Hey all. We decided it probably would be best to start an official topic, since we’re getting a lot of questions about our platform. Feel free to ask, and we’ll answer what we can.
We’re at INDISC right now integrating with the amazing folks here operating the tournament, installed in games and connected to our service. It’s been quite a journey! Anyway, our team has been busy at work developing a great product and service and we (the team behind Scorbit) wanted to share an update. We sent an e-mail out to the people who signed up for our mailing list on our website and we wanted to share that update with everyone here.
Scorbit is not a mod - It’s a platform.
We’ve created custom hardware, mobile applications, and a robust Internet service to glue it all together. While that may sound daunting, this is nothing new to us at Scorbit… We are technology veterans and successful entrepreneurs with a history of bringing new products and services to market. Our international team already includes over ten people and dozens of industry advisors bringing with them decades of expertise. We’re also pinball players, operators and most importantly enthusiasts, just like all of you, and do this with a passionate commitment to the community.
What is Scorbit?
At the highest level, Scorbit is connected pinball. Scorbit allows scores and other data to be real-time broadcasted to an Internet service from a pinball machine, ranging from solid state to DMD and modern era machines. You can imagine the many applications that emerge from doing that.
It all starts with the Scorbitron, a compact, powerful, fancy piece of hardware that took us years to develop, that is installed in the backbox of a machine. The Scorbitron takes it’s input data from several different potential sources and communicates that data over an Internet connection to the Scorbit platform (via an API) in the cloud. The Scorbitron can also act as a monitoring device, grabbing essential data for operators, eventually enabling remote software upgrades and other administrative functions to make managing and operating machines much easier.
The Scorbitron is the brain and we’ve designed a way to easily connect it to all types of machines. Solid states, DMDs, modern games, all have different platforms and data sources, and all require some special thought. We designed custom hardware for these situations to ensure the Scorbitron works with many machines, not just one specific kind.
Players and operators use a mobile app, called Scorbit. For players, you’ll be able to use the app to log in and identify what player number in a game you are which allows your scores to be associated with your player profile on Scorbit. Once you “check in” to a machine, you can choose to keep your score on a permanent leaderboard for that machine, which has its own unique identifier. We have loads of other features that will be available in the future on the platform. That’s the beauty of this: We can expand functions fairly easily, and fully intend to offer both our own and third party integrations that make this more powerful for players and operators.
Operators of machines will have a special feature set within the Scorbit app, allowing remote management of the machine for specific purposes. Imagine being able to set happy hour pricing, getting alerts when things break, viewing dashboards for valuable data or being able to even remotely upgrade the software of a modern machine, all from your app.
Finally, all of this is an open platform, allowing venues, tournament operators, live streamers and others to create integrations and visualizations to suit their needs. We will publish our API specifications that will allow developers in the pinball community to create some awesome integrations and solutions.
When can I get one?
As we mentioned, we started this project several years ago, so it’s taken a long time to get to the point now where we’re officially in beta. It’s hard to keep a secret that long, believe me. We were prototyping and demoing this starting a couple years ago, and installed our device at INDISC in 2018. However, this is a complex project, with people working on it all around the world, with many moving parts, so despite our desire to share our excitement, we wanted to wait until we were this far along to talk about it. We’re working with select operators now in our early beta program to test our latest hardware in field conditions. You will likely see Scorbit in certain venues and being used in some tournaments. Then, this year, we will expand the beta program for the Scorbitron and take reservations in advance shipping our products. We will provide updates to all reservation holders, keeping them in the loop of the process and are aiming to see Scorbitrons installed in pinball machines as soon as we can. We know this community deserves real products, not vaporware, which is one of the reasons we’ve waited so long to share our story and why we will not be charging for orders until products are in hand and ready to ship.
How much will it cost?
I know, it’s the big question. We really can’t announce pricing now, as we’re still working out our manufacturing and production costs. Frankly, we also expect our pricing model to be influenced by the feedback we are getting from people like you (and this forum) during this early beta program. We want to make sure this product is affordable for operators and yet is set up in a way that covers the support for a real-time, high volume Internet service.
How do I get in on this early beta?
If you’re interested in participating in the early beta, we’ve set up an online survey that you can fill out here:
https://goo.gl/forms/VZ8dVp3Ba4MO9LzZ2
Understand, the beta has already begun, and we already have a lot of interest, so we’ll do our very best to accommodate who we can, when we can.
Stay tuned and we’ll keep you informed as we enter the next phase of the beta!
Thanks,
