That's weird, this company seems to be named Funsup not American Pinball. Its almost as if exactly what we've been saying is happening, is happening.... again. But you know, twist up the things we've been saying however you need to cope.

Looks like AP will be under the Funsup umbrella. Happy to see that factory will still be churning out games in the future!

Zero cope over here. I've always said, the more pinball the better!

Glad for that. I wonder either way if they'll be supporting them, or if someone contracts with them if they'll be responsible for their own support ?

LTG : )

I'm sure those questions will be answered in the future, but for now I'm just happy the prognosticators in here were wrong.

More pinball, more happiness!

Per that website they still intend to still produce pinball machines under a contracted process, possibly with licenses as well under the AP label. This kinda makes sense given that CupHead technically falls under this umbrella as it was a contracted game.

Their previous marketing guy had said some major music celebrity’s estate had approached AP about making a game he said would have turned the company around as the artist was that legendary. He didn’t stay long enough to know if AP did proceed with that project or not, but he said the artist was top tier AAA level. Apparently game 8 is in some sort of active development as well, so maybe things are still moving along as they should.

Funsup discovery courtesy of today's Pinball Show patreon segment. More info there from email sent to dealers

Who's left to design a pin?

I saw game #8. Looks interesting, that's for sure!

I'm not. Many people here back a guy just like that throughout his history. Self first, empathy sometimes, if it doesn't interfere with self and/or money. But then, the flip side of that is if you decided to not buy something from everyone who wasn't on the 100%, you wouldn't have much.

gonna leak photos of that one too?

?????

Get ready for the GTF price bump

Galactic Tank Force Overdrive

I thought you were working for AP providing technical support?

I am.

No idea how this will work out for contract building.

LTG : )

Seems like a convenient way to avoid paying anything out on the AP lawsuit(s) and employee back pay. Instead of sending more Aimtron money into AP to keep it alive, then having judgment(s) against profits, leave AP for dead, put all the new investment in Funsup, and then AP is underwater on paper, despite any profits made from Funsup on licensed or transferred AP IP. We'll see, I guess.

some needs to dump and post the full restore images for all of the AP games.

I’m sure all of the AP employees can’t wait to build games for this new venture!

Ssounds like they will be for sure making games.. not necessarily pinball. They are already making arcade cabinets (not full arcade games), and I remember they made like one redemption game during covid (redemption games don't require a lot of assembly or logic, but are highly profitable) so I guarantee they'll be all over that (probably shouldn't have fired the guy that worked at ICE, a redemption company). The odds of them still building NEW pinballs is very unlikely. If they build pinball at all, it'll be attempting to build game #8 (no engineer to fix issues means they'll struggle), or they'll rebrand existing games that they know how to manufacture (have workers in india do art and code).

Can't you just use Clonezilla to copy an existing AP hard drive to an image file that can be restored to any hard drive on demand?

I think the idea of having a company that could build already amazing homebrews in a professional way to get it into the market is kinda cool. Maybe they pump out some own designs here and there...

Are there more companies doing that? I like my LOV so far and this was a homebrew concept right?

Look at metroid, league of legends, sonic spinball or overwatch pinball. All of them I would rather buy then a commercial company release.

The problem will be the license. You don’t need a license for a homebrew but will require one, once you go into mass production. You then go to grab the license and it’s not available. Now you’re stuck with a machine designed around a specific theme and it’s not available.

I dunno about them making any profits what ever they do, the way they have run business the last few years. A name change or making a new shell to operate under will highly likely be more of the same.

But yes the arrangement of a new name is probably an attempt to try and get vendors of parts to maybe sell to them again. Hey look were a different customer for parts. They have tarnished themselves on all fronts...

There life in pinball is all but dead. Maybe they could sell cabinet arcades or something but you still need employees to churn stuff out. And we know how they handle that. But I would guess they would need less skill and engineering so maybe a workforce of converted burger flippers and dog groomers could get that done. As long as the company actually meets payroll on a regular defined basis they might have a half chance to do that. But based on ownership management I think thats no where near any reasonable probability if they run it like they did AP.

And yes , new name and shell of Funsup might be a way to leave AP for dead and avoid paying judgements, backpay etc that are out there.

What employees ? All 3 or 4 of them ???

Maybe they can snag some employees from the McDonalds, Burger King, Brandts, Reps and Lucky Burger places in Palatine

Never gonna happen. Who's going to professionally design the mechs and whatnot?

Thats not how any of this works lol.

