Those existed prior to Insider Connected. Think of it as Xbox Live and Xbox Live Gold. I leveraged our two existing loyalty programs, which were prior to the Connected. It’s going to track your progress, give you rewards, allow you to participate in promotions and so on. You can walk up to any connected pinball machine anywhere in the world and the game’s going to recognize you. You get a unique QR code that belongs to you. There’s a free level of Insider Connected. It’s a new way to engage with pinball machines, both as an operator and as a player. Any LCD screen Stern Pinball game can be connected. For $199.99 you can retrofit your existing Stern Pinball machine, because we want everyone to participate in the universe of existing pinball machines, back to 2015, the Stern Pinball, what we call the Spike 2 system. It’s been shipping standard on every pinball machine since Godzilla, which we launched in September. Put a QR code on the beer can, scan the can for free plays. You can do a deal with a sandwich company, a beer company. Having the QR reader on the game also gives us tons of opportunities for things like partner promotions. It’s about creating player engagement in a modern way with a very old-school device, a pinball machine. There’s going to be features hitting the system constantly, both functional features and interactive player engagement features.
We’re going to be rolling it out, the full scope of the features, over the course of 2022. You can go back, open up your Insider Connected account on a portal, and see what you’ve got. It’s a very cool thing that brings pinball into the current environment, where it extends how we interact with the game, both at the machine and off the machine.
Whether it’s a game we’re introducing and we issue quests–find this game on location, play it three days this week, play it on Saturday night, whatever. For Stern Pinball, that gives us the ability to highlight a specific game. From an operator’s perspective it gives them the ability to create quests and build loyalty. It gives us the opportunity to do promotions. But from a player standpoint, whether you’re at home or at a location, a barcade, a bowling alley, you scan in and the game has tracked your progress. The machine can report that it’s broken and this what it thinks is broken. He can look at the health of the machine. Not only do we have the functional features–an operator can tell if your machine is working, when his busy times are, trends in the performance of games. What this does, the ability of the system to recognize who you are, it allows us to gamify everything about pinball, just like the rest of the world.
You can see Stern George up there along with my score. What’s very cool is that all of a sudden, your avatar, your initials and son, they show up. Insider Connected has a QR reader on what we call the bottom arch, the apron on the pinball machine. It allows, for the first time ever in the history of pinball, using a QR code, which is in an app on your phone–you scan that into the pinball machine, and the pinball machine knows that it’s you specifically playing it. That’s a shortcut way of thinking about it. Insider Connected, think of it as Xbox Live for pinball. I was very influenced by that experience with Insider Connected. The vision of what those have become, from what they were back in those days. Clearly I’m referencing my experience with the birth of Xbox Live and PSN. I have to focus on connecting our pinball machines, the universe of our pinball machines. While I was executive producer of that team, it was essentially the birth of Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network.įast forward to 2022, or actually 2020, probably 2019 is when we started this effort. Shortly after that I went on to run an Xbox and PlayStation dev team at Midway Games. The Pinball 2000 platform, you could take an Ethernet cable, plug it into the machine, and the machine would report out whether it was up and running. I worked on a game called Revenge from Mars at Bally, Williams Electronics. The reality is, the first connected pinball machine was back in 1999. Pinball has to be the last that’s not connected. Insider Connected is our initiative to connect the universe of Stern Pinball machines. But the place to start is with Insider Connected. Gomez: Pinball NFTs! Pinball NFTs are the future (that’s a joke). GamesBeat: Unless you have something to tell me about pinball machines of the future. This is the first interview I’ve done in a while that probably doesn’t have anything to do with NFTs or cryptocurrency. Register Here George Gomez is chief creative officer at Stern Pinball. Join gaming leaders live this October 25-26 in San Francisco to examine the next big opportunities within the gaming industry.
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