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NEWS: KanColle Arcade Credited With Returning Sega Machines to Profitability


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leafy sea dragon



Joined: 27 Oct 2009
Posts: 7163
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PostPosted: Mon May 15, 2017 2:32 pm Reply with quote
Hmm, so does that mean that it was Sammy/SEGA that was slumping, but the arcade machine business in Japan is actually growing? Though I wouldn't be surprised if arcade developers in Japan are much like the literature business in the west, propped up by a few mega-hits to compensate for the low sales of most of the rest of the output. (I don't know if Japanese arcade companies are actually like that.)

That does make me wonder now: When they report these profits and losses, do they count the redemption machines that are everywhere overseas? I mean, their Key Master and Barber Cut machines have been slowly but steadily wiping out the traditional claw machine in these parts. That's got to count for something for the company.
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Mr. Oshawott



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PostPosted: Mon May 15, 2017 4:33 pm Reply with quote
It seems that the popularity of KanColle Arcade is still riding at stratospheric levels...
I wonder when the title will start introducing new ship girls into the party...
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WANNFH



Joined: 13 Mar 2011
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PostPosted: Mon May 15, 2017 5:32 pm Reply with quote
Mr. Oshawott wrote:
It seems that the popularity of KanColle Arcade is still riding at stratospheric levels...
I wonder when the title will start introducing new ship girls into the party...


Well, KCA girls roster is growing every month with little updates - but the list is so huge, so the arcade game just covered only the original ship list and reward girls from the 2013 events for now (it introduced new Arcade event with Yamato as reward not so long ago). Also, there is no second modernisation models, and too much mechanics of the original game is not implemented... But well, it have actual and more engaging gameplay that original game lacks!
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Mr. Oshawott



Joined: 12 Mar 2012
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PostPosted: Mon May 15, 2017 7:06 pm Reply with quote
WANNFH wrote:
Well, KCA girls roster is growing every month with little updates - but the list is so huge, so the arcade game just covered only the original ship list and reward girls from the 2013 events for now (it introduced new Arcade event with Yamato as reward not so long ago). Also, there is no second modernisation models, and too much mechanics of the original game is not implemented...

If that's the case, then, at this rate, it could be quite a while before new characters start coming in...But perhaps that's a good thing for now...

Quote:
But well, it have actual and more engaging gameplay that original game lacks!

Agreed. The arcade version has plenty more going on with the 3D appearance of the ship girls and the interaction towards them.
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Kadmos1



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PostPosted: Tue May 16, 2017 2:04 am Reply with quote
Beyond the rise of AR/VR and DLC, why is the market for arcade games in the USA essentially dead?
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leafy sea dragon



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PostPosted: Tue May 16, 2017 4:29 am Reply with quote
Kadmos1 wrote:
Beyond the rise of AR/VR and DLC, why is the market for arcade games in the USA essentially dead?


That question, I'd say, is better rephrased as, "Why is the arcade game market still alive in Japan?," as Japan is one of the few countries left to have a large, profitable arcade scene. (Also, DLC is not a reason for the death of arcade games in the west--today's western-made arcade games are full of content updates and patches. AC/DC Pinball, for instance, had quarterly balance patches for two years.)

Rather, in Japan, arcades are largely seen as a hangout spot for teenagers, a reputation that I don't think really exists in any other culture, or at least one that did not die out with the rise of console gaming. In other countries, arcade attendance dropped with the rise of console and PC gaming, as people preferred (and still do) to pay a much higher one-time fee than to pay each time they want to play. The annoyance you see people exhibit with microtransactions over mobile gaming is the same annoyance people had with arcade gaming.

The one advantage arcades had over video gaming at home was improved hardware allowing for more advanced games than what was possible at home. When people were playing Super Mario Bros. at home, arcade games had pre-recorded voice clips and primitive 3-D-like predecessors to Mode 6 scaling. But as the years went on by, home consoles and PCs were catching up to what arcades could put out, and arcades hung on through the 90's by offering immersive experiences that would be expensive to replicate at home, such as driving games with steering wheels and manual shifting, and rhythm games involving rigorous movement like the Dance Dance Revolution series. Eventually though, even THESE games' novelty wore off.

