/vr/ - Retro Games

>>10103137
>People make fun of barcades, but we also have a really good barcade in my city that does tournaments and trivia nights and shit.

My problem is that barcades are buying up all the leftover surviving arcade cabinets from the 80s and 90s. They supply was already limited before, but now it's gotten very bad. They bought up so much of the used inventory and driven up the prices like crazy. I can't even find some stuff anymore without paying crazy prices (if I can find it at all). 10 to 12 years ago it wasn't a problem finding them.

Another issue I have with them is that barcade owners almost always exclusively buy upright arcade cabinets. They don't pay any attention to racing sit down games, or other sit down games. This leaves a bunch of perfectly usable sit down games left to rot because barcades don't want them for whatever reason. I asked one barcade owner why, and he said he only wanted upright arcade cabinets where multiple people could play. He wasn't a fan of single player games, and only had a couple because those particular ones were very popular (for example Pac Man). This is very flawed way of thinking imo.

Another issue is that arcade collectors and preservationists can usually only fit upright cabinets in their homes. So it's become a competition in some areas to find specific cabinets before a local barcade buys it and shoves it in their warehouse.

Barcades came 10 years too late. They started showing up in the 2010s. But the arcade industry needed them in 2001. If barcades showed up back then, perhaps the arcade industry wouldn't have collapsed. Tens of THOUSANDS of arcade machines were destroyed, scrapped, or tossed in the dumpster because people thought they were worthless because of the arcade collapse. The only reason we have any surviving classic arcade machines was because of collectors who saved them, put them in their home, or put them in a warehouse for storage. But 80% of machines are gone now. They are considered antiques.