What has killed or will kill arcades?

[MobilityRed]

As the song goes, "Video Killed The Radio Star", but what has or will kill arcades?

A change in culture? Little variety? Loitering by today's youth? Modern consoles becoming too powerful? Xbox Live?

I feel as though in 10 years there won't be many outside of resort type areas (boardwalks, theme parks, and possibly Dave and Busters).

What does everyone think historians will say was the death knell when arcade gaming does eventually flat-line?

[Enigmus]

Home consoles. Isn't it obvious? :frustrated:

[Sonicwolf]

People have been becoming lazier for a long time now. Why walk or drive all the way to the arcade to play germ infested, worn out arcade games which cost money and can empty your pockets when you can pay a lump sum and get a game console with games permenantely?

[jb143]

Not just home consoles but the fact that the technology caught up. It used to be that home consoles were viewed as rather inferior but that's not the case anymore.

[scooterb23]

I blame everything that kept people from going to the arcades. Including crap games, movies, cable television, global warming, high gas prices, collectible quarters, and Oprah.

[Sonicwolf]

Well you could blame everything on Oprah and Oprahism you know...

[TonyTheTiger]

$$$ has a lot to do with it, too. A fighting game typically costs $40-$60 to buy right? If you're not really all that great at the game but want to develop your skills at the local arcade, you can end up blowing through nearly that much money in a weekend when a credit costs $.75-$1.00 a pop.

It makes me wonder why publishers are always pushing the hardware on their arcade cabinets. Sure, those fancy 40 inch LCD panels where each player gets his own screen look gorgeous but what's the point if the cabinet ends up costing arcade owners so much they don't have a choice but to charge $1.00+ a credit thus driving customers away only to then see the console release a few months later and thus watch that $10,000 machine collect dust? If it were me, I'd be building arcade cabinets as sturdy as possible but as inexpensively as possible to encourage more arcade owners to buy my machines.

[Baloo]

I think there are a lot of reasons that have made arcades declined, including:

1. Arcades are noted for being seedy hangout joints, and are used to deal drugs sometimes, and if in a bad area, can be rather dangerous. Rudy Giuliani ended up cracking down on arcades back in the 90s I think.

2. Arcades are very expensive to run. Like people have said, why go to the arcade to play a game when you could play it at home for a mere $50 rather than pump in probably $20 in quarters to play maybe every game in the place twice over? Or if it's that redemption shit, you'll be shelling out more money for even less fun.

3. Arcades are very expensive to run. Unless you're a franchise (Dave and Buster's or Chuck E. Cheese), part of a hotel or casino, or on a boardwalk, chances are you aren't going to be getting enough customers that will shell out a lot of money to pay for the arcade cabinets. New games can go for $1,000 a pop or more. I don't think I've ever seen arcade cabinets that work go for less than maybe $150. And that's for really old outdated games like Vs. Super Mario Bros.

4. Let's face it, if it's not a redepmtion game, chances are it won't be able to make enough money in enough time to pay costs. I could put in one credit (maybe .25 to $1.00) in a pinball machine and play for half an hour or more if I'm good. I put a credit in a redepmtion game and I play for half a second. See the difference?

[Sonicwolf]

It seems many arcade games are designed for maximum consumer FAIL. The more fail that comes to the person playing, the more money they pop in the slot. It seems that arcade games have become worse for value. Well that and everything else.

[Octopod]

I think there are a lot of reasons that have made arcades declined, including:

1. Arcades are noted for being seedy hangout joints, and are used to deal drugs sometimes, and if in a bad area, can be rather dangerous. Rudy Giuliani ended up cracking down on arcades back in the 90s I think.



This is why I hung out in arcades as a kid.

[TheDomesticInstitution]

Ever since television was invented in the early 80's, more and more people have been watching that instead.

[Vkmies]

Home consoles. Pretty simple. People stopped going to the arcades when you could play your favourite arcade games home. For free!

[Enigmus]

The only good one I've seen is a Ms. Pac/Galaga that gives you a continue for 1 quarter and lets you keep your score after continuing. The only one. Seriously.

[p_b]

It seems many arcade games are designed for maximum consumer FAIL. The more fail that comes to the person playing, the more money they pop in the slot. It seems that arcade games have become worse for value. Well that and everything else.