I'd say the death knell for arcade gaming outside of Japan is the rise of easy, convenient online gaming, which allows for multiplayer whenever one wants. The arcade's most lasting appeal was that you could easily walk into one and find an opponent at some game in there, or play a fighting game or rhythm game or something and eventually find an opponent.

Japan's arcades, meanwhile, managed to hold up under that by being commonly agreed-upon places for groups of friends in high school to meet up after school, whereas in other countries they might meet up at a restaurant, or a café, or a park, or at one of their houses. Japan's arcades also managed to avoid the reputation of being seedy places where drug dealers and underage smokers hang out, so parents were perfectly fine with letting their kids stay there.
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Tuor_of_Gondolin



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PostPosted: Tue May 16, 2017 10:35 am Reply with quote
Another reason for the death of arcades in the US (I can't speak for other countries) is ever-increasing property values. Arcades are in buildings. Buildings are taxed. So, the owner of an arcade has to pay the rent/taxes on the property. The owner does this via the revenue he makes from the coin-ops he has, and thus he has to ensure he's making enough money to pay for his expenses, otherwise he goes out of business.

What was happening is that the amount of money an owner had to charge to play a game kept increasing. A quarter-a-game moved up to two, three, four, and even more in some cases, just to play a single game. This started to price gamers, especially younger gamers, out of being able to play much in an arcade.

At the same time, console gaming started to improve. This naturally led a lot of gamers to stay at home rather than go to an expensive arcade. In turn, this led to fewer and fewer people going to arcades, and so the death spiral began in earnest. These days, arcades are effectively dead in America. A shame, but nothing lasts forever.
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Megiddo



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PostPosted: Tue May 16, 2017 10:45 am Reply with quote
Japan's incredibly efficient transportation system means that teens can get together in places relatively far away from their suburban homes. Without the rail system there's no way that arcades would have survived/thrived as they have.
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Mr. Oshawott



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PostPosted: Tue May 16, 2017 11:01 am Reply with quote
At least I got a chance to relive my old days of the Arcade era by playing an old Pac-Man/Galaga arcade machine at a barber shop that I visited around three weeks earlier...
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leafy sea dragon



Joined: 27 Oct 2009
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PostPosted: Tue May 16, 2017 12:17 pm Reply with quote
Tuor_of_Gondolin wrote:
Another reason for the death of arcades in the US (I can't speak for other countries) is ever-increasing property values. Arcades are in buildings. Buildings are taxed. So, the owner of an arcade has to pay the rent/taxes on the property. The owner does this via the revenue he makes from the coin-ops he has, and thus he has to ensure he's making enough money to pay for his expenses, otherwise he goes out of business.

What was happening is that the amount of money an owner had to charge to play a game kept increasing. A quarter-a-game moved up to two, three, four, and even more in some cases, just to play a single game. This started to price gamers, especially younger gamers, out of being able to play much in an arcade.

At the same time, console gaming started to improve. This naturally led a lot of gamers to stay at home rather than go to an expensive arcade. In turn, this led to fewer and fewer people going to arcades, and so the death spiral began in earnest. These days, arcades are effectively dead in America. A shame, but nothing lasts forever.


That's a good point also (and arcades weren't the only type of business that got killed by that), that the time arcades were disappearing quickest was around the time that the real estate bubble was expanding, with property values becoming twice, triple, or more their original price. (The value for my house increased fourfold during then and, had the other waves actually reached our town, it would've become sixfold.) As people cut back on their spending to pay for rent and the resulting higher prices for everything else, entertainment is typically the first to go. That might also explain why some arcades based on pre-loaded cards rather than quarters or tokens continued to remain relatively stable during the Great Recession, such as Dave & Busters: People might not realize they're paying up to $5 to play a game because the cards convert the pre-loaded money into their own units. And a lot of people are drunk at Dave & Busters.

