Saving arcades.

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
1

Arcades need to change. If they do not they will just die out.
Arcades use to be the place to go to play the newest games and see some competitive gameplay. It had a bigger crowd on account of the arcade only games, and the bigger crowds lead to more competitive play.
I love arcades. I remember putting my token in que on the game. Being on hot streaks and taking everyone’s money. And learning new combos from players better than me.
If I happen by an arcade now the only people ever there are a few playing DDR, and some kids playing for tickets.
Now to get back on topic. To save arcades they need to once again offer something you cant get at home. One way is to run turnys. Few do, most don’t. To atract new people all turnys should have a prize. Cash or otherwise.
On to my main idea.
All arcade games should offer online play. Why is this different from home? A business can get a T1 line for about $150 - $300 a month. With a T1 line you can get LAG FREE play to other T1 lines. So every arcade machine could play lag free against any other machine around the world. For this to work T1 lines would be required. No cable modems or DSL.
Can you imagine putting your 50 cents in to a game entering your tag, and seeing "You have been matched with Acidreflux In Tokyo."
Looking even farther ahead you could even run world wide turnys.
On its own, this is just an idea that may never happen. So I would like all of you to tell me who we need to talk to, to make this happen?
What does SRK need to do, to make this happen?

Edit: Acidreflux is just a name I made up. If someone is useing that tag, I was not refering to him/her.

2

So now i have to sit in a lobby waiting for a game in the arcade to? Awesome.

3

What are you going to do about it?

4

No. You are still in an arcade. You can play ppl there. Or just play the CPU untill “A new challenger appears”

5

i said the exact same thing over a year ago… the problem seems to be lag. thats why fighters arent generally popoular online.

6

Business want to make money. They do what they think will make money. They make money by producing products and services that people want.
If enough people ask for something to the right person there is a good chance it will get made.
There just has to be more of a demand for it than it would cost to do.

7

That’s why it would have to be T1 required. A T1 line can prevent all lag.
For the few not in the know. A T1 line is a type of Internet service for schools and business.

8

Even with infinite throughput, if you don’t have some robust netcode you won’t have acceptable internet play. What you’re proposing requires involvement from developers and publishers more than arcade operators. Arcade operators would need to relay this message to them, and I think the players from places that have arcades are pretty content with just playing the locals without having fantasies about networks that let them connect to Japanese players who probably don’t want to play shitty American players anyway.

Besides, its not just fighting games that keep Arcades afloat.

9

There are a bunch of topics on this subject, and a lot of theories get bandied about and not much happens. I don’t think adding online to arcade games would be all that much of a difference because arcades died not from lack of people to play, it’s just people wanted to play at home with their friends rather than go to an arcade. It’s the same reason why movie theaters are losing a lot of money now (the impetus to switch to digital projectors is more because they are trying to cut down on film costs, rather than visual quality) what happened was people could create comparable setups at home with HD tvs, surround sound, etc.

X-copying Japan’s framework wouldn’t work either, because a lot of things play into why theirs works like the way it does. (Culture, the way cities are arranged, etc.)

I think holding tournaments can help, but I don’t know if it ultimately would be able to save the arcade scene. Adding online play to arcade cabinets would be cool, sure, but I don’t know if that gets a kid to come in to play there, rather than stay home and play the same game online there, even if the experience is less laggy at the arcade. (I mean there are tons and tons of players who play games online, who don’t have any real interest in traveling to play in tournaments. Case in point, the DOA scene. So less lag is not that big a selling factor.)

Arcades would have to be something new, and probably something unrecognizable to veterans of old arcades. They would need to probably offer I think something more like a LAN center, as it’s cheaper for operation to get a bunch of consoles, and some games, and that way you can allow people to build their own scenes by bringing their own games. Still this hasn’t become wildly popular, and I really don’t think the arcade ever comes back to any level of prominence again. Hardcore players are interested (hence the hubs in New York, and Cali, and Texas) but the casual player doesn’t care.

The reason that DDR is different is because the experience on the machine is markedly more…“full” so to speak than the offline counterpart, even if you invest in metal pads. Plus there is the theatrical quality to that game, fighters can have dramatic things too, but they aren’t really all that theatrical.

10

What makes you think T1 lines don’t lag?

Do you have any technical knowledge or documentation to back this up?

11

I completely agree. The arcade would just be the support for the service. It would have to start at the gaming company.

12

What you’re proposing is basically like an internet cafe. I HATE internet cafe’s. Ain’t gonna work.

13

put a smoking section in arcades.

srsly.

14

Three hundred bucks a month after whatever installation fee is required is a lot of money for most arcade owners, most of whom are not exactly swimming in dough.

You know why arcades with fighting games died out in a lot of places? It’s mostly because the fighting game scenes died out. Like, no crap Portland Oregon and St Louis Missouri and Tampa Bay Florida don’t have great fighting game arcade scenes, it’s because whatever fighting game scenes they had (if they ever had any) have mostly died out. Even if someone opened a great fighting game arcade in Winnipeg, it wouldn’t be able to survive, because the scene itself just couldn’t support it.

