that’s a huge av
I have a T1 at home.
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
T1 lines have slightly lower latency to the first hop than dsl, but anything else between point A and point B on the public internet is not in your control. T1 lines have much less bandwidth (1.5mbit symmetrical) than some dsl (although my old dsl was 3mbit down .78 up), or fiber to the home connections (you can get 20mbit symmetrical verizon FIOS for cheap if its available in your area). For one person gaming this isnt a big deal, but T1 connections are easy to saturate with multiple people. If my wife is downloading something, I will get lag spikes in online games. Most of my coworkers w/T1 have an additional cable subscription for downloading. The main advantage of T1 at this point is reliability and quality of service.
Furthermore, there is always lag. You aren’t going to get an instant connection from the middle of the U.S. to japan, it’s just basic physics.
Even though what I proposed is on a bigger scale than what I can do. I do plan to open an arcade in 3 years. To keep it open I will be primarily a game store. (Local card shop. Not a Game stop.) To compliment the two it will also rent/sell/buy games movies. Diversity is what can keep a store open.
This is not outside my funding to do. I currently own a pizzeria in Eugene, OR. Most will just write this off or call me a liar. So at that I will just let this tread die.
Thanks for saving me the hassle of typing something similar.
I heard japan has these optical/fiber connections as a standard, which I heard are better
Have Scheduled Tournys and Lock-ins well attract people…mostly old school gamers. Thats the only way to save the Arcade Scene as of now.
we do that all the time here in Nor Cal, and its working.
They are. Which is why I wish I still lived in Indianapolis and not Southern Illinois (I heard AT&T introduced Fiber Optics in Nap last year – Verizon doesn’t even know where Southern Illinois is on the map, let alone that we might want FiOS).
Japan/Korea both have stellar broadband standards, especially compared to standards in the US. Friend from Korea came over here to visit in '07, and if we were chilling in the house, she was on the computer complaining about how slow my internet was, and how Korean internet is far superior.
Oh FiOS, how I long for thee.
Lack of faith in your fellow SRKers just cause they are realistic about your idea? How depressing.
Arcades could have been saved if more drastic actions were taken…10 years ago.
Now the arcade scene should move to more of a local play leagues or something similar (IMO).
The reality about this is, is that it will not work.
Seriously, re-think your plan.
Why do you think arcades were dying to begin with? When console releases came out, most casual gamers decided not to goto the Arcades because there logic is “why goto the arcade when you can play at home?”
Your idea is basically the same thing.
“Why goto an arcade with internet when I got the internet at home?”
Theres more to it than that, but it’s not hard to see that this is a failed idea.
Why should people with a scene move on?
Arcades have really high operating costs and really low revenue which leads to razor thin profit margins. If they changed to the LAN center model, things would be much better.
Say if Capcom/SNK/Namco/whoever opened up a Steam style service. You download the program, and the interface controls entirely through arcade stick.
Instead of paying thousands for a ST, CvS2, MvC2, 3S, 98UM, SFIV and etc boards, the arcade could have a bunch of sit down cabinets that have a windows PC inside that have all the arcade games installed. The arcade owner would pay for licenses which no doubt would be cheaper than arcade boards because a gig of bandwidth is not even $0.01. Because there’s virtually no cost for arcade boards, the game publisher make more money and the arcade owner pays less. It’s win/win.
To boost arcade revenue, the arcades could have sit down cabs that charge by the hour. Even if I get my ass handed to me all night, I still only spend like $8 a night at FFA. All that time I spending waiting for my turn at the machine is time I’m not spending money. Arcades will make more money by the hour than they would per play.
But why would anybody want to pay more? I’m willing to pay more if I get better service. Arcade machines haven’t fundamentally changed since the 70s. If every cabinet has the same games installed, I don’t have to wait 15 minutes to play 98UM. The games could have a built in latter match making so you don’t get annoyed by any scrubs trying to play at the big boy cabinet. If there’s no competition on Garou when I’m over, I can play someone online over the arcade’s T1 line. More profits for the arcade owner, a better product for the consumer, it win/win. again.