Speaking of which, the barcade scene kind of grew out of the ashes of the traditional arcade, one in which there are a lot of arcade games in one room and a bar on the other, combining two types of establishments seen as social hangout spots to kill time. The American arcade fans who refuse to play home gaming (yes, they do exist) have mostly concentrated themselves at these places, and the barcade has become such a key part of arcade gaming, particularly in cities like Seattle and Munich (each of which have dozens and dozens of barcades), that they now mentally associate arcade gaming with the bar environment.

Megiddo wrote:
Japan's incredibly efficient transportation system means that teens can get together in places relatively far away from their suburban homes. Without the rail system there's no way that arcades would have survived/thrived as they have.


You're right. It'd be unimaginable for teenagers in large American cities like Phoenix or New Orleans to have one central meeting spot from all around the metropolitan area. Though anime always seems to depict the characters at an arcade that happens to be along the route back from school.
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H. Guderian



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PostPosted: Wed May 17, 2017 10:49 pm Reply with quote
I would agree, it is more about Logistics than hardware.

Also I remember interviews with Salarymen who frequented arcades, and why they were dedicated to a dying entertainment form. Japan has an appreciation for the transient things in life. Even if they're old, even if they're outdated, some people have identity staked to those arcades. I'm a half hour out from Boston, and we have one, soon to be two (I hear) arcades in my city. No one speaks of them, and certainly no one is frequenting them with the determination to come back daily, or weekly, until either they or the arcade dies.

We're just not wedded to the idea of arcades.

Now on to Hardware, our Mall in town has an arcade, and apart from the new one rumored to be goign into a huge entertainment complex under construction, in the mall they put up, right in the middle, some big flashy enclosed arcade booths for things like The Walking Dead. Even in the arcade itself many of the units seem to be centered around those large screen cinematic experiences. Meanwhile one or two of the DDR machines are out of order. There's a Pac-man machine tucked into a corner with a poorly responding set of controls.

Our arcade culture mimics our console gaming culture. Hollywood Wannabe Cinematic Experiences.

But what do you see in every anime that has a scene in a mall? Fighting games where you can just drop in and play other people. Ideally located games where a Salaryman or kid can walk by and drop a few dollars to blow off steam. While much of Arcades are still solo experiences, there's not much of a drive to make them a community center.
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StudioToledo



Joined: 16 Aug 2006
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Location: Toledo, U.S.A.
PostPosted: Fri May 19, 2017 9:56 pm Reply with quote
Kadmos1 wrote:
Beyond the rise of AR/VR and DLC, why is the market for arcade games in the USA essentially dead?

Nobody wants to be the first to try a vinyl-like jumpstart.

leafy sea dragon wrote:
Rather, in Japan, arcades are largely seen as a hangout spot for teenagers, a reputation that I don't think really exists in any other culture, or at least one that did not die out with the rise of console gaming.

It tried over here back in the 80's, arcades was often billed that way, much like the drug store soda fountain was a century ago.

Quote:
In other countries, arcade attendance dropped with the rise of console and PC gaming, as people preferred (and still do) to pay a much higher one-time fee than to pay each time they want to play. The annoyance you see people exhibit with microtransactions over mobile gaming is the same annoyance people had with arcade gaming.

Which seems pathetic in retrospect unless the sort of incomes we see today aren't what they had been during a Cold War era when kids still had allowances and there was always a case for those vendors and other stores to see to 'robbing' a little.