This is why I don't really play arcade games anymore. Years ago, arcade games were hard, but not unfair. It was possible to play for half an hour on a credit (at least on certain games) if you were good. Today, this seems to be impossible for me. A typical game today ends after 2-5 minutes. And I hate paying for continues...:(
So I simply don't play modern arcade games anymore (with very few exceptions)

[Baloo]

Yeah, because with the price of rent and arcade machines today, you need to find a way to make gametime shorter and people pump in quarters. Why do you think arcade games in the late 89s-early 90s started eating quarters by the bunch? Ever play Michael Jackson's Moonwalker? How about The Simpsons? Final Fight? They're designed to get you for as many quarters as they possibly can in the time that you beat the game. Moonwalker is ridiculous, you need to spend at least $5.00 to beat a game that's all of 5 levels long. Fun game, but ridiculous in terms of how many quarters it eats.

[eskobar]

There are many reasons that killed the arcades:

- Developers and publishers looking for bigger profit margins changed arcades for home consoles

- Lazy people ... Many people abuse from the online services to the point that they find unnecessary to get up and go out. :rockets:

- Better games at home than arcades (because many developers switched to home consoles)

- Unfocused development. Expensive hi-tech cabinets don't substitute a great game. X_x

- Low profit margins for arcade operators. :sob:

[ButtonMasher123]

In addition to everything thing that has already been said I would add online play as being yet another factor in arcades dying. Back in the day the arcade was the place to be for social gaming to play all the fighting games and beat em ups. You could play the games at home too, but maybe you couldn't always find someone to play with or someone who was on your level so instead you went to the arcades to show your skills and interact with other gamers. This is obviously not neccesary these days when all I need is Xbox Live to achieve the same thing.

[NayusDante]

These guys:

http://radiation.fobby.net/ohgodno/Earthbound%20(U)_00119.png


Let's look at some more recent games...

House of the Dead 4 - HUGE screen, motorized controllers, and a "special edition" that's a sit-down motion simulator. Even at $1/play, it's unprofitable. Fun as hell though. A home console version would only be $80 with included gun.

F-Zero - Motion simulator seat, powered by the GameCube-spec arcade platform. The motorized portion costs more than the actual hardware, I'm guessing. You still can't get this sort of thing at home, and probably won't for a while.

Afterburner Climax - Really GOOD motion simulator. Newer hardware, but more extreme motion, so same problem. A home version would cost more than the console itself.

Touchscreen Games - You see these in bars and restaurants now. These have replaced the action games with casual games, mirroring the Wii. They're a lot cheaper to produce, consisting of a low-end PC and a touchscreen. The DS is more complicated than these.

Street Fighter IV - They're expensive and we already have the home version. Not much sense here.


The Wii really echoes the arcade's fate. When Wii mania hit, we saw that "hardcore" gaming was only a small slice of the pie. Traditional arcade games are going to appeal only to that slim section of the populace. That leaves the rest of the market to appeal to, but they already have Wiis. That means that they have to do something that the Wii can't do, which is rather limiting. All that's left is extravagant motion simulators and Bejeweled-on-the-bar. Neither one of those can sustain a business.

If arcades have any future, it's redemption games. Last time I was in a Chuck E. Cheese, the only actual video screens I saw were on DDR and an Atomiswave fighter. This place was huge too, it was just ALL ticket games. Kids will always get a thrill out of "winning" something, so it's a sustainable business model. Their pizza and wings are good too, so that helps.


The past few years have shown us that "hardcore" gaming is not the future, and business owners have reacted.

[Blanka789]

I am inclined to agree with your assessment that hardcore gaming is being pushed out. The joy of practicing with your character in a fighting game until you can beat the number one player in the arcade, lining up to play the newest game, and the sheer awesomeness of the arcade appears to be disappearing.

I think the home console market has hurt arcades similar to the way DVD's have hurt movies-These come out quick, and playing it in the comfort of your own home is a nice luxury.

I wish they could find a way to compete, but I don't know if it's there.

[SegaAges]

When I go to the local arcade, I only spend about 30 minutes to an hour there.

My fav game they have, Initial D. After every single race, you have to pay another 3 tokens (1 token = 25 cents).

Yeah, I blow through 3 or 4 racers, and then stop. It costs way too fucking much, plus I have an arcade machine at my house, hehehe

[eskobar]

When I go to the local arcade, I only spend about 30 minutes to an hour there.

My fav game they have, Initial D. After every single race, you have to pay another 3 tokens (1 token = 25 cents).

Yeah, I blow through 3 or 4 racers, and then stop. It costs way too fucking much, plus I have an arcade machine at my house, hehehe


I still have to find an initial D arcade in all of Nuevo León, México. I want to buy the cabinet but i just don't know where i can buy it, i had the chance to play it in the US and its quite an awesome game ... and i am fan of the manga/anime 8-)


Adding to the thread, Online console gaming has improved to the point where you can get decent matches online :D

[NayusDante]

...and playing it in the comfort of your own home is a nice luxury.

