They already screwed a lot of people by not making PS4 cross-buy with PS3 and Vita.
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All Williams/Bally pinball machines unavailable in Pinball Arcade after June 30th (all platforms)
- Thread starter Shaneus
- Start date
They already screwed a lot of people by not making PS4 cross-buy with PS3 and Vita.
Possibly not their fault; could have been constrained by their licenses.
Just a heads up for people buying on Steam:
If you buy a whole season as DLC on the store page, the DLC gets registered to your Steam account.
If you buy a single table from inside TPA it will register to your Farsight account but it will NOT be registered to your Steam account.
If you buy a whole season as DLC on the store page, the DLC gets registered to your Steam account.
If you buy a single table from inside TPA it will register to your Farsight account but it will NOT be registered to your Steam account.
There are no egregious misfires in the Season One table pack, I enjoy all of those tables immensely.
And Steam. In Pinball FX, I could unlock all the tables I bought in Zen Pinball on PS3. I'm really angry I had to buy the first 3 seasons of Pinball Arcade again on PC.
I was about to get some individual tables, does that mean there's less guarantee I keep them forever on my account then?
That's not really the same thing. You don't usually expect to get something for free because you bought it on another ecosystem. Whereas they already had cross-buy between PS3 and Vita, and then just decided to exclude PS4 from it. It was a real dick move.
Shame this is happening but it is what it is. I've always wanted a pinball machine in my house and was thinking about making a TV version down the line. Guess I should look into this as option soon
Yep, if you buy single tables and then Farsight goes down, you are out.
I saw this heads up earlier in the thread but thank you for posting it again.
I only want to buy seasons anyways, but this seems like an actual danger. I had wondered how they implemented the single table sales. I wonder if the console versions work the same way?
If I remember right their reasoning at the time was because it was a large jump in graphics from the PS3/Vita version lol, with the enhanced lighting and night modes...
This is the shittiest news, those are the two companies that make TPA what it is for me. I've got 2 or 3 seasons, I guess I need to make sure I get the rest I want soon. :/
Fuck, I think I've bought several individual packs on PC.
Ugh, Season One is clearly a must-buy for me, but outside of this season only Terminator 2: Judgement Day (I want it so badly) and maybe The Addams Family caught my attention.
I don't want to buy a whole season for a single table.
I have a bunch of tables on various platforms. To get the tables I am missing, but want the most, on all the platforms I use would cost at least a couple hundred bucks at full price even if buying single tables. Sigh. Should have used the most recent sales on each platform.
If the table is tied to your FarSight account to restore, yes. If you delete the app, then re-download it, and select restore purchases, what you get is all you'll get when they go down. I know the iOS app has a Farsight account login for redeeming stuff like the KS rewards, so those will be lost I believe, since you won't be able to use that function once they drop those servers.
To be fair I'm not even sure you'll be able to download the tables, I don't think those are saved in the App Store ecosystem, but on their own servers? That's just the impression I got from how damn slow they downloaded when I used the app a while ago.
So when they discontinue the app completely, and go out of business, I believe it will be delisted and you'll be unable to play any tables beyond the basic one, if that's true.
IOS is the worst around FWIW.
I have legally bought IOS games (from Llamasoft) that have been delisted that I cannot ever legally download again, ever. Even on my iPad which runs 32-bit IOS (these games were never upgraded to 64-bit executables. The games were lost when my iPad died and needed a full system restore.
Apple's "solution" is that I should have retained a (literal binary file content, not license) backup of these installations to restore from. They cannot be restored from the store once delisted. This isn't even in-game content like we're talking about here from Farsight.
Do not ever, ever assume that you will be able to re-download delisted content from the App Store.
I've got Xbox 360 games and content that was delisted years ago that I can still download from my purchase history, unlike IOS.
I mean who would have thought that FarSight will lose the license for the Williamls/Bally pinball machines so quickly?
sigh
Shame to see so many must have lists NOT including Bram Stokers Dracula.
Also I was just reading the Spidey cover issue of Game Informer and they had an article about a company that has been making videogame skill based machines for gambling and the casinos have latched on as it has opened up avenues to younger demographics in the slot market, enough so that the company is now working with Bandai Namco on a pac man championship edition with gambling elements. Wonder if something like that might be involved in whatever is happening here?
Would be a shame if it was after all the years of fighting to keep pinball machines out of the gambling device classification.
Also I was just reading the Spidey cover issue of Game Informer and they had an article about a company that has been making videogame skill based machines for gambling and the casinos have latched on as it has opened up avenues to younger demographics in the slot market, enough so that the company is now working with Bandai Namco on a pac man championship edition with gambling elements. Wonder if something like that might be involved in whatever is happening here?
Would be a shame if it was after all the years of fighting to keep pinball machines out of the gambling device classification.
Such a shame. I have not even got to Pinball Arcade as I still have so many untouched tables in FX2/3. For a very short while I held the Twilight Zone-record at uni. Those were the days. Some mechanical engineering students serviced 2-3 tables around a lecture hall where you could play for only a dime in the early 2000:s. :)
I could totally see this being the case. I certainly don't expect anything good to come of the license.
This is terrible news. I've read that there will be no more seasons after 7 either - so I don't know if that means Pinball Arcade is dead now, or if they will only be releasing individual tables for it.
While I never liked that they didn't figure out a way to get cross-platform ownership working, the way they handled Kickstarter rewards (I never did get a working code for Twilight Zone), that they split Stern tables out into their own app (which I haven't even looked at), and there have always been technical problems because it seemed like they were biting off far more than they could chew with the number of platforms they supported... it was still good while it lasted.
