/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.8678983]

How did arcade owners fuck up their industry this badly?

[Anonymous No.8678989]

Can’t be worse than the job your parents did with you.

[Anonymous No.8678995]

>>8678989
If there exist parents who fucked up so badly that their kid lost them $39,000,000,000 I'd be impressed more than anything.

[Anonymous No.8679003]

Notice the drop coincides with the release of the Playstation. That was the point where consumer hardware was slowly starting to close the gap with arcade hardware. By the time the next gen rolled around, the difference in power was minimal enough that home consoles could run (slightly watered down, in some cases) ports of arcade games without issue..

[Anonymous No.8679004]

>We're losing money! Quick, add more lightgun shooters and fighting games!
>But sir, it's not working, the players want something diff-
>I SAID DO IT!

[Anonymous No.8679041]

>fearmongering concerning drug dealers around every arcade corner
>needed to put the "Winners Don't Do Drugs" stupidity into it
>more unspoken regulations
>bad locations
>health concerns from touching the buttons after someone else
>busted cabinets
>poor choice in games
>game lineup never changes
>always 5+ year old cabinets

[Anonymous No.8679045]

>>8679003
There were no games for Playstation in 1994. Arcades were being killed by SNES and Genesis(and all of them by PCs). If it hadn't been for the fighting game craze in the early 90s, the decline would have been visible earlier.

[Anonymous No.8679052]

>>8679041
>fearmongering concerning drug dealers around every arcade corner
I dunno about you, but in my area "go to the arcade" and "let's do meth" were pretty much interchangeable

[Anonymous No.8679054]

>>8678983
>Microsoft NVidia, Google, and Amazon launch cloud gaming services
I like how that monthly subscription shit is mentioned, but online stores such as Steam (2003) and the Epic Game Store (2018) aren't.

[Anonymous No.8679060]

>>8679004
>>8679041
>Unavoidable damage to cheap shot the player to spend more quarters
>Defaulting to max difficulty that is completely fucked to eat more quarters
>Surprise instant death gimmicks
>At least 1 utterly bullshit boss in almost all games
There's only so much git gud covers, you know what kind of shit I'm talking about here.

[Anonymous No.8679071]

arcades were simply too limited in what they could offer
the industry was switching towards longer, more adventure oriented games that simply couldn't be done on arcades due to the premise that you only had one sitting to play the game, and once home consoles started to catch up in terms of hardware, they lost their main selling point

[Anonymous No.8679072]

>>8679060
Quarters? I wish. Up here in Canada the only game that took quarters was the Galaga machine, and that still required two of them per credit. Everything else has been loonies for decades.

[Anonymous No.8679090]

>>8679041
>the whole world is america

[Anonymous No.8679106]

Why the fuck would i go to the arcades when i can just play games at home?

[Anonymous No.8679113]

Companies like Capcom started using heavy duty copy protection with CPS-2 and arcade owners gave up when they couldn't buy cheaper pirated cabs anymore.

[Anonymous No.8679117]

>>8678989
fippy bippy

[Anonymous No.8679121]

>>8679090
yes

[Anonymous No.8679126]

>>8678983
Have you ever met an arcade OP?
Most of them are sleazy and have no knowledge of their own industry.

[Anonymous No.8679130]

The west simply isn't conducive to arcades. They survived in Japan for much, much longer for a reason, with Covfefe being what finally brought them down rather than any other reasons.

The west is all about personal boundaries and doing things in your own space. Everyone drives cars and everything is far apart. You would have to go out of your way to go to an arcade, and you'd have to deal with other people there, many of which are going to be of undesirable types.

Meanwhile in Japan you simply get off on a stop along your commute or go to an arcade that's near your workplace since everything is so bunched up and everything is centered around public transit. Thanks to the lack of minorities there's no inherent fear about the people you will encounter and a sense of community can stay. Playerbases are much closer together so you can keep up good competition easily. In the west, you had slim fucking pickings for who you were up against or working with, if anyone was even around at the time.

[Anonymous No.8679135]

So what were the first arcades? Pinball and crane games are decades older than arcade machines, were there buildings just for those games and then they started adopting video games?

[Anonymous No.8679145]

>>8679135
Pool halls I guess?

