Episode 128 - Cake or Death (Pins or Video Games)?
This episode has a wide-ranging discussion about Stern releasing another cornerstone in 2020, the cost of toppers, DMCA and Twitch, the new consoles from Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo's sales figures...
Highlights
- Gary Stern indicated Stern has 5,000 pinball machine orders they're trying to catch up on
- Stern TMNT topper pricing jumped from ~$600 (Black Knight topper) to $1,000 in under a year
- Elvira House of Horrors rerun pushed from October to November/December or later
- Twitch received fewer than 50 DMCA notifications per year before May 2020, then thousands per week starting May
- Twitch gave users only 3 days (Tuesday to Friday) to delete flagged VODs before DMCA bans started
- Led Zeppelin as a theme is more commercially attractive than Guns N' Roses for pinball
- GNR pinball is beautiful but reportedly not fun to play
- A major unnamed band lead singer was DMCA struck for his own music on Twitch
Notable quotes
“There's no way Zeppelin doesn't sell. So especially with a really solid design behind it, it'd be insane.”
“you could go out and buy a PS5 and an Xbox One Series X, both for the price of this topper”
“if enough people are willing to spend that much money on it, why wouldn't the companies make it that much? Sure, and that's the question. And Stern's experimenting, I think.”
“I just don't – unless the license deal makes them – forces their hand... I just think it's like, no, our lines are busy. Why sell a new game when we too busy selling the old ones”
“when we start getting to the point where a topper is, what, a fifth of the price of a machine if you buy an SE? Yeah, no, and that's the value equation that I run through.”
“Their answer is to the DMCA problem is, oh, just don't play background music.”
“there's been several streamers that are, oh, what do they call them? They're just real-life streamers who just stream them doing stuff, who've gotten hits because they were walking down the street past a restaurant that had music playing outside.”
Entities
- Chicago Gaming Company· company
- Jersey Jack Pinball· company
- Stern Pinball· company
- Twitch· company
- YouTube Gaming· company
- Black Knight· game
- Elvira House of Horrors· game
- Grand Theft Auto V· game
- Guns N' Roses· game
- Hades· game
- Led Zeppelin· game
- R2-D2· game
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles· game
- Whirlwind· game
- Whitewater· game
- Roanoke Pinball Museum· organization
- Dennis· person
- Gary Stern· person
- Steve Ritchie· person
- Tony· person
- Zach Minney· person
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