Data is king. Everything and everywhere data is what is making money. From car insurance to what you watch and do. So being able to see exactly how long players are playing, ball times, average scores etc can really help operators in theory.
If I make the game a little easier do I see an increase in plays? What about when I changed the price? Sure, we could track these manually but this gives us hard evidence. Not to mention from a TD point of view it makes it easier in the future for us to be added to be able to change things faster and more efficiently.
So I see it both ways. This is all just data mining behind the scenes and what we see are achievements, score tracking and other things. I’m not sure the exact possibilities with all this data but I’m more than sure is valuable to Stern.
Noticed that my player name was displayed differently on the Insider Connected machines I played last night, on LZ Pro my name was showing as ‘Schu_’ (my SIC handle) but on Avengers Pro it was showing as SHU (initials). It might have been the reverse, but in either case a weird inconsistency.
It would be nice if you could select what to display from the webapp. Like I’d prefer only using my initials on all games, not my username, but like you said, it is currently inconsistent.
Are automatic software updates currently available? Trying to help a local operator. If yes, can they be scheduled? Most location games are turned off at night. Scheduling to start updates the first hour the business is open would be great. I assuming the game would know enough to not start an update while a game is being played.
Thanks. Didn’t consider when it might be looking for new code. At power up would be the way to go. Beginning of the work day. Hopefully not later, while someone is playing. I emailed Stern and will share anything useful they say.
'Once the game is connected to an Insider account, you can go into the options for Software Update and choose when you would like it to update.
By default, I believe the way it works is that once it detects there is a new version, it will download the update in the background in-between games, and then install the update after a certain amount of downtime.
The next option is that it will download the update in-between games, but will not install the update until you go in and tell it to update.
The third option lets you schedule when it downloads / installs updates.’
The I believe part doesn’t sound real confident, but apparently this is how it should work.
For an unconnected pinball machine, the machine could generate a QR code which represents a Stern proprietary cypher. After the machine-generated QR code is read by the person’s smart phone that has the Stern Insider Connected app on it, the cypher is then transmitted by the person’s smart phone to Stern by the app.
The interviewer (Dean Takahashi, he of the infamous Cuphead tutorial playthrough) starts off by noting that “this is the first interview I’ve done in a while that probably doesn’t have anything to do with NFTs or cryptocurrency.” Gomez jokes that pinball NFTs are the future before more seriously(?) noting that “we’re watching the space.”
I may have mentioned this at some point earlier in the thread, but Gomez emphasizes that “pinball has to be [among] the last [forms of technology] that’s not connected. Everything else is connected. Your microwave is connected.”
Once again, he notes that “the full scope of the features” will roll out “constantly” throughout 2022.
He gives two examples of how the QR reader could lead to partner promotions:
You can do a deal with a sandwich company, a beer company. Put a QR code on the beer can, scan the can for free plays. It’s an ecosystem.
An interesting topic Gomez revisits a few times throughout the interview is how younger people respond to pinball nowadays. It begins when he relates anecdotal evidence he’d heard from families who own Insider Connected machines:
It appears that young kids, little kids, are not playing for score. They’re playing for achievements. […] They’re very used to this in their video game world. It seems like a natural. Dad’s telling me he’s worried about the score, how to optimize his score, his progression path through the game to optimize the score. His kids don’t care about that. They just want to get achievements. That’s been interesting.
He notes that Stern is “about to roll out an entire suite of stuff related to leader boards,” both for score and for features (i.e. collecting chimichangas and defeating opponents in Deadpool). Apparently, these have consistently received praise and attention at trade and enthusiast shows.
Gomez mentions “head to head play” as a new feature that’s “probably going to happen in 2022.” He doesn’t get much more specific than that, aside from this brief moment later in the interview:
When we do have head to head play, it’s similar to joining a chat room. You’ll be connected to your buddy and you’ll have some head to head interaction.
Takahashi asks “How do you remain careful about things gamers may not want?” (specifically mentioning excessive microtransactions and advertisements as examples). Gomez largely evades talking about those two subjects in favor of explaining Insider Connected’s privacy features. The closest he gets to addressing microtransactions et al is a statement that machines will automatically apply changes to conform to national laws depending on where they’re situated - his example is Belgium, most likely alluding to the country outlawing loot boxes in video games back in 2018. (He also mentions that “everything has been done with the approval of our licensing partners.”)
I know a lot of people in the thread have discussed the possibility of Stern adding some form of wallet functionality to Insider Connected, and Gomez mentions something like that in passing:
Down the road you’ll also be able to load a wallet and walk up to any pinball machine, anywhere in the world, and have your currency converted into game value. That’s coming. It’s not there yet.
