Farsight Studios (The Pinball Arcade) lost this license a couple months back. Now Zen Studios has the license. Apparently you can already play a few tables on Steam. While it's hard to do pinball justice digitally, it is cool to see someone besides hobbyists get a shot at remaking the greats.

https://www.polygon.com/2018/9/4/...

Very cool! I'm glad they're picking up the ball!

Cool! I wonder if this means cabinet mode will be supported.

Something sounds fishy here, as the rights holder refused to renew with Farsight, versus there being any sort of price negotiation that fell through, a bidding war after the license lapsed, etc. Maybe Farsight got back doored by the new guys? Here's hoping they don't get access to all of the models, assets, etc. that Farsight created/developed while they had the license. I know this might seem petty, but with a lot of the Bally/Midway tables that Farsight did, they shelled out money to parties other than WMS Industries (the Bally/Williams pinball trademark holder) to get them done. I personally participated in the Kickstarter that brought Addams Family Pinball to life digitally, and am aware of several others that happened so that all the proper rights could be obtained from all parties. If the new guys get to not only back door Farsight but get all their hard work, too? Ugh.

Ehh I'm glad, and there are certain tables that those Farsight fools overlooked that I think Zen will latch onto. They already are knee deep in Disney so some stuff seems pretty obvious, especially watching their teaser video, that should be coming likely in 2019 between the tables lined up and the stack of manuals too.

I was tiring of farsight with how they were handling their releases and starting to hose people on the value of the bundles going from 20 games down to 10 for the same value, then started taking the 2 for $5 down to $5 a piece. They really felt like they were taking advantage of their unique position and whatever happened did, and now they got to deal with the fact many of the most memorable tables made they lost access to and I think it likely serves them right too. I feel the opposite to where I think they had it kind of coming seeing the groaning about them for years now online by some more hardcore non casual pinball fans. I get feeling bad about helping them license some tables, but you did get them, and do still enjoy them so it's not a loss. This is a gain.

Hopefully they stick to their model of how they put tables out individually or bundled, it should make them far more popular if they don't foul up the core physics needed to handle these games with the care and respect that farsight did in that end of things.