Pinball Magazine - Stern's Dave Peterson special

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Follow-up interview:

Dave Peterson

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Follow-up interview with Dave Peterson (Stern Pinball) Jonathan Joosten

In Pinball Magazine No. 2 an in-depth interview with Stern investor Dave Peterson was published.

That interview dated back to January of 2013. During the Pinball Expo factory tour at Stern, Pinball Magazine caught up with Dave, which resulted in the interview below.

PM: Dave, we published your interview in Pinball Magazine No. 2 and had some very good response to that. Any news?

DP: Well, we’ve had a very good year. Obviously since we talked in January we’ve released a few new titles, with Star Trek being our current title. We also introduced Metallica. That was an interesting experience. People touring the factory today can see what Star Trek Limited Edition (LE) will look like.

They can’t play it, but we think this is going to be a great game for players. We’re very excited about it. We have a full slate of games planned for 2014 and 2015. We’re growing. Business continues to be strong. We’re out of space in our factory and product development areas, so we’re looking for more.

PM: So this space problem, does that mean you will be moving?

DP: We’re not sure. We have to figure out some way to add

more space and that can take a number of forms. We might move. We might add additional space somewhere in the neighborhood, maybe another building.

PM: You just said that Metallica was an interesting experience. That sounds like not everything went as planned.

DP: It was an interesting experience because we made a decision to only sell 500 of the LE’s and there was demand well in excess of 500. So we don’t think we managed that process as well as we could have. We’ve actually made a lot of changes in how we allocate, and how we decide on how many LE’s to build. That process was implemented with Star Trek LE. Today we’re not in the market yet with Star Trek LE, but we think the process was smoother than with Metallica LE. We’ll continue to evolve our processes as we move forward with the goal of better serving the community.

PM: After what happened with Metallica a number of smaller distributors was cut off. How is that going to work in you and people’s favor? Basically you have less outlets to sell to, which seems odd to me. As an investor I would expect you’d be happy with as many distributors as possible. The cut off distributors most

likely have to buy their games from another distributor, which means another markup in the chain and a raised price for the home user. That doesn’t sound like it will help sell more games either. Can you elaborate on the decision to cut off these smaller distributors?

DP: As I mentioned, demand for Metallica LE greatly exceeded our expectations. So some customers were disappointed.

We’re not happy about that.

PM: Obviously Metallica and Star Trek have a completely different following. I can see that Metallica fans would be more interested in a pinball machine than Star Trek fans.

DP: That could be true, I’m not sure. Ultimately we’ll find out.

The market will tell us.

PM: The rumor is that the Star Trek LE already sold out.

DP: Yeah, well, we have no place further to go with the LE. Demand has been very strong. So basically we’ve done what we’re going to do with the LE. PM: I’m not sure what you’re saying. If you say you’ve

got no place to go with the LE’s, that sounds like nobody wants them. Is that the case?

DP: Not at all. To the contrary, we can’t build them fast enough.

PM: You did a second premium with Metallica.

DP: Yeah, we were reacting to the unexpectedly high demand for Metallica LE. So we introduced the “Monster” version of the Premium in response to market demand. Market demand is tough to predict. Take Star Trek for example. Up until today nobody had actually seen the Star Trek LE. A lot of the initial reactions to the Star Trek Pro model were less than positive, but once people started playing the Pro all of the views started to turn around. We’ll wait and see. Once Star Trek LE is out in the wild we’ll take it from there. We do have a Premium model that we’re planning on building at the end of the LE run.

PM: The negative feedback you mention is easily linked to the first video of the game that was released.

That only contained a moving photo of the playfield, and a picture of the Pro, LE and Premium cabinets.

No actual game play, not even parts of the lightshow.

Obviously people we’re expecting to see more and that video was sort of a let down.

DP: Are you talking about the teaser video? The teaser video is meant to announce the game. It’s not meant to demonstrate gameplay or any features of the game. It just announces the game.

PM: Sure, but if such a video announces three models and you start taking orders for LE’s right away, people may want to see what they can expect in terms of game play and such. The LE’s are likely to sell out fast and without even video of gameplay it’s basically a gamble what you’re buying. But if you don’t buy it right away, it might be gone.

DP: We like to show gameplay as soon as we can. In the connected world in which we live, as soon as we get a Pro game, or an LE or whatever out into the world somebody’s going to make a video of that and put it on Youtube. Within an instant it’s around the world. There’s no way for us to change that. That’s going to happen and we recognize that it’s going to happen. What we should also recognize is that when we see early video of a game it’s not necessarily representative of how the game’s going to end up playing, or necessarily demonstrating all of the key features of the game. That’s not a problem that’s unique to pinball. That problem goes across industries.

Again, it’s just a reality of living in a connected world. Somebody will tweet a video of a test game they found in a bar.

That’s gonna happen.

PM: Earlier today I spoke with a Stern employee who mentioned you’re short on manpower in certain areas. Here’s your chance to advertise what you’re looking for.

DP: Actually I think we already publicly announced what we’re looking for. We’re clearly expanding because our business is growing. Right now we have several openings.

PM: Not for a software programmer?

DP: We had an opening for a programmer, but we just filled it. But we’ll have another opening next year because our staff continues to grow.

PM: You’ve mentioned the online forums. One of the returning topics is unfinished code on quite a list of games. Some are out of production and are not likely to get an update, but even the most recent games seem to be incomplete in terms of game code. You hired a new programmer but is that enough to solve this ongoing problem? Or do you have any plans to solve that problem? It’s clearly not taken well by the home user market, which is quite important for Stern these days.

DP: We continue to develop and upgrade code until the product design and development team is happy with the game play. They constantly receive suggestions from players on how to improve code and they consider those suggestions.

Many are incorporated. The rate at which code updates are provided on particular games varies depending on workloads.

Our policy is to support our games.

PM: One of the things we discussed earlier was the opportunity for Stern to take Whoa Nellie! Big Juicy Melons (an electromechanical game by designer Dennis Nordman and Stern artist Greg Freres) into production. Any news on that?

DP: As I said when we talked in London, this is definitely a game that we want to do, that we want to build. We’re working to make it happen. We still have a lot of work to do in terms of getting it ready for production.

PM: So no news is good news?

DP: All good news. Generally speaking it has been a very good year. We’re going to exceed our plan for the year and are in the planning process for 2014. We expect continued growth and good things for next year.

The original 4-page interview with Dave Peterson is published in Pinball Magazine No. 2, which is still available in the Pinball Magazine web shop. Issue 2 features a career covering interview with pinball designer Dennis Nordman, with pinball artist Greg Freres chiming in on the games they did together. The cover story has lots of contributions by other pinball industry veterans. Other articles in the 188-page magazine include in-depth interviews on ColorDMD, Pinball News, Pinball Expo, The Pinball Arcade, Silverball Museum and much more.

See www.pinball-magazine.com for more details.