis (heck Stern was when doing MMr). And given that Scott had already had an informal agreement with Charlie, I have to think that was assuming it would be P-roc.

Obviously both Heck board and P-roc can work in commercial machines as we have seen. They each have their strengths and weaknesses and I suspect we will continue to see new commercial machines using both. A good thing for all of us.