Why Do You Think Arcades Failed In The USA?

[wraggster]

time for Tell Us Dammit. No, make that TELL US DAMMIT.

Here's who it works: We ask a question, you answer it. Simple and no strings attached! This isn't some marketing survey or whatever. It's an emotional investment in you. Yes, we're interested in knowing you, reader person.

You probably know ****tons about us — more than you even want to, we're sure. But, hey, we'd like to know about you. That way you won't be some faceless blob — and we might feel a tinge of guilt when we ban your ass. Or not, because really we're incapable of human emotion.

Earlier this week, I talked with Spencer at game site Siliconera about Arcade Mania. He asked me: Why do you think arcades failed in the USA? (You can read the full interview here.) Now, we ask you...

Question: Why do you think arcades failed in the USA?

http://kotaku.com/5133549/why-do-you-think-arcades-failed-in-the-usa

[rancor01]

I honestly dont know what happened.. The last time I saw an American arcade at capacity was back when Mortak Kombat 1 came out. I remember this one specific arcade in the mall I lived next to in Texas had many games with people crowded around each one... Knights of the Round, Hard Drivin (full cab), After Burner II (full cab) Aliens, APB, Street Fighter II, etc.. This place was ALWAYS packed... Not long after, it simply died.

I live in Tokyo now, and I dont think the arcades here are as great as everyone thinks they are.. Honestly 90% of the people in most arcades I go to are there to play pachinko. The games are greatly neglected, with the monitors showing horrible blurring and color bleed.. And I almost never see any games that wont fit into one of those Neo Candy cabinets... ex. Silent Scope, driving games, crazy taxi or pinball... Most arcades here are all exactly the same with multiple fighting games, card games, pachinko, the new Gundam fighting games I see the Initial D games everywhere but honestly theres nothing here that great... I do like the new Aliens game though.. based on the colonial marines.. but its not worth paying almost $2 to play... I think the arcades in Japan are dying as well, and without pachinko to sustain them, they would have been dead 10 years ago like in America.. PAchinko is keeping Japanese game centers alive.

anyhow, thats my opinion..

[RV2006]

Arcades are dying because there is no need for them anymore, and its tragic!

The reason I can see in their decline, is evolving technology. A long time ago, game consoles were only a supreme luxury, so no one really had them, and arcades became a second home for many people, but now everyone has consoles at home, so why play street fighter 2 in the arcades with your mates, if you can just go over to your mates house and play it there! where the mess is smaller and theres no queue of impatient brats waiting for their turn...

Also handheld consoles attack this former industry. Taking games with you means you can get your gaming fix on the beach without having to move off your sunbed...

To be honest, the only way I can see arcades surviving is to specialise, to become a niche.

I've never seen many arcade tourneys, (bar fighting game tourneys), so maybe thats a possible direction arcades could take.

Over here in the UK, I'm uncertain how long arcades will last, maybe they too will die.

Interestingly enough though, the arcade scene is evolving in developing tourist areas.
When I went to zakynthos the other year, I noticed the number of arcade machines almost doubled since my visit there a year or two beforehand (especially physical based 'test your might' ones...).

Maybe theres hope for cabnet based fun for us game junkies yet! :D

[alanparker05]

Home consoles, multiplayer peripherals and lazy Americans

[mungrin]

You guys are all wrong so far.Arcades fail here because here in America they attract the wrong crowd.Id love to take my kids out to an arcade but i woukdnt because they would be full of teen thugs.I worked in Times Sqare 5 years ago and they opened 3 huge arcades.All of them closed because of violence.Stabbings,shootouts etc.Americans dont go to arcades to play games,they go there to get into fights and cause trrouble.So who in thier right mind would ever open an arcade in the US?Only someone targeting little kids and families.

Chucky Cheeze

[alanparker05]

I also blame the Dreamcast, or the anagram: mt arcades

[MicroNut]

Why are American Arcades hard to find?

1. Consoles
2. Chucky Cheeze
3. Price
4. Safety
5. PC Games
6. Online Games / MMO's
7. Emulators - PC / XBOX

Arcades have not died entirely:

Chucky Cheese (www.chuckecheese.com/) and Nickel City (http://nickelcitygames.com/) for Kids

GroundKontrol (http://www.groundkontrol.com/) for Adults

The whole Arcade gaming industry, in its purest form, is way down all over the world... not just in America.