Quote:
The one advantage arcades had over video gaming at home was improved hardware allowing for more advanced games than what was possible at home. When people were playing Super Mario Bros. at home, arcade games had pre-recorded voice clips and primitive 3-D-like predecessors to Mode 6 scaling. But as the years went on by, home consoles and PCs were catching up to what arcades could put out, and arcades hung on through the 90's by offering immersive experiences that would be expensive to replicate at home, such as driving games with steering wheels and manual shifting, and rhythm games involving rigorous movement like the Dance Dance Revolution series. Eventually though, even THESE games' novelty wore off.

They still try. Bandai Namco's Star Wars Battle Pods are a neat item to check out.

Quote:
I'd say the death knell for arcade gaming outside of Japan is the rise of easy, convenient online gaming, which allows for multiplayer whenever one wants. The arcade's most lasting appeal was that you could easily walk into one and find an opponent at some game in there, or play a fighting game or rhythm game or something and eventually find an opponent.

Which I wouldn't mind at all, I suppose kids don't want to have the sort of friends like I did.

Quote:
Japan's arcades, meanwhile, managed to hold up under that by being commonly agreed-upon places for groups of friends in high school to meet up after school, whereas in other countries they might meet up at a restaurant, or a café, or a park, or at one of their houses. Japan's arcades also managed to avoid the reputation of being seedy places where drug dealers and underage smokers hang out, so parents were perfectly fine with letting their kids stay there.

Those people do spoil it for the bunch. I wouldn't it again but people are a--holes to say the least.

Tuor_of_Gondolin wrote:
Another reason for the death of arcades in the US (I can't speak for other countries) is ever-increasing property values. Arcades are in buildings. Buildings are taxed. So, the owner of an arcade has to pay the rent/taxes on the property. The owner does this via the revenue he makes from the coin-ops he has, and thus he has to ensure he's making enough money to pay for his expenses, otherwise he goes out of business.

This is no different than what happened to drive-in theaters during the end of the 20th century. My town once had a dozen of 'em during the 70's. Now, only one.

Quote:
What was happening is that the amount of money an owner had to charge to play a game kept increasing. A quarter-a-game moved up to two, three, four, and even more in some cases, just to play a single game. This started to price gamers, especially younger gamers, out of being able to play much in an arcade.

Inflation is a bitch.

Quote:
At the same time, console gaming started to improve. This naturally led a lot of gamers to stay at home rather than go to an expensive arcade. In turn, this led to fewer and fewer people going to arcades, and so the death spiral began in earnest. These days, arcades are effectively dead in America. A shame, but nothing lasts forever.

Which is pathetic, really, I'm certain what we have today will be gone soon enough (except vinyl).

Megiddo wrote:
Japan's incredibly efficient transportation system means that teens can get together in places relatively far away from their suburban homes. Without the rail system there's no way that arcades would have survived/thrived as they have.

Let's see you try to convince potential taxpayers on wanting to pull that here in the US. Most can't even comprehend not having a car anymore it seems. Rather we went back to interurban trolleys personally.
http://www.toledoblade.com/frontpage/2007/05/27/Toledo-was-hub-of-interurban-100-years-ago.html

Mr. Oshawott wrote:
At least I got a chance to relive my old days of the Arcade era by playing an old Pac-Man/Galaga arcade machine at a barber shop that I visited around three weeks earlier...

I had it best growing up in the 80's, the sort of stories I can tell my grandkids one day (if I ever have any). Lately, it's nice if I bother going out to a Dave & Buster's since it's nearly there besides whatever noob titles I'm not interested in (never any shmup's).

leafy sea dragon wrote:
What was happening is that the amount of money an owner had to charge to play a game kept increasing. A quarter-a-game moved up to two, three, four, and even more in some cases, just to play a single game. This started to price gamers, especially younger gamers, out of being able to play much in an arcade.

Capitalism is a bitch.