Has anyone ever been to an arcade with everything on free-play? Disney Quest in Orlando has an entire floor that fits this description, and it's simply annoying. A friend and I had played 2/3 through Brave Firefighters when some mother and her very young son come up. She asks "can he play now?"

This is another win for home gaming - you can actually play through the whole game without coming off as a jerk. Yes, I have spent an hour on this one machine, and the kid is going to play it for two minutes from the start, and I'm probably never going to see the ending.

When you're in an arcade, you can't hog a machine for more than 10 minutes or so. It's just accepted social etiquette. Most developers could make arcade titles with two levels, and we'd be the only ones to notice. Think about that for a minute.

[Baloo]

I still have to find an initial D arcade in all of Nuevo León, México. I want to buy the cabinet but i just don't know where i can buy it, i had the chance to play it in the US and its quite an awesome game ... and i am fan of the manga/anime 8-)


Adding to the thread, Online console gaming has improved to the point where you can get decent matches online :D

Yeah, it's way better than the ones on Sega Genesis and SNES (X-treme or something like that?) where you could just yank the phone cord out and whoops, the whole match is ruined because someone is losing.

[NayusDante]

Wikipedia:XBAND (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBAND)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ef/Xbands.gif

That actually used an "arcade" pricing format, where you bought so many play sessions.

[Blanka789]

Wasn't there a project where people were trying to revive the Xband service by dumping the SRAM from different Xband carts? I wonder if it will ever happen...

[Baloo]

Has anyone ever been to an arcade with everything on free-play? Disney Quest in Orlando has an entire floor that fits this description, and it's simply annoying. A friend and I had played 2/3 through Brave Firefighters when some mother and her very young son come up. She asks "can he play now?"

This is another win for home gaming - you can actually play through the whole game without coming off as a jerk. Yes, I have spent an hour on this one machine, and the kid is going to play it for two minutes from the start, and I'm probably never going to see the ending.

When you're in an arcade, you can't hog a machine for more than 10 minutes or so. It's just accepted social etiquette. Most developers could make arcade titles with two levels, and we'd be the only ones to notice. Think about that for a minute.

I actually like Disney Quest in Orlando. They have an awesome selection of games from what I can remember of it. You have to go at a time where there isn't going to be a lot of people there, like late at night or early in the morning. That way you'll be able to play all the games you want without anyone bothering you

[Phyeir]

Not just home consoles but the fact that the technology caught up. It used to be that home consoles were viewed as rather inferior but that's not the case anymore.

That's everything right there. If for some weird reason we had never reached the point to mass product games over arcade quality (or arcades had managed to stay in front of home consoles without being 5-10$ per play), everything would be the other way around and arcades would be going strong. Instead, we have systems that can go online and allow us to play others at home (but arcades were starting to go down even before that).

[Sonicwolf]

Arcades started to die in North America even before the home console graphics equalized with the arcade graphics. The Great crash was a big blow to all sections of video games here.

[gjackx]

X-band was pretty awesome for the time! Some games ran a little smoother an others.

I remember that I had about two different people in town that I could play against (the only ones with X-bands and the same games), 'cause the nation-wide stuff was pretty expensive (I believe each person "shared" the cost of the long distance calls).

Now that I think about it, that was about 12-13 years ago...time really does fly!

[BetaWolf47]

It's just that people have become more aware of home consoles. Back in the day, arcade cabinets were everywhere: bars, movie theaters, restaurants, convenience stores, ice cream parlors, and game rooms. You could find them without really looking for them, and they cost a mere quarter so it wasn't that big of a loss if you didn't like the game. You had to dedicate money to buy a system and games for it and without the internet it would be a blind buy.

Now people are more educated when it comes to games, and know whether or not the game will be worthwhile. Plus it's become more mainstream :P

[Sonicwolf]

Now people are more educated when it comes to games, and know whether or not the game will be worthwhile. Plus it's become more mainstream :P

There is a dark side to that. Crappy games rarely sell well now. Crappy games seem somewhat collectable. For example, a game like Ghostbusters for the NES. That would not have sold at all if people had the internet back then. But now its kind of humurous and collectable.

[Mac Tonight]

I look at the Death of the Arcade as a multi-step process.

1. Insert Quarter To Continue: This was the first blow against the Arcade culture. There was a time when the vast majority (if not all) of the games in an arcade were 25 cents a play, and if you died, you died. Then, someone got the bright idea that if you allow a player to pick up where he or she died by inserting another coin, they'd stay and play longer. This by itself wouldn't have killed arcades, but it turned the scene from a battle of man vs machine to a simple test of endurance and financial fesability. Suddenly, with enough quarters, anyone could beat a game.

