Because SF was alive and kicking before Halo 2 came around
Im dense?
Im not the one that tried to compare Far cry and halo 2, i just replied to the guy that did…my original question was what POPULAR multiplayer game is more realistic than halo 2, not saying halo 2 is 100 percent realistic…
and halo 2 became popular because of Halo 1, which i still think is better than Halo 2, obviously halo 2 is n00bified and is not near the level of play as halo 1…
but as Jae hoon said, stop talking about which FPS is better than which, and back to the subject at hand…
Charge by hour per sevice (ranges from 5-10 usd) plus they get thousands pumped in for professional gaming events, ie PC gaming tournaments.
Throw into it the fact that if you have half a brain you don’t have to pay for your PC’s (companies will sponsor them for free advertising in graphics and cpu’s because they gain sales due to people using their products there and then buying them at home).
Plus if I throw a tournament at a cyber cafe, just hit up some hardware companies and you can get a quick 1-5 grand in prizes, or a check for that money. Then charge to enter, so the owner keeps all profit. Unlike an arcade, no company will regularly throw out that kind of cash. With a cyber cafe you have several billion dollar companies that will foot your bill (and game makers) just to gain more sales and gain marketing.
In the ideal situation a cafe doesn’t pay for machines, gets mad amounts of free prizes/cash for tournaments… and then just makes profit/pays rent of low hourly fees, an arcade can’t do that, they are entirely driven by hourly fees and can’t get the amount of free crap/bonus stuff thrown their way.
Also look at the upgrade issue. In a cyber cafe you dont’ buy a new cab, or cart per game, you just instal software, and if needed call up your sponsors for a free fix of new hardware. So you don’t pay upgrade cost.
Also you can cram more PC/console units in per space then arcade cabs, so you maximize the amount of area people pay for.
Another (though not so frequent issue) is that a lot of cyber cafes are owned by progaming teams from various clans/e-sport organizations, so they can get the set up fee (which can be a 6 figure amount) from their clans checking acount, or prize money won, and it’s an investment where they make their money back and they use their sponsors equipment, and give them free adds.
Keep in mind some members of clans make over 100k in just prizes a year, and often times you can find about 3 or more people at that level in one clan, so the sponsorship money flows in.
It really all has to do about who will back your hardware, and pay for your extra costs.
It’s just easier to whore out. Imagine if capcom would give you free cabs, give away free games, and free 1grand prizes to tournament winners at your arcade, and that’s about how it works in a good cyber cafe.
The only major console player in all of this is microsoft, who will throw money at you if you push halo and microsoft events.
You can get some GOOD 2d fighting games going at most decent cyber cafes, since a ton of the guys there (the older crowd) are mostly ex street fighter players. The one I go to has a DC hooked up with a good selection of games and actual sticks in the managers area… plus the illegal as hell PC with mame and good sticks, SSF2T can go on way after hours.
I agree. I don’t think there’s any kind of change in thinking among the ‘GTA generation’. Thery are just following the current fads just as many people were following the fighting game fad years ago.
When I was a kid, none of my friends really knew how to play fighting games. They were just following the fad and fancy graphics. Matches would be like Blanka electricity vs E.Honda hand slaps. Once I learned about charge moves from Nintendo Power none of my friends could beat me, even the ones who owned the game.
And there were plenty of dumb comments back then just as there are now. “MK is better than SF because it has blood.” Around Dreamcast time I remember a guy telling me how SF is a “push button game” and then bragging about how he knows how to beat the CPU in Soul Calibur by not using your best attacks until the end to trick the AI.
So yeah, it’s all about fads. Even when fighting games were popular most people were just buying them and not really understanding them. Mayba a game gets hyped because of its graphics, maybe it’s violent. Whatever. But casual gamers tend to follow fads without seriously playing the games.
Well, there are various reasons as to why the arcades died. Most of them are pretty valid too.
-Like it’s been said, the soccer mom have been overprotective of their kids.
-Then there’s the cyber cafe thing, which does plays a good part. But like it’s been said, there wasn’t any in my hometown and our arcades died in the mid 90s anyway.
-Finally, there’s the fact home games are just as flashy as Arcade games now, if not more. It wasn’t the case in the 90s. This made arcades feel a lot less appealing for many people.
Let’s end this with a sad, personal story. During my first year of college in 1993, there was a small arcade room right next to the main dining all. A lot of people gathered there to play. One day, they recieved the first Super Street Fighter II machine in the area and people flocked to it, leading to very serious competition. Then Mortal Kombat II appeared, drawing even more people (but ultimately splitting the fighting scene altogether. But people were still playing fighting games, spread on the two machine… But someday…
Doom struck. Some computer geek installed copies of Doom on every computer in one ot the computer labs, and the madness spread like wildfire. Nobody was playing fighters anymore, fragging people for free in Doom instead. The college’s arcade closed down and I was left bitter.
Sad story, right?
Not all of them. A lot of the ones in Toronto are run by random Asians or something. And they don’t go out of their way with clans & what not. It’s like a high-end computer section of a library.
Anyways, the computers they put up probably cost less than $1000 apiece, since they probably buy in bulk from other Asians & get some kind of discount. So let’s use a 24-hour cybercafe with 20 computers for example.
$1000x20 = $20000 initial cost for computers - excluding the cost of the monitors/peripherals, since
Assuming that, on average, each computer gets used for 8 hours a day @ $3 per hour:
$3/hour x 8 hours per day x 20 computers = $480 per day, 7 x $480 = $3360 per week
So the computers would be completely paid off in about 6 weeks. Then, after that, they never need to worry about the computers again. So for the other 46 weeks of the first year, whatever they make only needs to cover the operation costs. Also, the people working there probably get paid a few cents above minimum wage. And that’s only for the first year. If they upgrade after that, they can sell off the old systems to help pay for the new ones, so it’ll take less time to pay off the computers.