Quote:
That's a good point also (and arcades weren't the only type of business that got killed by that), that the time arcades were disappearing quickest was around the time that the real estate bubble was expanding, with property values becoming twice, triple, or more their original price. (The value for my house increased fourfold during then and, had the other waves actually reached our town, it would've become sixfold.) As people cut back on their spending to pay for rent and the resulting higher prices for everything else, entertainment is typically the first to go. That might also explain why some arcades based on pre-loaded cards rather than quarters or tokens continued to remain relatively stable during the Great Recession, such as Dave & Busters:

I'm surprised we're starting to call it "The Great Recession" at all, but I guess that's been coined lately.

Quote:
People might not realize they're paying up to $5 to play a game because the cards convert the pre-loaded money into their own units. And a lot of people are drunk at Dave & Busters.

Pfft, probably. I have the sense to notice how much goes into running those places.

Quote:
Speaking of which, the barcade scene kind of grew out of the ashes of the traditional arcade, one in which there are a lot of arcade games in one room and a bar on the other, combining two types of establishments seen as social hangout spots to kill time. The American arcade fans who refuse to play home gaming (yes, they do exist) have mostly concentrated themselves at these places, and the barcade has become such a key part of arcade gaming, particularly in cities like Seattle and Munich (each of which have dozens and dozens of barcades), that they now mentally associate arcade gaming with the bar environment.

It's always been like that since the days of pinball.

Quote:
You're right. It'd be unimaginable for teenagers in large American cities like Phoenix or New Orleans to have one central meeting spot from all around the metropolitan area. Though anime always seems to depict the characters at an arcade that happens to be along the route back from school.

No doubt convenience of plot not to be bugged by whatever distance necessary, though I'm sure living in urban settings, it's not that hard to have something like that out of convenience. My mom certainly did.

H. Guderian wrote:
I would agree, it is more about Logistics than hardware.

Also I remember interviews with Salarymen who frequented arcades, and why they were dedicated to a dying entertainment form. Japan has an appreciation for the transient things in life. Even if they're old, even if they're outdated, some people have identity staked to those arcades. I'm a half hour out from Boston, and we have one, soon to be two (I hear) arcades in my city. No one speaks of them, and certainly no one is frequenting them with the determination to come back daily, or weekly, until either they or the arcade dies.

It's like a form of pre-postmodernism. Don't act like tomorrow already happened, it happened anyway, but we don't care! The same could be said for vinyl as well, but I suppose those of us like that physicality/tangibility that's missing in our digital lives.

Quote:
We're just not wedded to the idea of arcades.

Sad really. At least you're out of the house at all. It feels odd not having somewhere to go every day of your life.

Quote:
Now on to Hardware, our Mall in town has an arcade, and apart from the new one rumored to be goign into a huge entertainment complex under construction, in the mall they put up, right in the middle, some big flashy enclosed arcade booths for things like The Walking Dead. Even in the arcade itself many of the units seem to be centered around those large screen cinematic experiences. Meanwhile one or two of the DDR machines are out of order. There's a Pac-man machine tucked into a corner with a poorly responding set of controls.

I'm certain it's hard finding suitable service for these older machines, let along any authorized servicemen to work with these days. If only some of the remaining giants in Japan could help us out in that respect, but I suppose it's an industry that involves re-training these people again (such as the reason why Trump's reasons for wanting to "Make America Great Again" is a long-hill battle with a society untrained by a work ethic going back a century).

Quote:
Our arcade culture mimics our console gaming culture. Hollywood Wannabe Cinematic Experiences.

Which I never saw it at all as being. I'm probably in the wrong camp when I say a game is a game, not a movie (of course I'm nearly over the hill at this point, nobody cares for my opinions)!

Quote:
But what do you see in every anime that has a scene in a mall? Fighting games where you can just drop in and play other people. Ideally located games where a Salaryman or kid can walk by and drop a few dollars to blow off steam. While much of Arcades are still solo experiences, there's not much of a drive to make them a community center.

Rather they were. Of course I don't suppose anyone really goes out anymore around here, I've seen that decline over the past 30 years or so, I miss the times when I was doing that every chance I got.
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Hikarunu



Joined: 23 Jul 2015
Posts: 950
PostPosted: Sun May 21, 2017 9:01 am Reply with quote
WANNFH wrote:

Also, there is no second modernisation models, and too much mechanics of the original game is not implemented...