2. Tickets: It started with Skee Ball...at least in my local arcades. Then, it expanded to Whack-A-Mole. Before you knew it, there were more ticket games than actual arcade games. In my local mall, a new arcade called Boardwalk Blvd moved in with roughly 80% of their floor dedicated to ticket games. My beloved Alladin's Castle (in the same mall) valiently tried to keep up by inserting two skee-ball lanes in the back with a counter of very modest prizes. To their credit, they stuck it out with regular, fun video games, but it was their undoing. Less than a year into Boardwalk's appearance, my childhood paradise had closed. I still have a few of the tolkens sitting in a cup on my desk. Some of my most fond memories came from that place, but I digress. Boardwalk is still in business, if you could call it that. Lines of ticket games and DDR sit unused. In my opinion, the rise of the ticket games was the beginning of the end.

3. Advanced Home Consoles: I tend to blame the home systems less than most people when it comes to this topic. As silly as it sounds, not all kids could afford to own the console or it's games. I grew up in a pretty poor town, so if it meant spending 2 bucks a week on the PlayChoice 10 instead of 50 bucks for a cart, I usually picked the arcade. Of course, I'd get a game or two on a home console for Xmas or birthdays, but it was often coordinated with the wish lists of my friends in the neighborhood so that none of us would own the same games (that way, we'd have more of a variety to play). We still hit the arcades. You just can't duplicate Discs Of Tron, Crossbow, Return Of The Jedi, Indiana Jones, Paperboy, Gauntlet, etc... on a home system, regardless of graphics. It's like playing online poker vs going to Las Vegas or Atlantic City; the atmosphere made even a lousy game fun. Still, as future generations buy a PS3 for 50 bucks at a flea market, it's easy to understand why they might not be as excited to go to an old arcade.

4. The Internet: Let's face it; online gaming has pretty much ended the need for people to leave their house to compete with other gamers. The retro gang will always get together to jam out over a Tempest or Tapper machine, but the new generation can sit in their undies and play an epic adventure with gamers across the world for hours, weeks, months...

5. Cost: Arcade machines are expensive to produce, expensive to transport, expensive to repair, expensive to replace with newer games. It's just not feasable any longer. Apart from a few relics of olden times (the Knoebel's arcade, a lonely WWF Superstars machine at a local golf course, the Ms. Pac Man at the Laurel Drive In), no one is really interested in spending that kind of money keeping a quarter machine up and running, let alone a whole building of them.

This is our version of "I walked to school uphill both ways in the snow with no shoes". (well, that and Saturday morning cartoons and cable tv). It is an icon of an era, but sadly, it exists only on the fringes of the industry. It's all but dead today. I don't think it will ever die off completely; there will always be one or two machines in a movie theater lobby next to an air hockey table, or perhaps in an airport or at a rest stop, and perhaps a hardcore classic gaming organization like Twin Galaxies will keep a few afloat, but the era of Arcades has ended.

[NayusDante]

This is our version of "I walked to school uphill both ways in the snow with no shoes".

And it was FIFTEEN MILES to the arcade, and they just had Pac-Man. And you know what, we were happy with it! :P

Alladin's Castle, though, that was the signal for me that arcades were on their death bed. They were there for YEARS. That was where I discovered Guilty Gear, so I really miss that place. That mall has two GameStops to this day (one on top of the other...) and before the 'Castle closed, a retrogaming shop was open briefly. The employees there would spend their breaks fighting the GameStop employees on the Tekkens and the Soul Caliburs. Heck, they had the networked Quake-engine cabinets, I forget the actual game name. I REALLY miss those days. That mall is becoming a ghost town, but there's still two GameStops. Ever since they closed, arcades have been more of a curiosity than an establishment. The ones I listed before are either part of "fun centers" or on boardwalks.

[megasdkirby]

For me, it's:

1)Home consoles becoming equal or superior to their arcade counterparts.

2)Price of arcade games.

On the first count, like many have stated before, arcade games were graphically superior to any home console. However, as time passed by, consoles caught up.

On the later note, one thing is to pay 25 cents for a game...than to pay $3-$5 for ONE GAME!!! I always refused to pay that much for just one play...and if I died, I had to insert ANOTHER $3-$5? No thanks.

I understand that costs were because of higher end technology, but still...WOW!

[NayusDante]

I just realized something...

Did arcades just evolve from this:
http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/resources/2008/02/IMGP9873.jpg


...into THIS?
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2453/3639276427_95f023087c.jpg?v=0

[megasdkirby]

Pretty much.

I myself spend more time on the internet than playing games.