Sure, in theory if you wanted to bring a homebrew to market it could work. In fact, if we ignore a lot of the major red flags (bad management, possible contract disputes, vendors who won't do business, ect), it does make sense in the right scenario. For example, the Road Trip game from Ramp's. This is also assuming you have the capital it would take. What it won't be providing is homebrewers to come out with just any old licensed theme they want. They'd still need all the proper licensing and approvals. I guess if somebody somehow managed to work out a deal for all the rights to the music and IP they needed AND had the super deep pockets it would take for that AND then also have more cash to hire the contract manufacturer it could happen, but thinking that would be the norm is absurd. Also lets not forget that at the end of the day they'd still want to make a profit. You're living in dreamland, not reality.

Nice choice of a business name for them....

Funsup - The fun is Up when employees don't get paid or are laid off. Cool name for a company when things go bad.

"Hey Ralph , Fun's up. You don't work here anymore "

This would only work for unlicensed titles and it would be quite the undertaking. A home builder could never get a licensed IP.

The person designing the game (home brewer) would have to design the mechs or use off the shelf mechs.
You'd also need music, sound work, art, ramp and guide design.
You would have to provide the cad work.
You would need a programmer, engineer, artist at a minimum from AP.
You would need a support agreement.

Maybe AP could provide contracted art since they have an inhouse artist.
Maybe AP could provide contracted sound work since they have a remote sound engineer.
Maybe AP could provide a programmer inhouse or remote to help with implementation to production.
Maybe AP could provide support if they did the manufacturing.
I highly doubt the games could be routed though unless coinage rules, electronics and implementation would be agreed upon.

You would need a pinball framework to code the game. This would need to work with the AP electronics. This framework would be needed to be familar to the contracted programmer at AP.

AP could provide standard AP electronics, computer, OS, lighting and assembly.

I imagine deposits would need to be made by the builder and an agreement.

Interesting concept but it is a long road to take a home brew and make it to production.

Yep, he saw it!

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I hear there may be an influx of former IRS employees looking for work?

This is contract manufacturing and this new firm will gladly build your homebrew or other machine. You bring a totally ready to build design, you handle and pay any licensing, you handle the engineering, art, coding, or pay them, up front, IF they have those services available and you provide ALL of the funding for the build. You sell the machines, you provide support and warranty to your customers.

Aimtron/AP/whatever wants zero risk, they don’t want to have to worry if a game will sell. They just want to be paid to build them.

So if you have a fully engineered and developed game that you want built and have ALL the funding and believe that they can still deliver a quality product, which is no longer a given, and you are willing to take on all the risk, including doing business with the Vasani’s, then this might be an opportunity for you.

My expectation is that going forward AP/Aimtron/whatever will be nothing more than an occasional side show in the world of pinball. I expect we will see cuphead and maybe they try to get this other game out, but doubt we see any other AP titles beyond that, as I don’t see them interested in the risk of investing more money in their own titles.

well someone needs to do that before it fails. And stern and JJP have them on there own websites today.

rights and IP issues will put an quick stop to that.

Former IRS employees burnt once. Don't want to burnt twice. For them the The Fun is Up already.

Better chance recruiting those Burger joint people. They are used to being flame broiled and know the risks of being burnt. They may have even experienced or seen a dumpster fire before.

.....that was sort of my joke.

Oh yeah - I picked up on that.

I believe I have posted before, that I have build images for all of the games I worked on if they go NLA from AP, other than GTF as we had not gotten to that before we parted ways. While there are some nuances to it, easy enough to create them for later games using a functioning SSD as a source. Heck any drive duplicator could be used as well, so this would not be my worry as an AP game owner.

You’d need to have deep pockets to have your homebrew made …

If licenced - $50k starting price plus music and actors on top of that. Everyone is holding their hands out. If you can even get the licence in the first place (you probably can’t)

Then say you wanted to make 100 games that you could sell.

Let’s throw a contract price of $5500 for a stern pro level game. (Hey, could be $5000 … adjust the calculations to suit)

You need to pay probably 30% up front before they even start. So that’s $165,000 (plus any tax) for the deposit.

Then you’ll have to pay the balance of $385,000 plus any tax as soon as they’ve finished.

Now you have $550,000 worth (plus all the licencing costs, if any) games in a warehouse (that also costs a lot of money to rent) that you have to try and sell.

At the end of the day, you might make say $1000 a game?