Finally, Takahashi’s last question (concerning the demographics of pinball players today) warrants a response that I think is interesting enough to quote in full:
It’s a really diverse community. I can tell you our marketing studies say that the fastest-growing segment of the community is 20-somethings. You also have some of the old-timers, people that have been around it for a long time. One of the most exciting things to me, watching on social media, I see families that own pinball machines, and I see little kids interacting with them. These kids–it’s really the first generation of kids that will have grown up with these things in the home.
Our market shifted from a strictly commercial market to almost half and half, where more than 50 percent of the pinball machines bought today are going into the home. They’re commercial machines, but they’re being brought into personal collections. This is a thing that, to me, assures the future of pinball. People typically discovered it in college, in a bar. Now there’s a generation of kids that have grown up with it in their house. To them, it’s as normal an entertainment as anything else in their world. That’s the future. A kid that’s five years old today growing up with a pinball machine in his house, it’s not a strange thing. When he grows up he’s going to say, “When am I getting my pinball machine?”
As for my thoughts on some of these topics: I’m not overly surprised that Gomez doesn’t want to outright deny going into unpopular venues of obtaining profit (ads, microtransactions, and especially NFTs), but I can hardly say I’m thrilled at the idea of Stern doing any of those. (Especially the latter.) The fears that Insider Connected would be a Trojan horse for the company to spruce up their revenue at the expense of players’ enjoyment aren’t really abated by these statements.
On a more positive note, some of the planned features sound interesting (like head to head play), though I’d have to hear more specifics about how they work to make any solid judgments. Finally, it’s definitely interesting to hear how many people in their 20s are getting into the hobby (let alone the prospect of children growing up with a pinball machine in their home).
I really don’t want Stern to get into NFTs, the market has historically been prone to a lot of faults and has significant issues. Doesn’t help that people involved in NFT trading are just a very vocal minority - I don’t think they’re going to get anywhere if they double down on that market, it’s just not lucrative. Same goes for microtransactions - one or two like a yearly subscription fee are fine, but saturating the platform with them will likely lead to diminishing returns despite the initial influx of cash. Then again Gomez clearly stated it was a joke so what do I know?
It’s cool to see that they’re continuing to become more ambitious with the project despite a “meh” launch, but I still feel the platform could use some polish. Some instructions have blatant typos or are completely missing and the forums announced at launch are nowhere to be seen (and apparently weren’t brought up at all here). I bring all this up not because I dislike Stern, but because I want to see them continue to thrive and am worried that they might be going down the wrong path with these ideas.
I say all this as someone in his 20s, the exact demographic Stern is beginning to take notice of according to this interview. Hearing about the privacy restrictions is good, but I think it would be best for Stern to polish what they do have and wait to announce further details as more information arrives.
I’m honestly not sure if they’ll ever get into that. I can theoretically see Stern, which tends to tout itself as a “lifestyle brand,” trying to increase brand recognition through NFTs. That said, when Gomez talks about potential cross-promotions with beer or food companies with Insider Connected codes, it always goes back to promoting their core product: pinball. NFTs are just far enough from their core that I can also see them never making any.
Gomez actually does mention the forums in the article; I was only summarizing information that was more or less new, since roughly half the interview is stuff he’s already discussed in the past. In this case, all he says is “we have forums coming,” which is hardly new information.
On that note, I wonder if it’d be best for Stern to try and make a roadmap with rough estimates for the features they’ve promised to add by the end of the year. So far, the only one that has anything remotely concrete are the leaderboards, which are simply coming “soon.” I get that this could cause issues down the line if they need to delay features for whatever reason, but I feel like Stern’s been rather opaque with how they promote and handle Insider Connected thus far. (Part of the reason I wrote the first post was because there was a lot of confusion about how it worked around the time it was originally announced.)
More minor news: with the v.1.20 update released today, Star Wars now supports Insider Connected. Here’s the achievement list.
Perhaps the most interesting is that one of them requires you to play the game on May 4th.
With that, the only SPIKE 2 game that currently doesn’t support IC is The Mandalorian, and I can’t imagine it’ll be that far behind. (The website notes that upcoming titles are “pending licensor approval,” and since the last two games are licenses set in the same universe, it wouldn’t make much sense for Mandalorian to be held up much longer after Star Wars gets cleared.)
That’d be midnight-to-midnight UTC. If they use UTC as the basis things will shift one hour next month with the switch to daylight savings time/summer time. This achievement will make much more sense in Europe where everyone is closer to UTC
Update - Mandalorian now has achievements & Insider Connected support. This means all SPIKE 2 games officially have support. (Also, this game has a hidden Madness mode and I didn’t know until now - can you find it?)