Since it costs less to start up, more arcades are likely to open. Capcom or whoever could allow for a home version of it’s online store which means even more profit. Somebody should come up with the software for this online store and demo it. If you could get Capcom/SNK/Namco/Sega and hell even midway to release their classics on the service it could revive the arcades.
You can open up an arcade on a shoestrong budget if you know what you are doing. Most fighting games/cabinets from auctions and stuff you might have lying around is not as costly as you think. With the exception of SFIV, Tekken 6, KOFUM, most fighting games are cheaper and affordable.
This “licensing” thing you speak of does not exist, so it’s basically “copying”, which shuts the distributors and manufacturers out (copyright infringement)
Most new arcades being opened these days have a “factor” or investor behind the place, and you seriously need $60,000-100,000 easy to get all the new games you want, but if you want to do it on a budget, and find a good, cheap, high traffic area (I found a 3100 sq Ft location in a mall for less than 50 cents a square foot a month) you can definitely get something set up at least.
The smart places to open arcades are: malls, cities where you already have scenes/demographics (Chicago, NY, LA, SF) near a movie theater, school/college, or just do revenue sharing where you don’t even have to pay for a spot.
That’s just flat out wrong.. The ability to purchase software in bulk has been around forever.
and besides, people would still needed to make the actual cabs and cabinet parts.
Here’s an easy way to think of it:
Given the equatorial circumference of the Earth is about 40,075 km and c about 300,000 km/s, the theoretical shortest time for a piece of information to travel half the globe along the surface is 0.0668 s. (66.8ms)
There are approximately 17ms in a frame, and fighting games run at 60fps . . .
Therefore, even if the Internet was theoretically perfect, you would still lag between 3 and 4 frames one-way. It is not physically possible to ever have perfect, lagless fighting gaming between the U.S. and Japan.
I mean those who don’t or aren’t able.
From the man who’s actually DOING something about saving arcades . . .
Ironically, Einstein’s dying (which had little to do with lack of revenue afaik) may be the best thing that could ever happen to austin’s arcade scene. I’m sure I’ve already spent more at arcade UFO than I did at einsteins in the last year of its existence, and had more fun doing it too. Better machines, better variety of games, better layout.
Do what you love, do it right, and people will support you for it.
Winsome calculations by poonage. :rock:
In the long run, I don’t see arcades surviving in any First World country (even Japan) unless they bring something “extra” to the experience.
Simply put, when the population has access to next-gen consoles, it does not make economic sense to go somewhere and pay to play. This is especially true with the newer arcade games that cost $1 per play, as most people can easily wait for the console version and most likely save money overall. Japanese players are just beginning to see this now; a combination of culture and sheer luck has kept their arcades alive, but even there a decline has begun.
There is a natural tendency for human beings to base their behavior on the incentives, and right now there isn’t a major incentive to go to arcades. Note that these incentives DO exist in poorer countries, because not nearly as many people own the latest consoles - think of how some of the strongest arcade scenes these days are in places like Mexico and Pakistan.
So, where is the incentive going to come from? We already know it isn’t going to come from competition, not yet anyway; there’s just too little money/prestige in fighting games right now, especially for the amount of time & effort they require.
As I alluded to at the beginning, I think the solution is to make your business more than just an arcade: Choose something else as your primary attraction, and you’ll draw people in to play games. Think of something like Dave & Buster’s, or maybe even Planet Zero; yes, I know about all the issues with the latter, but those are problems with the owner rather than the model itself.
Of particular importance, in my view, is choosing something that creates a family-friendly atmosphere. One factor in killing arcades which is not often mentioned here is the fact that they acquired a reputation for attracting gangsters, drug dealers, and other sorts of thugs. As such, it would pay dividends to combat that head-on.
Just my .02. =)
Eh, luck has nothing to do with it. I’d be more inclined to say arcades are suffering just because most businesses are suffering at the moment. Either way, I don’t think anyone here knows enough about the economic situation in Japan to pinpoint any decline in arcades to something as specific as console gaming.