They made Kai 2 in Arcade. Saw Kitakami and Ooi in their Kai 2 uniform. Also they made anti-sub mechanic in game. Could be possible they will add combine fleet and LBAS mechanic later in Arcade.
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Mr. Oshawott



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PostPosted: Sun May 21, 2017 9:17 am Reply with quote
Not sure if anyone noticed, but two new ship girls, Gangut and Kamoi, appeared just moments earlier...
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leafy sea dragon



Joined: 27 Oct 2009
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PostPosted: Mon May 22, 2017 2:01 pm Reply with quote
StudioToledo wrote:
leafy sea dragon wrote:
Rather, in Japan, arcades are largely seen as a hangout spot for teenagers, a reputation that I don't think really exists in any other culture, or at least one that did not die out with the rise of console gaming.

It tried over here back in the 80's, arcades was often billed that way, much like the drug store soda fountain was a century ago.


And it worked, for a while. The thing that I find interesting is that it continues to be like that in Japan, and by the looks of things, solely in Japan. Arcades were swiftly dropped from teenage hangout spots, at least in the United States, while most of the other locations kept that status (restaurants, parks, friends’ houses, shopping malls—though shopping malls are on a decline too).

StudioToledo wrote:
Which seems pathetic in retrospect unless the sort of incomes we see today aren't what they had been during a Cold War era when kids still had allowances and there was always a case for those vendors and other stores to see to 'robbing' a little.


My impression is that the parents pay for the games and platforms to play them on. It’s why the ESRB is such a big deal: It’s there to provide parents in these stores a quick way to be aware of what’s in these games they’re buying for their kids. Whereas arcade games were typically paid for by the kids’ own money: They might get 5 bucks a week, and that’d be enough for a few games each day coming back from school.

Which brings me to the next point in that there has been a gradual (but definitely confirmed) increase of protectionism among parents in western cultures over the past few decades. The average distance a kid is allowed to walk by themselves has been decreasing, and helicopter parenting is on a rapid rise. This would become inherently incompatible with arcades, places where kids would be by their lonesome for extended periods of time.

StudioToledo wrote:
They still try. Bandai Namco's Star Wars Battle Pods are a neat item to check out.


And Pac-Man Battle Royale is also quite a sight to behold, and they seem to be good earners. As a pinball fan, I must also point out the machines made by Jersey Jack Pinball, which have bright 40-inch monitors in place of backboxes and a good example of how pinball looks like in the 21st century. They are also good earners (but you won’t see many of them because they literally cost ten grand each).

StudioToledo wrote:
Which I wouldn't mind at all, I suppose kids don't want to have the sort of friends like I did.


Well, I grew up in schools with strong cliques, and even in the arcades I sometimes visited when I was little, there were cliques there, similar to modern gaming’s clans. This system seems to have spread, where kids form small but very tight groups with varying levels of acceptance of newcomers, no doubt influenced by the rise of social media allowing them to stay in touch 24/7. From what I heard, the cliques I found in arcades are not common elsewhere, however.

Still frustrated me to no end because they rendered me unable to play on any of “their” games, and they resorted to every tactic in the book to intimidate and bully outsiders who wanted to play on those games or directly against them. Not that I could really play on many games anyhow, as my father, who didn’t understand the appeal of playing games (any sort of game, not just arcade games—he had an equally low opinion of sports), figured I could be entertained by just watching, so he’d sometimes drop me off at arcades with no money. Sometimes, I could sneak in a dollar or so, and that’s when I’d run into those mean big kids.