[thick9"]

Arcades in USA have not survived for the most part because of multiple factors:

1.rising cost-I went to arcades mostly from the ages of 8-15,and kids that age dont have a lot of disposable income for the most part,so when games went from .25 up to .50 a play it cut the number of games to play(on an allowance)in half.Every .25 raise in cost after that cut the number of playable games respectively,to where at a dollar a game it quickly becomes cheaper to buy the home version for a game your going to play more than 20-30 times.So you could say arcade cabinet manufacturers and arcade owners killed themselves off with rising costs and or greed.

2.Home consoles have closed the graphical gap that once existed in the NES/Genesis/SNES days.Home consoles can easily reproduce the graphics found in an arcade these days,whereas 'back then' Arcade graphics were far superior to a home consoles(Neo Geo excepted)which created a good reason to play the arcade equivalent over the home version.

3.Functionality-Most popular arcade games ended up with broken controls from over use or abuse,either way it sucked to play against someone with a fully working controller layout in a fighting game if your buttons were sticking or your joystick did not go in a certain direction.Also,the ability to play competetively over the net meant you didnt have to leave your home to get some good competition.

4.Atmosphere-In a well run and staffed arcade there were seldom any problems,but in an arcade without any staff there were many problems like cussing,fighting,food/drink spills on the screen/controls,smoking,and in really bad instances stealing,mugging,stabbing,shooting,killing.Yeah,so metimes it got that bad.Better for your health to stay home.

[darkchylde]

I think everyone would agree that there's obviously no single, easy answer to this question, and that if there were one given that it wouldn't fit everyone equally.

For me personally, I stopped going to the arcade when several things happened.

1. Pinball machines all but disappeared. Yes, you could (and can) still find them, but nowadays it seems like the only places that still have them are seedy bars or smoked up bowling alleys, hardly places that I want to spend my time in and hardly places that (these days anyway) are family (ie: children of all ages) friendly.

2. Every new game coming in was some sort of fighting game or a horrible racing simulation. I remember the glory days of MK 1, 2, & 3 somewhat fondly, but those were hardly the only reason I went to an arcade. Sometime toward the end of my high school years, every arcade that I went to seemed to only pick up things like Virtua Fighter, Street Figher 2/3/A/E/I/O/U/Flavor-of-the-week as new stock, or monstrosities like Daytona USA (which our sole remaining local arcade STILL has four linked ever-Daytoooonaaaaaaaaaaa-screaming boxes of). It's not that I didn't give the new games a chance, it's that the arcades I went to got so oversaturated with that stuff that I now can't stand to play it. Arcades made me HATE fighting games. And it wasn't because I was bad at it, but because the eventual result was oversaturation to the detriment of all else.

3. This ties into the last part of #2, and is that pretty much that the fighers and racing games managed to push everything else out of the arcades that I visited. At first those were put right next to classics and other great games of the time (TMNT, The Simpsons, Gauntlet, Shinobi, Choplifter, Time Pilot, Galaga, Ms. Pacman...I could go on & on). Then the fighters were given all space at the front of the arcade, pushing everything else to the darkened back corners. Then they just started disappearing, one by one.

You can blame home consoles for the decline of the American arcade, but I think that you can only do so in part, and a small part, IMHO. In my experience (which mirrors many of my friends', both local and all over the country), what ended up happening was that pinball nearly disappeared, fighting games peaked, nearly all other games were pushed out of arcades, and then the same kids who were spending all of their money on fighting games at the arcades picked up their quarters and bought the home console versions of the same games (which were released at nearly the same time as the arcade machine) and abandoned the arcades. You could say that this shows that home consoles were the killer, but I don't think of it that way--I see it as a gradual decline over time with somewhat of a sharp dropoff at the end. No single thing killed the arcades that we knew and loved as kids and teenagers.

I saw this happen in my community and mourned, as I would have stepped up and helped keep our local arcades going...except that they didn't have anything left that I cared to play. The most entertainment that I get out of most arcades that I visit these days are the "skill" machines or the skiball machines that occasionally pop up.

