The costs are just nuts. It’s a thousand for just a pac man machine. I’ve heard ae units are 20 k. To make an ok profit youd have to get enough plays to suffice for twice the initial price of the unit. Then there are electricity bills, your own personal costs like groceries, employees etc.
A model I have seen is combining it with a working, solid, money making business, and it seems to work quite well if the primary business is super profitable. However I have also seen them coupled with restaurants and I wonder how these even stay open. Having one of those is risky enough of a business.
To eke out the existence of an arcade for a short time it would have to be like running a farm- the owner would always, always be in debt, huge debt, unless his customer base was huge and spent a lot and he had a business on the side along with deep pockets to begin with. We simply don’t have the old style market anymore where exclusivity of having certain games made up for the costs, and the inkling that the USA has of that (ae, new kof) is expensive.
Just… How is Cen doing it with Next Level… How did any of em do it in the modern era (2000s)?
I know early 2000 etc we still had somewhat of an arcade thing going but after that, bam, death. Too expensive, online gaming on consoles, hassle free (no command line) emulation, economic recession, etc.
Arcades dont make the money. The real money is in those staker or claw machines. People spend money for a CHANCE to win a cheap chineese toy. Its only possible if you have a combo bar or bowling alley place. i cant think of a single arcade in existance that has an owner that gets its solw income from arcade games. sad times
Easy most of the ones that have survived are independently owned. First you don’t report all your earnings to the government, since you will be receiving cash money (quarters) there is no real way for the Feds to find out what you are really earning, a lot of small businesses do that such as smoke shops, Chinese food restaurants, discount stores, video rental places, taco places etc. You will see a big “CASH ONLY” sign as you enter the stores and next to the register. This is the key to making money in this type of businesses.
2nd. You don’t buy the real AE cabs for $20K you buy some knock offs for $7K (that’s all I will say about that). There are ways to get every game out there for a fraction of the MSRP.
3rd. You don’t have employees, you are the only employee which means you’ll be there from opening to closing. Every gamers dream right…? Not when you are forced to do it every single day.
4th. Sell drinks and snacks. Believe it or not this sales add up at the end of the month.
Now let’s not forget about location, location, location.
I really don’t see how arcade cabinets are like $20k. You could just buy a good TV, an Xbox, two arcade sticks, and some wood for a cabinet for like $3000. You’d obviously need to figure out some way to make it coin operated or whatever, but still, it’s less than a quarter of the actual cost.
But yeah, Galactic is right, they really can’t make money. A 20k machine that gets a $1 play every 5 minutes constantly for 40 hours a week takes almost a year just to pay off its initial cost.
If an arcade was run just off games then it’d be impossible to make a profit. That’s why the bigger arcades have stuff like a billion crane games, ticket games, and side attractions like bowling alleys. Same goes for Japanese arcades. They NEED those pachinko/slot machines and UFO Catchers, otherwise they just shut down.
You mean like a lan center? Funny thing about those “arcade” games, don’t make any cash there. It’s the worst community to bother with. Most of the cash raked in from those places comes from COD, HALO, et all. Where you can have all your friends in the same room talking to each other in real time with the same pings to a center and practice team/clan matches. Those fuckers will pay out the ass to be able to do that. The next group are PC gamers for the same reason.
You can have arcade games, but it’s not going to keep the place afloat and in many cases having free play tournaments nets you less money as you get fucked out of all the income you could have got on a weekend.
Not to mention some of the most popular non arcade games that are really big in e-sports, heh you might have to pay to hold quals for larger events or even pay to be allowed to use the game.
And in some cases just using “off the shelf equipment cheap” can land your happy ass with a massive lawsuit, it’s not as simple as “tvs + games = profit”
Because you make money off of it. This is not hard to understand. It’s the same for most software and other items. Hell, look at pay per view items. To show a fight in a bar, costs several times over what it costs to watch it at home, because you make cash off it. Once you start making cash off another’s work, you have to pay up or you will get sued into the ground rather quickly.
To put it simply, you buy a copy of SSF4, that’s 60 bucks. You get one licenses only usable by you and you are not legally allowed to charge to people to play it or watch it, if you did that’s grounds for legal action. Or you buy the Taito X2 version at several times over the cost and you are allowed to charge people to use it. What you’re allowed to do with it depends on the license of what you bought.
Ditto for cable. You can pay a pretty price for a top fight at home, but if you charge anybody to see it at your home you’re now liable for getting fucked. Or if you own a bar you pay thousands for that same viewing because it will bring in business.
Everything operates this way. It’s just that one subset of gamers are too stupid to grasp how the world works.
I pay business fee’s for sports and items at work, it can ratchet into several thousands of bucks fast, because we are a business (even though we have nothing to do with sports, it’s just for folks to goof off in the lobby with) it’s how the game goes. If you’re going to make a buck off it, the fees go the fuck up.
sad times