It sounds negative when I write things out like that, but the sheer amount of great tables that they had, and how well they played, was unrivaled.
Theatre of Magic is probably my all-time favorite pinball table. Cirqus Voltaire and Monster Bash are up there too.
There really are so many great tables in Pinball Arcade though - it's ridiculous.
While I never liked that they didn't figure out a way to get cross-platform ownership working, the way they handled Kickstarter rewards (I never did get a working code for Twilight Zone), that they split Stern tables out into their own app (which I haven't even looked at), and there have always been technical problems because it seemed like they were biting off far more than they could chew with the number of platforms they supported... it was still good while it lasted.
It sounds negative when I write things out like that, but the sheer amount of great tables that they had, and how well they played, was unrivaled.
Too true...
On iOS there was originally a free and paid version of the app, but I think most of the newer releases have been "free to play" with TotAN included.
Without telling you to just buy several seasons (though it sounds like you should be buying seasons if you're on Steam) if I was picking three tables:
Theatre of Magic is probably my all-time favorite pinball table. Cirqus Voltaire and Monster Bash are up there too.
There really are so many great tables in Pinball Arcade though - it's ridiculous.
I've seen a few people post messages like these and I can't get behind them at all. Farsight is the only player in the game, and despite their many problems, this licensing debacle is fucking over fans way more than Farsight ever did. This sucks for everyone.
Would be rather ironic given how Bally, Williams, and Midway were all western arcade powerhouses back in the day. It's criminal that nobody is rereleasing those classics with all the retro gaming going on nowadays.
Just about anything by Steve Ritchie (the voice of Shao Khan!) and Pat Lawlor. I'm also partial to the Elvira tables. Medieval Madness is a classic, and Monster Bash and Attack From Mars are also great. Creature from the Black Lagoon is worth playing if you can get over that it was developed by a child pornographer...
Season 1 has most of the best Bally/Williams tables. Theatre of Magic, Medieval Madness, Attack From Mars, Cirqus Voltaire and Bride of Pinbot are all excellent. ToM is my favorite table ever.
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I'd almost have to give the second best music ever to Swords of Fury (also by Brian Schmidt, who did the music for Crue Ball on Genesis and some of the Strike games as well):
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Do you need these? If you're jailbroken I still have them on an old iPad (I think, there are 9 games) I could backup and upload or something.
I've had seasons 1 and 2 on PC (and PS4, along with a couple extra tables) for a long time, gonna buy Season 3, 4, and 6. Of course, this is our little secret, don't need to let the wife know.
This some really crappy news in terms of pinball preservation. Although, it was always in a weird place with Farsight's curation.
I wish we would have known earlier now that these won't be on sale before delisting. I would have picked up the first couple seasons on additional platforms. It really kills the value proposition.
I can only dream that this means they double down on the modern Stern tables, and maybe find sone work arounds to the LCD screens. I'd take the Maiden table without the video which is kinda rough anyway.
I wish we would have known earlier now that these won't be on sale before delisting. I would have picked up the first couple seasons on additional platforms. It really kills the value proposition.
I can only dream that this means they double down on the modern Stern tables, and maybe find sone work arounds to the LCD screens. I'd take the Maiden table without the video which is kinda rough anyway.
Should be fine since you're buying them for your PSN account and not Farsight's own account system.
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From Pinside:
Scientific Games FWIW is a company solely devoted to the production of slot machines. So money is almost literally nothing to them.
With that article regarding someone moving up in the company, from earlier, I'd have to think they let them expire to use them themselves, or outsource, to be digitally recreated. Even if they say, wanted to use some materials for their own gambling devices, that wouldn't directly waterdown the use of those licenses via TPA.
As long as I can eventually get these for Switch from some other company, I'm happy.
If this is just a case of Farsight screwing up horribly, it's another story altogether. The fact that they even released it on Switch without clearing any of the licenses is absolutely insane to me. How do you not know that would happen?
If this is just a case of Farsight screwing up horribly, it's another story altogether. The fact that they even released it on Switch without clearing any of the licenses is absolutely insane to me. How do you not know that would happen?
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No other developer is going to release/port tables to any platform in the future. There's no money in it and individual parts for each table need to be scanned and modeled, not to mention the emulation for the ROMs, the physics, the engine, the lighting and the sounds.
The only way anyone will be able to play these tables on the Switch is if there's somehow a port of Pinball Arcade for the nVidia Shield that's hacked to run on CFW because they're basically the same hardware.
The only way anyone will be able to play these tables on the Switch is if there's somehow a port of Pinball Arcade for the nVidia Shield that's hacked to run on CFW because they're basically the same hardware.
Fuck. I remember downloading the game on IOS, not sure i had purchase any, i dont remember, but its list as purchased owned after restore purchase, Arabian Nights, Medieval Madness, Theater of Magic, Ripley, Voltaire, Funhouse. The three tables i want to keep are there. Will they remain there?? I just dont remember buying, perhaps they were free at the beginning and they are list as owned?? I want to make sure Arabian Nights will remain, the data seem attach to the app, i cannot delete it in the data,
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I would really caution against buying anything on iOS. Assuming they delist the app down the road, I think you'll be unable to download it and unable to download any purchased tables for it, because the app is only like 40MBs or something, and the tables are downloaded from FarSight's servers I believe.
Happens more often than you think. Business can be petty because it's based on relationships more than logic and data most of the time.