The rising cost of playing machines can be blamed, but I don't think it had nearly as big an impact as a lot of folks would like to believe. Yes, it meant that some machines were more expensive to play than others, but at the time, it just meant that I had to weigh my choices more carefully. I could choose to play X-Men and make sure to dump all of my extra quarters into continues ($0.50 to play, $0.25 to continue) or maybe play a couple of $0.50 games and spread the rest of my cash around to other machines. In my area, there were always older machines (and a few newer ones) that cost $0.25 to play; just because they were old didn't mean that they weren't fun or weren't worth playing all of a sudden. The same amount of money came out of my pockets as games got more expensive to play, I just played less and spent more time looking over my friends' shoulders cheering them on. I remember when the hologram games came out, in the late 80's or early 90's, and were $1.00 or more per play. This was CRAZY in my eyes at the time, but it didn't stop me from playing them a few times, nor did it remove the long line of people lined up to play them after the current player was finished.

In my area, and with (most of) my friends, it wasn't us who abandoned the arcades, it was the arcades who abandoned us. You could point out that this shows that arcades didn't care, but the fact of the matter is is that arcades have always been a business, and at the time, fighters were what made sense, what brought in the most cash. I think that those few remaining arcades still care, they're just completely befuddled as to what to do to reverse the trend. If I had the money, I'd grab a spot in my town's not-so-crowded downtown and open up an arcade with lots of pinball machines, lots of classics (old & new) and a few fighters & racers. I have a feeling that I'd be able to keep it open (since our always empty local Tilt has managed it for 20 years), but I don't think it would do much to reverse the overall trend.

Well, that's my $0.25. Throw your TP rolls at will, heh.

-Doug

[juiceface]

Way back when, arcades always had the best graphics and gameplay available; they were always a generation beyond consoles. As time went on, consoles got more powerful and easily began to compete with arcades. Titles being exclusivly released on consoles further prevented arcade games from competing as all the good games never made it to the arcade.

As others pointed out, price had a significant impact on arcades also. You could now make a $199.00 investment on a console that would get much more bang for your buck with the same processing/graphical capabilites which enabled gamers to avoid playing only 199 times in the arcade.

If game companies really wanted the arcade to come back the way it was, they would realease some exclusive titles for the arcade first, then let them trickle down to console (think mortal kombat). That would force gamers to visit the arcade a bit more. Another idea would be a 'free game' system similar to pinball machines, where if you advance in a game enough after you die you would be awarded with free games for your effort. Lowering prices to 25 cents a game, and having days where prices are only 5 cents a game as promotions would generate much more intrest.

Sadly, I think the days of the arcade are long gone. Ultimately the reason the arcade failed in the USA is because game companies wanted them to. The profit margin on consoles and home titles is much higher than arcade machines. that's why you see these 1.00 and 2.00 games; because that's the only way they can make a profit. Lets hope that someday arcades will come back, but in the meanwhile constructing my own cabinent is very tempting

[inlovewithi]

I thought it was obvious, apparently not judging my some of the comments. To put it simple, there used to be a big gap between the power of a console compared to the power of an arcade, and that difference in power was awesome. Once that gap diminished, so did the technological specialness of the arcade. I remembered being wowed the 1st time I saw MKII, it looked incredible.

[havoc_012]

Arcades died because the games became more specialized and difficult. Most of the "casual gamers" were scared off.

Fighting games became the standard in arcades. These games remained stagnant until most people had left the arcade scene. There needs to be more innovation in the genre.

The arcade scene needs another SF2 or DDR type game that makes arcades feel fresh again. Relatively simple games that can be played by beginners or by experts and enjoyed at almost any level of play.

[jamotto]

Arcades need more variety in game genre's that they just don't get anymore. You go into an arcade and all you see is DDR variants and nothing else, what happened to all the brawlers, side scrollers and flight sim games? Heck, what happened to the sit-down cabinets that had rumble like OutRun did?

[mungrin]

If all this is true and arcades failed in America because of consoles and graphics and what not.Why are arcades alives in other countries such as Japan and Korea?

[rageteam1000]

I think that the market for arcades here in the states have been marginilized so bad (by game consoles/portable game systems/lack of general interest/rising costs to manufacturer, coin-op operators and vendors) that arcade owners and vendors alike have had to put the bulk of arcade machines to the bigger venues for increased sustainability (like Chuck E. Cheese or Ground Kontrol).

[pibs]

I still visit my local arcade! It is called TILT and its awesome. Where else would I spend my quarters, Laundry I think not! haha

They are just a bit harder to find now but, they are not complete failures.

Another spot I LOVE is called Nickle Nickle where you guessed it, all arcade games are a NICKLE :D There used to be a funcoland near my house before too but that got shut down... its now a GameStop OH THE HORROR!