Are the days of Stern Pinball launching any new games with 1.0 code over?

There have reportedly been a few games in Stern Pinball’s history that they have launched with 1.0 code. If someone knows differently, please correct in the comments. If that did occur in the past, that doesn’t seem to be a priority recently, unfortunately.

This includes the first game of 2025, Dungeons & Dragons: The Tyrant’s Eye and, although we don’t know yet, will likely be the case with King Kong: Myth of Terror Island. Also, The Uncanny X-Men, John Wick, Jaws and even Metallica: Remastered. All of these games launched with unfinished code, some worse than others, and only one (Metallica: Remastered) finished the code. Even the oldest: Jaws is not completely finished a year later.

Ouch.

I’ve written and voiced in streams quite a few times now that this unfinished code at launch practice is a huge noose around Stern’s neck. It’s one glaring thing they do that hurts them. I like the vast majority of what Stern Pinball does, and our family bought three new in box games from them in 2024. I’m not writing any of this to hurt, rather to understand. At least attempt to understand.

Release games with finished code!

Stern might argue it helps them by doing what they’re doing, but most pinfolks, even non-pinfolks, do not understand the logic of launching a game that is unfinished.

And yet they keep doing it. And doing it. Doing it.

So frequently they do this, it seems like it just might be an active business practice. Let’s try to crowdsource reasons why they would want to launch with an unfinished game that costs $7,000-$13,000 USD?

They need the money from the initial sales to complete the game

Is the answer really this simple? If it is, then their operation is too fat. If they must launch a new game unfinished to take the initial launch sale dollars to pay coders to finish the game then why don’t they simply reduce the number of games they release?

The answer could also be simple: they wouldn’t make as much money if they released fewer titles. Duh, the beast that needs to be fed.

They need more new games to run on the factory line to keep the production staff working

If they don’t release a certain amount of new titles every year, it might actually cause them a financial hit with unused labor in the production staff for their new factory. So, by releasing X number of cornerstone games instead of a smaller Y number of games each calendar year, they keep the production team busy.

In that case, it does make a lot of financial sense for Stern to release games unfinished. We don’t have to like it, but it’s conceivable why they are doing this. And it helps their business to be more profitable by keeping the production line constantly running.

Will Stern Pinball ever release games with 1.0 complete code again?

The answer here, at least as of this writing, seems to be no. Why not? Will leave that to readers to ponder in the comments.