Stern layoffs

[ChadTower]

...which pretty much describes a classic vid.  Simple to learn, progressively gets harder, a ---smurfette--- to master.

[ChadTower]

...which pretty much describes a classic vid.  Simple to learn, progressively gets harder, a ---smurf--- to master.

This describes about 10 classic vids.  For every Pac-Man, there's 100 pieces of Zarzon shovelware crap.

Those aren't classics.  Those are just old.   

[Karetaker]

For as well as SWEP1 and RFM did, don't forget they were outsold by South Park.

Meh... Ops afraid of the new concept.  Tons of potential for new directions that South Park could never have had.  I'm hoping the NuCore guys will open things up a bit so homebrew minigames become possible.

Ops are NEVER afraid of a new concept. It really comes down to if the earnings potential justifies the cost of a machine. RFM sold quite well and Williams finally saw a profit in the pinball division that had not been seen in years. Those sales were ALL driven by Operators. That hardly sounds like a group "afraid of the new concept". Ops love kits! So, the idea of a pinball kit was very welcomed. One thing that was hard for Operators to get past was the whole "What in the Hell do I do with the playfield"? SWE1 just seemed doomed from the start. Poor timing, poor planning, the movie underpreforming, whatever the cause it just didn't earn. Next thing you know Williams pulled the plug. A bit premature IMO.

[Xiaou2]

 The problem with Episode1 was the fact that the video took up valuable playfield
space for 'interesting' and fun shots.   Everything became too simplified and boring.

 Putting video in the backbox would have been the best option... as then it wouldnt
have affected the gameplay... only adding to it.

 The idea probably was to try to make the game easier for ops to maintain...
yet, play counts were low... cause pinball fans really didnt like the
generic, easy, boring,  shots. 

 The lame movie didnt help any... but that really wasnt the big issue.

 The added time and cost to try to produce quality video animations, only made things worse.

[ChadTower]

Ops are NEVER afraid of a new concept. It really comes down to if the earnings potential justifies the cost of a machine. RFM sold quite well and Williams finally saw a profit in the pinball division that had not been seen in years. Those sales were ALL driven by Operators. That hardly sounds like a group "afraid of the new concept". Ops love kits! So, the idea of a pinball kit was very welcomed. One thing that was hard for Operators to get past was the whole "What in the Hell do I do with the playfield"? SWE1 just seemed doomed from the start. Poor timing, poor planning, the movie underpreforming, whatever the cause it just didn't earn. Next thing you know Williams pulled the plug. A bit premature IMO.

You can say that but all of the ops I've asked gave me the same story.  "pinball wasn't earning anymore and I wasn't dropping $4500 on a new concept until I see it making some cash.  I replaced them with touchscreens and got into wall jukes instead."

[Mauzy]

Ops are NEVER afraid of a new concept. It really comes down to if the earnings potential justifies the cost of a machine. RFM sold quite well and Williams finally saw a profit in the pinball division that had not been seen in years. Those sales were ALL driven by Operators. That hardly sounds like a group "afraid of the new concept". Ops love kits! So, the idea of a pinball kit was very welcomed. One thing that was hard for Operators to get past was the whole "What in the Hell do I do with the playfield"? SWE1 just seemed doomed from the start. Poor timing, poor planning, the movie underpreforming, whatever the cause it just didn't earn. Next thing you know Williams pulled the plug. A bit premature IMO.

You can say that but all of the ops I've asked gave me the same story.  "pinball wasn't earning anymore and I wasn't dropping $4500 on a new concept until I see it making some cash.  I replaced them with touchscreens and got into wall jukes instead."

Thats exactly what the Op here said. They bought one SWE1 machine, "just to see", it crashed after a month and barely making enough to pay for the electricity. They sold it, got their money back, and never bought another. They now buy one crappy Stern machine a year and primarily run jukes and ATM machines with the occasional 8 liner or Golden Tee.   

Ops will try a new concept, but they won't purposely screw themselves over by doing it again.

[Karetaker]

Ops are NEVER afraid of a new concept. It really comes down to if the earnings potential justifies the cost of a machine. RFM sold quite well and Williams finally saw a profit in the pinball division that had not been seen in years. Those sales were ALL driven by Operators. That hardly sounds like a group "afraid of the new concept". Ops love kits! So, the idea of a pinball kit was very welcomed. One thing that was hard for Operators to get past was the whole "What in the Hell do I do with the playfield"? SWE1 just seemed doomed from the start. Poor timing, poor planning, the movie underpreforming, whatever the cause it just didn't earn. Next thing you know Williams pulled the plug. A bit premature IMO.

You can say that but all of the ops I've asked gave me the same story.  "pinball wasn't earning anymore and I wasn't dropping $4500 on a new concept until I see it making some cash.  I replaced them with touchscreens and got into wall jukes instead."

Yeah what I said on page 2 of this post was "Operators don't want to buy them anymore because they don't make money".  But, the production of RFM ran a bit over 7,000. In 1999 that was a huge number for pinball production. So, operators were buying them. If the operators you talked to were waiting until 1999 to get into touchscreens they were WELL behind the curve! There were touchscreens out before Merit made the first Megatouch. Anyone who had one on the street already knew these things made money.

$4,500 is a lot of money for a pinball machine. But, it's not really a lot for a machine per say in this business. What the SWE1 kits ended up costing I couldn't say. When I talked to a distributor about them when RFM came out I was told the kit would be around $1,800. So, I figure they would end up costing between $2,000-$2,500 for a kit. Now that's pretty cheap to get you into a new pinball machine. But, again it's only cheap if you can get your money out of it. I truly loved the idea and the concept behind the whole thing. A big pat on the back to the Williams pinball division for the effort. I will never understand why they simply didn't sell the pinball division off to the highest bidder instead of closing the doors. Although I love the idea it still has to make a business money at the end of the day. In today's environment an operator doesn't see his money out of a pinball machine until he sells it into the home market. That's the reality. Shame it has come to that. But, RFM did sell, and it sold quite well for 1999.