No more WMS tables in Pinball Arcade (license expires June 30)

Pretty brutal news. Sounds like Scientific Games (the owners of the WMS licenses) aren’t playing ball well with Farsight? Are there plans for another virtual pinball game using those licenses from another company that gave them a better deal?

Whatever is happening, this is bad news since this game was in some ways a gateway to pinball for people. I hope it doesn’t hurt the industry…

The forum you’re linking to is also getting a domain name change pretty soon too. And yeah, WMS chose not to renew the licenses over to Farsight.

Something’s happening, for sure, and things just got started to be put in place. We’ll see.

I never got into Pinball Arcade or any virtual games.

As an avid pinball/tournament player- is this worth looking into before June 30th?
Suggestions on best platform to download them?

It’s definitely a good resource for game rules. I have them all on my iPhone.

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I got all the tables on Android. I think that means the table updates etc come directly from Farsight’s servers, so if (and ultimately ‘when’) they decide they are going to stop hosting them, then I and everyone else will be out of luck.

If I was starting fresh then I’d probably choose PC, and get everything via Steam. Steam I think have a much better reputation for being able to get hold of the old games even years after they are no longer available for sale in the store.

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I have it on I-Pad and really enjoy it for what it is. If you are thinking it will feel like real pinball you will be disappointed but if you realize it’s just a video game then you will have fun.

next - Look at the tables they produced. Are you familiar with the rules of the games? If you answer “no” to a lot of them then it is diffidently worth it. I’ve utilized TPA and VP in general to help me learn the rules of games I don’t have access to this. This has helped me become a better player as I at least have a strategy for a game that I may be playing for the first time in real life.

I hear a lot of talk about VPX in the virtual world playing better. Not sure I agree unless they’ve made substantial changes in the past year. I used to build VP tables (released a dozen or so) and have a lot of appreciation for it so my opinion on VP in general may be skewed a bit.

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As folks above said, TPA isn’t a good replacement for the real deal, but it’s a great way to learn the rules and it’s a fun time-killer if you don’t mind its occasionally wonky physics.

Farsight hasn’t been the best steward of the license, with frequent bugginess issues, but they’ve been working at this for several years (and before with the Pinball Hall of Fame games), and it’s a bummer to see them get shafted.

If someone else is coming in to take this license - I’m not the biggest fan of Zen, but I love how they integrate competition scoring into the games, and they’re years ahead in designing a usable UI and their lighting system is excellent. I don’t know if I could be convinced to buy all of these again though.

And man, after they did the impossible and managed to make a legal digital version of Addams. You can complain about Farsight all you want, but for a long time it seemed like that’d be an impossibility given all of the character likenesses, the stipulations from the Julia estate, etc etc etc

And they only just got Banzai Run in there.

I hope the offer’s on the table for another company, because it would be awfully selfish of WMS to just pull the licenses and not let anyone else have a crack at it. Even if it meant not seeing licensed tables or at least the cheaper ones like Judge Dredd I’d be fine with another developer taking them…