If Planetary Pinball were to use the Spike System, it would have come with a cost. From my limited understanding of the Stern build, Planetary Subcontract to Chicago Gaming, which intern Chicago Gaming then subcontracted Stern to do the assembly and presumably sourced the hardware from various other subcontracts. I don't who did the board & software porting design: Planetary or Chicago Gaming.
But the more teired levels of subcontracting you have, the more it costs for many reasons. So to Crafty's thoughts of why not use the Stern Spike system, that answer would likely be, it would have added to the cost, such that almost everything is now Stern, so there would be no room for Chicago Gaming and Planetary Pinball to make a buck - though would be bringing nothing to the party.
But what I do wonder is if for the next Planetary Pinball game, why wouldn't Plenary just go straight to Stern, and cut out the middle man being Chicago Gaming. Then you could afford to give Stern a bigger slice of the pie. Effectively Planetary could just sit back and 'licence' the game completely to Stern and perhaps separately subcontract the cabinet build, and take the licence fee for near Zero work and near zero risk. But Stern would want to do it of course.
...Stepping back a bit, the obvious solution for Planetary and Chicago Gaming would have been to simply use a Homespin board that tis design for this very purpose. No issue is porting of software! Alternatively there is also the Proc option which would have required the same level of effort for software porting as the current approach, but would have cost more.
But one thing we have all forgotten about is YES MMR looks stunning. I hope I find one in the wild to play.
