Being an old skool fighter back during the 90s fighting boom I have seen fighting games thrive and then disappear and I’m glad that the genre is back in a fresh new form with all the new titles coming out.
But I figure I share my thoughts on how I feel Arcades a good thing for fighting game fans, newcomers, the companies, and the community and why.
(The opportunity is there.)
With as many new fighting games titles and I.P.'s out there is a least enough arcade cabinets to make a decent arcade. Now I know that some of the newer fighting games I.P.s don’t have arcade releases but many of them are used to have arcade machines back and it would be easy for the company to release a machine.
(They still are set up for Arcades)
Many fighting games are set up the same where as they were in the arcade such as having a challenger interrupt your main play thru the game (Here comes a new Challenger) or having the lobbies set up in the (King of Hill) method where those that win stay and those that lose have to wait there turn again.
(It would finalize the battlefield for a while)
One of the reasons I believed MVC2 any many other fighting game titles remained popular fighting games was because of the arcade scene. Because the MVC2 cabinet stay the same no patches no dlc. It was what was there and it remain the same given newcomers a chance to learn the game with out fear of it changing on them.
Case in point Yipes famous vid was in a arcade.
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(The Community would see each other more often )
I personally think a community would grow and thrive if there was more face to face interaction.
There is something about challenge someone face to face versus online play.
(It would make money)
Every time somebody loses another 50 cents as to be put into the machine. I spent like 20 dollars a weekend when my mall had MVC2. And would I would totally play UMVC3 in the arcade if arcades existed and there was an arcade release and I think some of you would too.
.
(Bring in newcomers and help them stay around)
Online communities especially on the headsets can be less inviting. The differences between arcades and online. Is after the fight you can shake there hand and tell them good game face to face versus typing gg and logging out. Even with has much trash talk as I have heard in the arcade it is small in comparison to the online communities such xbox live.
(Love of fighting games can get expensive)
Between buying the game, DLC, and getting a Fightstick the prices start to rack up. It be nice to be able to try out a new game for 50 cents especially if it as a new I.P. such as Skullgirls.
(Beat the Champs)
Gootecks as being working very hard to try to make money on fighting games and such. Now durign the 80s there was a concept where you tried to beat the champions of games like Pac-Man by beating there high score. This concept failed. But I believed that this same concept applied to the fighting game genre would work better. Would you pay 50 cents to beat Justin Wong or Daigo?
(Fighting games were born in the arcades)
Basically there is the whole principle that fighting games were born in the arcades and are one of the few genres of video games that can breath life back into them.
(There is a demand for it)
Personally I believe that fans of the fighting genre help breathed new life into it. And I believe that many don’t realize how powerful numbers can be. Example of fans bringing things back-the original Star Trek series, Futurama, Toonami and I am sure there are many more examples. the reason MVC3 was even made was because of the demand as with Street fighter IV. So I believe if enough people demanded arcades back they would return. I think that Capcom, Namco and all the rest would benefit from breathing life back into their roots. I think that if Capcom started making arcades there sales would blow Call of Duty sales thru the roof.
But I guess everything is best explained in this
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Just another player that wants a rebirth to Arcadia. And I feel that the fans here could help make it a dream come true.
Not to rain on your parade or anything, but the reasons arcades close is because they don’t make money. In this economy, financing/running an arcade is a near suicidal investment, unless you have cash to burn and you’re doing it out of sheer love. It’d be operating at a continual loss for Locations/employees alone, then there’s the cabs themselves. Unless you opened next to theater or someplace with an incredibly high volume of foot traffic and had the financial resources to promote it, the chances of it surviving would be grim. They’re pretty grim even if you’re a well established arcade that’s been running since the 90s
This is kind of a wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which fills up first situation. Fan love is one thing, getting outside support is another altogether. TV shows can get extensions if fans demand it, but part of it is being a viable avenue for advertisers to promote their product. Capcom fans would demand less fucked up versions of games from Capcom before they’d want Capcom to start opening arcades again, and while Capcom would be more than happy to license shit out, they’ll never put the survival of multiple arcades on *their *shoulders. Not while they’re bitching about SFxTekken sales and blaming an over saturated market that they created…again.
I’d put money on it that I’ve spent more time in an arcade that over 95% of the people on SRK. As a patron, as an employee and running tournaments and the short answer to everthing on that list is** NO**.
Everything number on that list contains some type of logical flaw in the explanation or is incomplete.
