/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>33798886
Even most urban* areas in NA, where there are enough teens/young adults with the kind of disposable income to support an arcade, do not have a dedicated rhythm game arcade scene beyond guitar and DDR variants. No demand, no supply.

This is mainly a result of the arcade gaming scene in USA as a whole going into a massive recession and recharacterization in the 90s-00s, right when many rhythm game arcade titles were getting their start in Japan. The lack of demand for Japanese arcade machines along with the domestic focus of the Japanese producers meant that the whole formative period of many arcade rhythm games was lost on people here. The main exception was DDR, and I'd say that at least partially due to it being mass-imported before the arcade situation got too dire. The only other way you would get direct exposure was if you happened to be in one of the few metro areas where someone could support grey market imports or work out a deal with companies for promotion, like conventions started doing. This also had the side effect of those games becoming associated with certain cultural subgroups that would gravitate around those places, like weebs, furries, etc., rather than it being a more culturally neutral thing like DDR/guitar games.

In speaking of guitar games, it wasn't as if the market for rhythm games in NA was completely untapped - it just focused on console. Even if they were considered inferior, developers adapted by using consoles with custom controllers as the basis for their games. Since most people in the USA gamed at home, socially or otherwise, that became the main entry point, so those games became the cultural cornerstone, with games requiring an arcade getting less and less representation. The popularization of PC and mobile games are a further continuation of this trend. If it wasn't for Round1 and such integrating their arcade rhythm game lineup into their entertainment centers, there might have been much less presence in the USA today.

And finally, because of places like Round1 having exclusive deals, any independent arcade would struggle to amass an appealing import lineup, especially as online requirements make grey/black market machines less viable. So if you want local import titles, your locality is either lucrative enough for someone like Round1 to step in, or it isn't. Simple as.

*Cities/municipalities with 50k+ population. A 50k city is backwater to many people, but it's closer to a city with 500k-1mil than a town with >10k population. The latter would struggle to even have arcade machines beyond gambling/novel retro titles.