The Over-Monetized Pinball FX Reboot is Now on PS5

Remember when digital pinball was good?

Alex Rowe
6 min readMar 12, 2023
Pinball FX’s disgusting set of pinball token purchase options.
Be wary of any game that offers a one hundred dollar currency pack. PS5 screenshot taken by the author.

A year ago, Zen Studios rebooted their iconic Pinball FX platform on PC. Wait, they rebooted a platform? That’s right. Although the previous games in the series could carry over your purchases in order to reward the community and build up a fanbase, this new version made everyone start over.

It also added performance intensive ray traced graphics that many fans in the community weren’t happy with, especially those that had built bespoke affordable digital pinball rigs into large standup cabinets. The system requirements got a huge bump upwards, and now Zen wanted you to buy all of your tables again.

Don’t want to spend tons of money getting content you already owned before? Why, then you could simply subscribe to the Pinball Pass. For the absurd price of fifteen dollars a month or a hundred bucks a year, you’d get access to most of the tables — except for a few from Disney that they weren’t able to negotiate as part of the package.

I thought this whole thing was a mess on PC last year and said as much in my original piece about it. Now, it’s a year later and the Pinball FX reboot has come to console platforms. Has anything changed for the better?

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Alex Rowe

I write about gaming, tech, music, and their industries. I have a background in video production, and I used to review games for a computer magazine.