If I was in one of my more ranty moods I’d explain why, but for now I’ll just repeat, NO.
God bless you Henry Cen for mentioning rent. No one ever mentions rent, from a player perspective you probably don’t even think about it but from an owners perspective its the elephant in the room.
How do you operate an arcade on the same cost for a game that they were going for 20 years ago when rent, cost of living, and everything goes up each year?
How do you raise the price to adequately compensate for this difference when equal or better versions of these games are now available on console?
If your arcade is making the same amount of money each year, ITS LOSING MONEY!
I live in a city where there is only one arcade left, and despite all of the work that I and Eric before me put into keeping that place up to date, having events and making sure the equipment worked, the fact that the owner of the arcade also owns the building the arcade is in is probably the biggest reason that that arcade has been able to survive. Every rent paying arcade in this city is long gone.
Among other things, most modern fighting game players don’t really care about arcades. People still say socal is a good place for arcades, but known weekly console gatherings outnumber arcades in the LA area like 20 to 1. Way different than it was just 5 years ago.
actually the opposite happened. it was fighters in the early 90s that helped the arcades for a while, after the demise of the mid-80s.
last “rennaisance” was with Dance Dance Revolution
but since you mention fighters, some malls had custom made cabs of MK9 and UMVC3.
but dont look just at games, look at the social factors too. real arcades werent the most family friendly places.
Arcades are dead. In this economic state; why the fuck should I spend money everyday to go to an arcade and share a cabinet, when I can play at home and now with online versus, there is no need to meet up at an arcade.
Arcades should just be lan centers. Having a machine is kind of cool, but times are changing. If you do get a machine, either make it free play like NLA and make you pay a fee to stay there, or make the machine a dollar or 2 and have some kind of ranking system. The first will clearly attract more than the second.
What you can do, instead of having the entire machine on a timer like what most folks do, is to have only the start button on a (short) timer, then disable A or X button somehow so that start is the only way to confirm/pick characters, then just put the game in arcade mode right where it asks you to press start. Makes the game feel so much more like a real arcade where, once a guy loses, he has to pop in more money just to play. We have a couple of places that have their machines set up like this over here.
Part of the big problem with the arcade business model, especially for fighting games, is that the ratio for time played to money spent is incredibly small and very obvious if you’re a bad player. If you frame the business model as $1 and play til you lose, that triggers alarm bells in customers’ heads. If you frame the business model as $10 and play for one hour, then suddenly it becomes a lot more appealing even if you end up winning a couple games and end up not technically making your money back. But all of that still loses to the mere fact that console/PC gaming is just so much more convenient.
Repeating what many others have said, in order for an arcade to survive, it has to provide a unique experience that can’t be matched in the comforts of a home that people would be willing to pay for. Unfortunately, that same unique experience is incredibly unwelcoming to many new players and it makes the arcade seem like some place where only the pros play and every other casual player will get perfected on. If an arcade tries to maintain income on the machines alone, it’ll have a tough time keeping the prices at a point where they can still get customers to pay for games and keep the arcade afloat.
in the old arcades there was a preset skill level. but modern online games do not have that. you can be playing a player far away who is much better than you and so competition is not fair.today this gap would be even greater.
also the arcade scene is rarely covered by video game magazines and sites.
Ironic that in the arcades you’d see the message “Winners dont use drugs”,
There’s also the question of culture and infrastructure. In Japan and other parts of Asia, people a) stay home less and b) tend to move about using public transportation more. This means, people are more inclined to go out to malls and shopping centers to hang out than to just stay home. This, in addition to higher utilization of public transportation means that there are clustered centers of foot traffic where people are bound to be. This is why arcades in the region can be found either in malls or near train stations (better yet, the mall itself can have subway access, e.g. VIRTUALAND in Bugis in Singapore or A2G in the University Mall in Manila). The same can’t really be said of most of the US.
One of the things I don’t see people talk about is how back in the day, games in the arcade were the best. If I’m right in thinking, arcade machines were so much more powerful than consoles, so a large percentage of good games were in the arcades.
Nowawadays, you can’t do that. CoD and the like wouldn’t work in an arcade setting, it’s a home game. And it’s games like this that bring in the most money.
What with the major console devs not putting out a new console in so long now (except for Nintendo), I would say there is potentially a market there for some of the arcade devs to stick out games that go beyond what consoles are currently capable of. I guess it’s lack of demand and money in a failing economy that stops this, though.