Well, either that, or they’re just fronts for laundering money.
Damn…way too much truth compressed into such a small space.
This is way too depressing.
I finally realized that no one is going to care about arcades and Street Fighter again.
Cyber cafes own arcades so much financially that nobody in their right mind is going to invest in a bunch of clunky old cabinets in a dark sticky room with equipment that breaks nearly every week so a couple of unwashed 20 year olds can hog the Capcom fighting game machine for hours on a couple of cents when they could be getting free money from Microsoft and stupid loser punk kids flushing their money down the toilet to play a game for a few hours on shiny, new, sleek computer equipment that never needs to be replaced.
Arcades and Street Fighter were just a short fad, after all. Like in the 70’s, disco music was mainstream but now it’s gone for good and no kid is going to cut off his Shitty Cent mp3 and pull out an old Bee Gee 8-track.
Halo 2 got a bigger push than any fighting game has ever gotten. So advertising and n00bified gameplay is what made it so popular. I’m not sure what that has to do with fighting games not being popular, but everyone has their reasons.
I cried IRL sniff
i think the truth of the fact is the kids in that area must of grew up playing with toys lol
my little brother and his friends are around the age of 13 to 15, they all love street fighter and other 2d games because of the depth of the system, none of them plays or even PLAYED with toys much, theres so many variations of entertainment in this world and the majority of it is served entertainment instead of constructive entertainment
these types of kids treat games like brain bubblegum.
Maybe, but you can’t hate on Microsoft for standing behind their products.
When they bought out bungie to control Halo they wanted it to become the #1 competitive FPS… well that never happened on xbox, and the game flopped on PC.
So with Halo 2 MS made damn sure to host cash prize events, and hype the hell out of it, and they have done a good job of it.
Even still most first place Halo 2 finished garner a piddly shit 5 grand, compared to Quake/Unreal which fetch 35 grand for the same standing (and this is 1v1).
The truth is that MS is waging an xbox vs PC war, hence all the hype behind it.
And if you think the hype is bad now, watch what will happen when Windows Vista comes out:looney:
I’d be interested in seeing some of the figures on just how much MS has thrown into the pot in their Halo VS counterstrike/bf2/quake/unreal… must be a fortune:rofl:
i fucking hate xbox, halo, and windows…
I have nothing against MS, Halo, or the hype. The thing I was tryin’ to figure out is why are people blaming GTA and Halo 2?
Because consoles killed the arcade star.
Ok. That’s reasonable and it makes sense.
Actually I think it was online gaming that killed arcades. Consoles have been around for ages and arcades have died somewhat recently.
Yeah it’s much to simple (and stupid) to blame GTA and Halo for killing off an already dying arcade scene.
Heck, when I was in high school (okay so I’m only 20, but I like to pretend I’m old), there was only the one arcade in the mall, and the best machines in there as far as activity and making money was DDR. Which is okay, I like DDR, and there was a third strike machine in there, but it only usually had a few diehards playing it all day. It was DDR carrying it, but the arcades were never as popular as plopping down at your friends house and playing games there. I mean, you got to play with a group of people you like, no lines, no paying, and if they were good at the game, it was all the comp you cared for. (Not to mention you could eat and play! heh.)
So arcades faded in the same way many things that were popular in the past changes, it doesn’t suddenly mean the new generation is dumb (I bet there was a lot of people thinking arcade goers were dumb over whatever things kids did before them) it just means the general tastes have changed.
I would argue many RPGs are just as popular, if not more so, than Halo and GTA and yet I still don’t blame those solely for the death of arcades.
Consoles were akin to the remote control for the television, sure you could go to your television to change the channel, but why, when you could do it from where you were? Once consoles caught up to arcades, the major reason for going went away, there was no longer that cool game that you couldn’t play at home, and really there wasn’t (at least for me) any community out there anyway. It was better to grab your friends, and just go to one of their houses and play for hours.
That’s my opinion at least, you may disagree.
Greedy arcade operators killed arcades.
The overnight jump from 20c a credit to $1 a credit pushed me out of arcades a decade ago. All of a sudden a home console didn’t look so expensive when I was pumping five times as much cash as normal into arcades.
Yeah but why would they up the price of the games in the first place though?
Either the arcade itself was going under what it was supposed to make OR the players themselves stopped showing up.
You could blame greed but if the arcade there is still standing where it was 10 years ago as you say, then it would have made sense the price hike. If it was simply for money/greed you would think once they scammed the players for a few years they would just close down and break more than even shutting down and selling off the property as well.
same here, I use to go to this pizzaria in new york(there was 2 different ones, one close to my school(P.S.7), which had xmen children of the atom, street fighter 2 and MK ultimate and one close to the trains, which had marvel super heroes, I use to steal quarters just to go play, lol, but once that xmen vs street fighter machine came out, it seemed, instead of 25 cents to play it was now 50, so yeah…im a cheap bastard, now you can play all that stuff online with a PC and emulator. but the one moment that really pushed me away from going to arcades anymore, was when I went to Disney Quest in Florida, I forgot how much it was to enter, but once in, you could play ALL the arcades there for free(technically not free since you paid to get in, but you get the picture), i had a blast there, then when I went back home after the vacation, it felt wierd going back to having to find or steal quarters, couldnt take it anymore…