StudioToledo wrote:
Let's see you try to convince potential taxpayers on wanting to pull that here in the US. Most can't even comprehend not having a car anymore it seems. Rather we went back to interurban trolleys personally.
http://www.toledoblade.com/frontpage/2007/05/27/Toledo-was-hub-of-interurban-100-years-ago.html


Railfans cry at the increasing opposition to the existence of the California High Speed Rail. But we Americans are proud of our automobile culture. Americans like to be in control, hence the phrase “in the driver’s seat.” It’s a shame that a side-effect of this is the lack of good public transportation in most of the country (though I know it’d be extremely expensive).

StudioToledo wrote:
Pfft, probably. I have the sense to notice how much goes into running those places.


The truth is that even if they knew, most people don’t care, and I think the arcade machines’ operators know people don’t care. But using a credits system definitely IS an easy way to mask how much people are paying per game. Considering games at Dave & Buster’s are mostly between 75 cents to two dollars, I feel like there HAS been a decline of sorts in attendance even at these places though.

Have there been major spikes in the expenses of running arcades other than rent? I feel like there has to have been something else, as an increase in property values affects everyone across the board.

StudioToledo wrote:
It's always been like that since the days of pinball.


I suppose. I grew up seeing pinball in arcades so I associated it with family entertainment, and that was the direction the industry took in the 80’s and into the 90’s to reach their apexes of success—but it became their undoing when the arcade industry fell to pieces a few years later.

StudioToledo wrote:

Sad really. At least you're out of the house at all. It feels odd not having somewhere to go every day of your life.


It’s all about convenience. Some retailers are having trouble now because they can’t compete with online shopping. We have the rise of services like Uber Eats and Eat24, where people are hired to pick up food and deliver it to people’s houses (that is, they’re willing to pay more so they don’t have to leave the house). But most of all, mobile gaming allows people to play games to pass the time wherever they are. I feel of all the things that’s the biggest threat to whatever’s left of arcade gaming, it’s mobile gaming, as it fulfills the same basic desires in a more convenient and less expensive way (unless you’re a whale). It’s why I think…I forgot the name of the company…but they’re going in the right direction in providing a large, grand experience, adapting these mobile games no less, that cannot be replicated on a handheld phone or even an HD tablet.

Another issue that has popped up recently is that a lot of people simply do not carry cash on them. For them to play these machines, there needs to be both an ATM and a change machine nearby, which not every place does. Some companies have rectified that as of late though, installing credit/debit card readers onto them.

StudioToledo wrote:
I'm certain it's hard finding suitable service for these older machines, let along any authorized servicemen to work with these days. If only some of the remaining giants in Japan could help us out in that respect, but I suppose it's an industry that involves re-training these people again (such as the reason why Trump's reasons for wanting to "Make America Great Again" is a long-hill battle with a society untrained by a work ethic going back a century).


There was an article I found a few years ago from a repairman who says that fixing these machines is often not worth the cost of traveling to the location and the replacement parts, and it’s more pronounced the further out you have to go. He says that a barely-functional machine still gets about 90% of the money a fully-functional machine gets, and this is because few people who play these machines are savvy enough to know when a machine is not working properly AND refuse to play it. The only times when repairs are truly justified are if the machine has become unplayable because of it or because the coin or bill slot has stopped working.

There is an arcade near downtown Los Angeles I would sometimes visit called the Family Amusement Corporation. The main thing they do is rent out machines for events like birthday parties, weddings, conventions, and such, but they have a permanent arcade there. I saw this phenomenon firsthand in that the man assigned to fix these machines is also their janitor. He's a sweet old man and the nicest guy in the whole block, and while he always seems to be there whenever I'm visiting, he does know the finer works of these machines--really obvious stuff like random objects stuffed in the coin slot he can fix, but tell him something more technical than "this button is jammed" and he won't know what you're talking about. The World Poker Tour pinball machine has had its "Ace in the Hole" sensor broken at least since 2013, and it still gets a lot of play anyway because I seem to be the only patron there who knows the ball is supposed to be held there to start a multiball mode. Everyone else just thinks the little chamber does nothing.
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