Thanks for taking the time to write this, interesting info and good to know a summary of the talk when i couldn't be at Pinfest this year.. I've heard fix talk at expo a few times to, so its 'with a pinch of salt' what he says I believe
The talk will be uploaded soon I believe
Thanks,
@Big Phil.
I’d wait for the talk,
@myPinballs, as what I’ve written’s not close to a summary
David Fix was talking for close to two hours (I left after ~ 90 minutes when he started running a trivia quiz to win
AP merch), covering quite a lot of ground in the process.
He spent a comparative lot of time talking about BBQ Challenge, despite admitting upfront this is was a pretty American-centric theme that probably didn’t resonate that well with a British audience. If I were him, I’d have spent the time talking about GTF (but, then again, BBQ Challenge is
AP’s new pin).
He also addressed some of the Pinside concerns about
AP, including rumours they were going bust and/or their parent company Aimtron were about to pull the plug. He said Aimtron see
AP as a growing concern that doesn’t have to make a profit every year, provided it’s on a general upward profit trend.
Also, he spent a lot of time on:
- What AP were doing to improve quality control (there’d been some complaints about the tank target mounting and a batch of magnetised balls);
- His work on building a strong team since he joined the company in 2020, and also;
- Addressing concerns about future repairability in light of the recent failure of Haggis Pinball. He talked about industry-standard parts, a commitment to long-term repairability and backward compatibility, his drive to improve customer service and have distributors stock replacement parts, etc.
Much of the QC stuff was relevant to people in the room - he was in audience dialogue for several minutes with
@mission65 and
@Mike Parkins who’d been stung by Heighway Pinball’s Full Throttle having a high percentage of non-industry-standard parts. David Fix apparently himself owns a Full Throttle.
He spent some time talking about high licensing costs and restrictions too, explaining that
AP is focusing on unlicensed themes as a means of keeping costs down, as that’s what Bally-Williams did starting out. He claims an unnamed company had to pay something like £2 million just to get the door open on the Harry Potter license, with (presumably) higher fees for individual sound/character assets, and that’s a big deal when a pin already costs £1.5 million in research and development. He said even cheaper licences can cost £100k upwards to open a conversation with the licensor, and then there are further costs if they want things changing.
He talked a lot without much chance for questions, which was a bit of a shame. I asked how
AP chooses their themes, and IIRC Houdini/GTF were chosen because magic- and space/B-movie themes traditionally sell well in pinball, and Oktoberfest/BBQ Challenge were because employees working on the projects were fans.
As I knew, going in, it was going to be a marketing pitch, I was listening to what he both chose to talk about and also *didn’t* talk about.
My takeaway was that he evidently views his buyer base (currently) as big collectors. He did a quick audience quiz before the talk started, and his first question was how many people owned 5, 10, 15, 20, 100, 150+ pins. I don’t know what he was expecting, but the numbers dropped down to an embarrassed-looking
@mission65 shortly after the 10-pin mark. There simply aren’t many mega-collectors here in the UK.
He also visibly name-checked the ‘death of pinball’ hypothesis, which runs that pinball sales are being sustained by a rapidly-aging cohort of nostalgia collectors and that - to recapture the magic - there needs to be work to grow the player base. I know that he’ll have pre-prepared the speech, but I found it a bit strange as Pinfest is as young demographically as I’ve seen it in the three years I’ve been attending and, although
@MajesticPinball and I aren’t exactly teens, we’re visibly under-50 and were literally sat in the front row! Anyway, it didn’t land quite right - rather as if you name-checked the aging population crisis in a room full of mums and babies, and then expected everyone present to nod along…
He also didn’t mention
AP’s gameplay philosophy in any substantive detail, which I found… interesting, to say the least.
That’s all I can remember off the top of my head. I believed everything he did say, and he’s visibly passionate about pinball, but I personally felt his marketing strategy was a bit off.
This means some Barry O's BBQ games coming to the U.K I hope?