[Anonymous No.8679180]

>>8679130
>the west is only the us

[Anonymous No.8679197]

>>8679180
Kinda. Everyone else has been buying us culture for longer than your parents have been alive so...

[Anonymous No.8679226]

>>8679135
Pubs and diners mostly. Places kids might be wasting time on a Thursday night at.

[Anonymous No.8679241]

>>8679090
>>8679180
>>>/int/ is two blocks down

[Anonymous No.8679262]

>>8678983
Publishers also fucked up by getting greedy and cannibalizing their arcade revenue with console ports. Ideally publishers would’ve continued creating unique, site specific arcade experiences along the lines of stuff like Prop Cycle and Mazan but by the 2000s the writing was already on the wall. Sega seem to be the only ones keeping that approach with maimai and Chunithm, two games with novel control schemes that can only be experienced in the arcade.

[Anonymous No.8679310]

>>8678983
Its because they charged way too much to play. Most of the owners of these places were just fat boomers with no interest in games who just saw the players as marks and wanted to extract as much money as possible but they went too far. I have also heard that it got harder to approve arcade places as they were considered to be low class so they build a starbux instead. Last time I went to one they only accepted tickets and it was hassle to even play but I put up with it because I know they won't be around much longer.
It was all about the games, not the design of the cabinet or the atmosphere. The main draw was to play games the wouldn't come home in a decent form for 5 years or more.

[Anonymous No.8679371]

>>8678983
Not counting the more general "video game crash" during the 80s, arcades had two big things that wrecked them.

First was the growing power of consoles as they approached the ability to produce arcade quality graphics and framerates. I can remember in the mid 90s, a lot of arcade games were pretty impressive compared to home consoles at the time, 3D models were more detailed and had sharper textures, 2D games had more colors and sprites, so you had arcade games being perceived as higher end compared to console counterparts, especially for people who didn't own the latest console of a generation. When arcades lost their "wow" factor, they stopped drawing in as many people since they weren't the only place to get cutting edge graphics.

The second was the rise of netplay for home consoles. Though the PC has had networked multiplayer since the 80s, the advent of Xbox Live opened the floodgates for console users to easily connect to the internet with friends from anywhere and find people to play games with any time they wanted. Arcades quickly started to lose ground as a social gathering place as online play begin to supplant it, as players didn't have to drive to their nearest arcade and dump quarters into a machine to get the experience. It wasn't quite the same playing online as it was having your opponents/teammates right by your side, but the convenience outweighed the downsides.

For arcades to have remained prominent, they would've needed to retain some important niche that couldn't be replicated on PC or Console, but they failed to find one.

[Anonymous No.8679543]

>>8679060
Git good, you shitter.
Don't forget the suicide batteries https://web.archive.org/web/20190607160453/http://www.arcadecollecting.com/dead/dead.html

[Anonymous No.8679560]

>>8679041
>health concerns from touching the buttons after someone else
WHAT?you cant be serious

[Anonymous No.8679563]

>>8679560
Germs exist, anon

[Anonymous No.8679564]

>Pay Capcom $25,000 for an arcade machine
>Shit breaks, can't fix it yourself, need to hire an "associate" from Capcom
>Need to do this same process for a few dozen machines
Meanwhile
>PC gaming is becoming bigger
>All the kids rage about Counter Strike and Star Craft
>Start up an internet cafe, computers are cheaper then arcade cabinets, can be fixed cheaply
>Kids bring their friends to play these multiplayer games together
>And when a new game releases, you just need to spend a couple hundred dollars to put a copy on every machine

The Internet Cafe killed the arcade, and it's completely logical why.
The Internet Cafe was then killed by cheaper computers and faster internet.
Also, just for show. This picture is the internals of Street Fighter 3. Look at this shit, the CD-Rom drive is held together by a single screw. A good hit to the machine would break that screw and the board.

[Anonymous No.8679571]

A brand new 9 floor game center opened in Akihabara this month. 4 floors dedicated to rhythm games, the rest ufo catchers. Not a SINGLE RETRO CAB IN THE ENTIRE FUCKING BULDING. What were they thinking? Across the road you have Taito’s HEY and Sega’s Retro:G with loads of retro coin-ops that are always buzzing with customers.