So you’re investing $550-650 thousand dollars, to make $100,000. Presuming you sell all hundred games. Depending on the retail you’re asking, you’d probably need to sell 90 games just to break even.

You’d need to be able to finance 650,000 bucks up front and sit on that amount for 12-24 months. Of course if you loan the money, you have interest on top of that.

And if you don’t sell all 100 games - you lose your house that you borrowed against.

Gonna take some balls to do that!

rd

Let's simplify this a ton..

They are already a contract manufacturer. This is them creating a sales pitch to try to attract other contract manufacturing work including arcade games.

That's it.

They have space, they have employees doing other work, and they are going to keep shopping themselves as a supplier of contract manufacturing work. When they actually get a deal, they'll work out how to fulfill the contract... and the process will repeat as long as they get any deals.

But this is for all intents just Aimtron doing Aimtron things... those suggesting this is AP reborn or something is just foolish. The pinball company is on fumes.. and we gotta wait to see what they do with the WIP stuff they have.

People don't do this because it makes no financial sense to do so.

Pinball companies work because you design and build products to fit a supply chain, manufacturing model, and business model.

Homebrews can be spun up with great flexibility because they do not do the above... and hence are not compatible with just being thrown into some random manufacturer.

Just like Dutch had a complete prototype for Lewbowski, but had to redesign it all when they actually went to manufacturer it.

I believe RMS likes the attention he’s getting from this post. Just like ole greatwitchjohn on the other forum post. GreatwitchJohn reincarnated, now if we can get a daily beer count.

I’m trying to imagine who exactly would pick AP/Aimtron/Funsup/ThatAin’tGonnaWork.com to produce anything? How careless would you have to be in your due diligence to imagine that “they” could produce anything? Who is that, exactly? Unless you filter your search results for only RMS1977 postings? He’s quite certain that this cunning pivot is JUST the thing that going to turn it all around. Not that anything needs turning around because the new game is great and he got free springs.

You’d have to ignore a really large amount of red flags in your research to end up at, “These guys are going to crush this for us - let’s hire them!”

It’s pretty easy to create a webpage with a painful logo and some “borrowed” pictures. Actually manufacturing something is a just a wee bit harder. This is like the central tenet of Pinside. “Pinball is hard.”

I will say the 45 year old picture with a guy in bell bottoms in the new Funsup site’s “Arcade” factory pic is pretty sweet. Just don’t click on the link please.

It’s all over except the lawsuits, finger-pointing, bankruptcies, recriminations, Pinside posts of pictures of the factory being emptied in the middle of the night and somebody blaming Marty Robbins for most or all of it.

That's pretty damn funny!! lol

Please no.

Can't wait for Funsup merger with Thejigsup

This is a fairly optimistic view, but certainly a step towards reality. You have left out all of the upfront engineering, cost for CM services provided to get the game ready for production and don’t forget about costs for documentation/manual, packing materials, shipping to your warehouse, marketing, warrantee, spare parts, the list goes on and on. Plus at only 100 games there is little purchasing power. I also suspect a lot more than 30%, as Aimtron is not going to fund the purchasing of parts, they will not bet on your success.

LOV was a pretty complete game and AP still spent a ton of money and engineering time over several months to get it the line. Those costs would also be billed. Also keep in mind they have still not sold the original quantity that Fix claimed was sold out, easy to overestimate demand — thus why I say they have no interest in funding a build.

Unlike LOV this is not AP wanting to fund, engineer, build, market and sell your game. This is them providing assembly and engineering services for a fee, that is higher than most here realize. Possible some one gets a great license and has funding and is willing take the risk and can utilize rises serviced to avoid building an assembly line.

And someone that far along may actual realize they'd be better off selling the design... or decide to be a manufacturer on the scale of BoF.

Aimtron would be about supply chain, physical space, and assembly tooling I image. But if you are that far down the line on everything pinball and not looking for a one off.. I'd imagine someone would aspire to be a BoF/turner/whatever... else just sell the design.

At the bottom of Funsup's homepage, there are 4 "partner" logos. What are the 2 middle ones?

Retro Arcade: https://www.betson.com/manufacturers/retro-arcade/

Polycade: https://polycade.com/

These “Fun is Up” puns, haha. Really got the juice going with this discovery, love it!

Hey, let’s see if they can even get Cuphead to market at this point. It’s going to be almost two years until we see another game from AP at this point.

I think the Polycade seems to be doing well because my kid’s dentist office just got one for their waiting room. Someone else in another chat said he saw one on a cruise ship. They might have something going there.