In a very, very small minority of places, there’s still a big fighting game scene without a real fighting game arcade. In fact, the only place I can think of like that in North America is the MD/VA/DC scene, which would probably support a real arcade if anyone opened one. But it’s hard to go out on a limb and buy all the cabinets and boards and lighting and screens and stools and everything you need, and at this point that’s probably not going to get done except by a player in the scene, since few other people out there realize there’s still a market for this. Even in this case, then, the cause for not having a good arcade lies with the players.

This is why it’s so horrible that Capcom priced SF4 so high, they literally priced themselves out of most markets. Arcades in places with real arcade scenes had to import SF4 or die, essentially, but arcades without strong fighting game arcade scenes aren’t going to go out on a $15,000 limb on the off chance that them getting the game will revive the scene. If the game were priced at the usual few thousand, I think you’d be seeing a comparatively explosive growth in arcade fighting game scenes across the world right now.

It doesn’t have anything to do with whether arcades offer online play; that’s something most people can already get for most games at home. Arcades do offer something you can’t get anywhere else, and that’s a steady stream of literally lagless players with whom you can talk and build friendships and improve your game. Even in the strongest of console-based scenes, you just don’t get anything approaching the kind of frequent and varied competition and people you get in an arcade scene. And virtually all supported fighting game arcades I know of hold tournaments more or less regularly already.

15

So much negativity. I’m not sure if it’s on account that this topic has come up before, people are bitter that the arcades are closing, or just that you never went.
I am older than most of the group here, so I have different memory of arcades. I have meet many friends there that I still talk to, been introduced to the turnament environment, and this site. (Over 7 years ago.)

So forgetting all of that. Did any of you learn fighting games in an arcade? Do any of you still go?

16

Yeah, arcades are not dead everywhere. My guess is even that the number of regular tournament fighting game players in the US and Canada who play in arcades is at least on par with the number who don’t, and the worldwide number who play in arcades probably hugely outnumbers the number who don’t. Almost two dozen arcades in North America, in a dozen different regions, have Street Fighter 4, and there are other arcades in other places that don’t have SF4 yet but that still get play in other games.

The LA scene, for example, has hundreds of players that support like 8-9 arcades. At regular weekly tournaments we’ll get upwards of 50-60 players attending and either entering the tourney in one game or another or just coming to hang out and play casuals. I’m going to an arcade tonight, as I do about every 2-3 days, and I’m planning to attend its tournament on Saturday. By contrast, the strongest console-based scene in North America has about as many players total as a major LA arcade gets for a weekly tournament, and the scenes in many other places are lucky to get a few dozen players total.

I understand that most geographical locations in the country do not have arcade fighting game scenes, but don’t take that to mean that a lot of members of the fighting game scene don’t have arcades. The two are very different issues.

Edit: Few surviving arcades are fighting game-exclusive, all the ones I’ve personally been to have had all sorts of extra games like shooters, shmups, rhythm games, racing games, skeeball, air hockey, or other things that tend to charge more money per play than fighting games and can be played by anyone for fun. Lots of places even incorporate a little (or big) LAN center, where people can come and surf the web or play DOTA or whatever. As an arcade owner you have to diversify and rely on more than just one group of people for revenue, and adding other games or a LAN center is a great way to do that.

17

You are 30. That’s not that much older than most of the people that are here.

18

Most of the negativity is very justified, imo.

-Your plan wasn’t quite realistic to begin with.

-If you’d used the search function, you would have seen that there are many threads on this topic already.

-Further study would reveal that about twice every month someone comes by with a thread like this which either says: “I have a great plan to revive arcades”, the actual plan not being very good at all, or: “You know what arcades should do?”

These threads are quite pointless, because usually the OP doesn’t own an arcade, or the necessary funds to execute their brilliant plan, probably nobody here does, or else there would already exist a string of the most amazing arcades you’ve ever seen, with free blowjobs while playing.

Also, it’s not being negative, it’s being realistic.
I’m no businessman, but with the current availability of good internet connections and the things next gen consoles are capable of, it’s not hard to figure out that arcades aren’t a great financial investment right now.
You may argue that it’s about the love of the game and the scene, not about the money, but that’s exactly what it takes to keep an enterprise like that running.

To answer your second question, there was only one arcade in my home town. At a certain point it got ST, but whenever me and my friend would go, nobody else would be playing, so we played on the SNES.
There was no internet and I couldn’t even imagine there actually existed a scene for this kind of thing. Even though Capcom fighters were still coming out, me and my friend would joke about us probably being the only people who played those in Holland.
In my whole life I’ve seen that game in only two arcades, now whenever I happen to find an arcade, there is not a single fighting game in them.

Now I can finally play reasonably lagless on GGPO. If there was an arcade nearby with some good games and a lot of players, I’d definitely go though.

19

True. Seems that the avrage is around 25.
Age of posters: 23 17 22 25 25 25

But a lot can change in 5 years.

20

I’m sure my memory of arcades is the same as yours. I was introduced to the scene when I was 7. I played SF1 in the restaurant. My mom took me to play SF2 in '91 at the arcade. I never looked back.

A lot of the members on SRK already know what the problem with arcades is and why they have failed in North America. Bob Sagat nailed it on the head.