[Anonymous No.8679572]

>>8678983
>Be me in 2000
>Area manager for Namco Cybertainment
>Monthly conference calls with corporate about tanking revenue
>Mindless old geezers refuse to admit home console industry is the reason
>2004... they finally realize it is
>"Let's do something you can't really do at home"
>Push new redemption and DDR machines to mall arcades that haven't been shut down
>Revenue hits net positive for the first time in years
>By 2007, returns to its decline
>Shut down remainder of mall arcades
>Switch to revenue share agreements with movie theater lobbies
>Life support till 2020, division closes for good due to COVID

[Anonymous No.8679573]

>>8679563
yeah but, arcade's target demographics(kids, teens, and crackheads) are the less concerned about germs and proper cleaning techniques while playing video games

[Anonymous No.8679720]

>>8679573
Soccer moms wouldn't give their kids quarters if they thought they would get AIDS

[Anonymous No.8679729]

>>8678983
>doesn't kick off vr with the virtual boy

[Anonymous No.8679829]

>>8678983
videogames were good from 1991-2007

[Anonymous No.8680935]

>>8679090
No the whole world is Japan, right?

[Anonymous No.8680952]

>>8678983
>That tiny VR share
People who think VR is going to be what 3D was in the 90s are so delusional.

[Anonymous No.8680986]

>>8678983
Arcades never stood a chance in America. We don't even have sidewalks where I live (suburb of major US city). How was I supposed to go to an arcade when I was too young for a driver's license? Not sure why arcades didn't thrive in the old world where you can actually walk places though.

[Anonymous No.8681009]

>>8679571
>What were they thinking? Across the road you have
Maybe that they shouldn't try to directly compete with the company accross the street who will do that niche better? That maintaining retro machines has a much larger cost in terms of maintence (speciality labor and out of production parts)? It seems like a fairly straight forward business decision.

[Anonymous No.8681010]

>Arcades
Walk in and be greeted by the one employee, some dude who looks like he's on work release, or some stoned highschooler working a summer job only to make enough to get a date and hopefully get laid
Have to break change, and carry around a pocket full of quarters the entire time
The only game you actually want to play is stacked 5 deep so you wander around aimlessly trying to find something that doesn't look terrible until it thins out
some dude always comes up to you trying to sell you weed or pickpocket you if you've been in the place more than 10 minutes
any cab that isn't one of the popular ones is in a state of total disrepair, because it's not worth the investment to fix them
no matter what game you're playing the world will spawn some fat wheezing blob of humanity, a 5 year old child, or chain smoker either behind you or he will join in to play
previously mentioned work release or highschooler will have to threaten to call the cops after someone got bodied in MK or SF 5 times in a row and keeps trying to start a fight
always some congregation of girlfriends and mothers off in a corner somewhere gabbing about inane bullshit and somehow managing to be louder than everyone in the place plus all the games running
marked up bullshit prices for all food and drinks
>Home
Buy or rent the exact game you want, play it in the peace and convince of your own home. Invite your actual friends who you know and get along with over to play and hang out.

Really shocking how one of these could die out.

[Anonymous No.8681056]

>>8678983
>How did arcade owners fuck up their industry this badly?
how were they supposed to compete with home console gaming?
The best they can do now is be a barcade (which is already represented by Dave & Busters). But who actively goes to one after one or two odd times? Nothing like how arcades used to be.

[Anonymous No.8681090]

>>8679041
>p-people stopped going to arcades because of a “winners don’t do drugs” splash screen in between game demos

This is your brain on drugs. Go OD in a gutter.

[Anonymous No.8681101]

>>8679054
Amazon was such a humiliating failure, they shouldn’t even be mentioned

[Anonymous No.8681115]

>>8679180
Euros have it a lot worse. At least in the US cops routinely kill minorities but in Europe you have to beg them not to hurt you while they jump you like a pack of animals.

[Anonymous No.8681129]

>>8681115
>At least in the US cops routinely kill minorities

I wish.

[Anonymous No.8681131]

>>8681056
>how were they supposed to compete with home console gaming?
Pretty much this. The reason arcades existed is because arcade games had cutting edge technology that was way more advanced than anything you could play at home. Eventually in the late 90s the home systems caught up and there was no real reason to go to arcades any more. That's it.

