Rebirth of the U.S. Arcade?

Gamasutra has an article up looking at Sega's plan to reinvigorate the arcade market through its recently purchased GameWorks chain. From the article: "I think what GameWorks has done has recognized where our opportunities are, and through our relationship with Sega — hopefully we're starting to see innovations back on the arcade side that bring a new and different environment and experience that people can't get at home. If you're familiar with House of the Dead 4 and the graphics that are a part of that, it's now starting to be back to having an appeal, starting to see some of that impact back on the arcade-side where you can't play in front of a 52-inch screen and have all of the very vibrant color and animation that's part of it — you can't just do that at home."

Comments

Cost killed the arcade. It's dead, Jim.

[drinkypoo]

The only plan to revitalize the arcade would be to reduce what it costs to play a game. The only way to do that is to make arcade games substantially more durable, because they are expensive to maintain. It would also help to make them cheaper. Unfortunately, making them more reliable would make them more expensive. So, obviously I don't have THE ANSWER(tm).

Regardless, it costs maybe $200 to get a decent used console with a couple peripherals, and $20 per used game, so let's say $300 to play give games as much as you want. Since new release games cost one dollar and up per play that's maybe 300 games, which will take between 30 seconds and what, five minutes? Ten if you're a super-pimp? By the time you've learned the combos on a new fighting game, you could have bought the last version and taken it home.

Speaking for myself, it would require that all games were fifty cents or less per play before I would go back to spending a lot of time in arcades.

There are a handful of arcades that run on nickels, if it's normally a dollar game it's a twenty cent game. They tend to have prize systems and snack bars, though, as well as other merchandise. They also tend to be COMPLETELY PACKED.