[Anonymous No.8681136]

>>8679041
>busted cabinets
this is the biggest problem listed
why risk wasting money on a broken ass cab?

[Anonymous No.8681137]

>>8681129
Now that the midterms are coming up, they're planning on refunding the police, so expect to see pretty much weekly occurrences of cops killing minorities on the news while Ukraine gets blown to smithereens.

[Anonymous No.8681151]

The rise of 3d games at home is what killed arcades.

[Anonymous No.8681152]

>>8678983
Never mind arcades, look what has happened to handhelds.

[Anonymous No.8681164]

>>8679041
>needed to put the "Winners Don't Do Drugs" stupidity into it

[Anonymous No.8681167]

Among various other reasons here is one I personally experienced that I think some others may have had:

I suck at using a joystick. Or rather I suck at using a joystick for fighting games and in the 90s and early 2000s that's the game I would have been most interested in at the arcade.
It was pretty demoralizing to not be able to play at the same level on the arcade machine as I could at home with my control pad.

[Anonymous No.8681170]

>>8681152
They turned into smart phones and now are by far the most popular gaming platform in the world?

[Anonymous No.8681171]

>>8681164
Why did we not heed quentin's warnings? He knew, he knew and we ignored him.

[Anonymous No.8681172]

>>8679572
>>Mindless old geezers refuse to admit home console industry is the reason
What were the reasons they gave instead?

[Anonymous No.8681181]

>>8681101
And there's also another curve in the graph for "cloud". There's really zero reason it should be mentioned in the PC sales.
Remember the Stadia? Anyone? I know it's not /vr/, but it's barely /v/ anyway. Such an embarrassing thing.

[Anonymous No.8681197]

>>8678983
Cloud is never going to take off. And WTF is mobile so huge? What retards are paying this much for mobile games? Probably fucking commies in Chinkia.

[Anonymous No.8681205]

>>8679041
>>more unspoken regulations
This is probably more of an issue than people realize. In many states the entertainment taxes make these businesses completely unsustainable.

[Anonymous No.8681208]

>>8679071
Well if they would have invested more into VR and other things that you couldn't do at home unless you were a millionaire.

[Anonymous No.8681216]

>>8679572
>>"Let's do something you can't really do at home"
This is the only thing they ever had to keep in mind. That and lobbying politicians to make sure entertainment taxes were kept at a minimum or done away with entirely.

[Anonymous No.8681219]

>>8679720
You never really knew if there were gays at the arcade. You just assumed.

[Anonymous No.8681234]

>>8681137
Only like 8 unarmed black men get killed by cops per year and they riot over it.

How many more people are killed by random gang violence?

[Anonymous No.8681383]

>>8679054
isn’t cloud gaming that stream gaming shit that the stadia is doing?

[Anonymous No.8681418]

Isn't it obvious? People are ultimately lazy and cheap. They will always do the option that is less expensive and requires them to do less effort. That's why they didn't go to arcades, and that's why they don't want to turn on the tv for the console anymore. They want to swipe up their phone and WEEEE TINY PICTURES THAT BLIND ME.

[Anonymous No.8681518]

>>8681208
I tried a VR arcade game once.
The fantasy:
>Whoa, this virtual world is totally immersive! I feel like I can do anything!
The reality:
>Costs twice as much as normal games per play
>Have to be "supervised" the whole time by an employee as if it was some kind of carnival ride
>Have to be strapped in with safety gear so you don't randomly flail around, hit your head, and sue the arcade
>Have to attach a greasy VR goggle to your face that's been in intimate contact with dozens of people who think showering is for fags
And on top of that, the game wasn't very good anyway. I'm not saying that VR can't be a good experience... I'm just saying that expecting it to save arcades is just plain unrealistic. It has way too many practical limitations.

[Anonymous No.8682316]

>>8680952
found the guy who has never played vr

[Anonymous No.8682330]

>>8678983
>parents do cocaine and play video games in the 80s
>they have children in the 90s
>their children become tranny journalists and tiktok vloggers
>the parents want to die
>children create russian psyop apps
>children think they are genius game devs
we all deserve it we should all reap what we sow