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Namco Blames Wii for Arcade Closures
milsoRgen noted a story about Namco Bandai is shuttering between 50 and 60 arcades in Japan and blaming the success of the Wii for the closures. "A lot of the types of games that people played at an arcade can now be done at home," said company spokesman Yuji Machida. To be fair they also blame the high cost of gasoline as well.
Dance-pads, guitars, and guns have shown that people are willing to buy alternative input devices of many stripes, which had been a niche for arcades.
To be honest, I doubt its the gasoline prices. Allot of arcades over in Japan are usually within walking distance of schools and residental areas. They are just freakishly expensive.
Take the Gundum Pod Game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNSodeMJ2u0
The thing takes 500 Yen. Thats a little more than $4.50 a GAME. Oh and you can't just play it once, you have to play it multipal times to raise your skill so you can get better mechs. Sure it was networked and you could play with other people in pods, but games like this make the PS3 look like a worthy investment.
If they made the games cheaper, I think arcades can last longer there. But I doubt it as most of these "pod" like machines are pricey as it is.
PS - Missed a br:P
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/shuttering
"To furnish or close with shutters: locked the doors and shuttered the windows."
Sometimes when businesses are closed, they do just that.
I wish I could come up with a real number of arcades open in Japan, but my google-fu is weak today. However, given my experiences there, 50-60 does not sound like a big number of closings...
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
According to Play Meter magazine (the magazine for the arcade/amusement industry), the arcade industry took an even bigger dive in 2007 (from its long decline starting in 1984).
Family Entertainment Centers (FEC) locations were down 60% year-over-year. OUCH!
Japan is not the US and the US is not Japan, and may have cultural differences helping it last longer. Though sometimes the two combine.
Pancakes. Oh I blew it.
Japanese arcades are very different from the US. They always keep up with the latest, usually have multiple people working there at any time, and have clean machines and floors. If a button doesn't respond right you can raise your hand and they'll replace it and give you credit.
The main boost in arcade popularity came with Street Fighter 2. Everyone was playing it, and all the school kids would stop by after school. It also provided an extremely high return rate compared to traditional arcade games where players would play as long as 20 to 30 minutes per game. Two players would go at it and one will surely lose and would only play for about 2 minutes.
The fighting games carried the arcades for a good 5 years. But after that, nothing really matched the popularity and profitability of fighting games. Although extremely popular, the main problem with gambling games at arcades is that it is illegal to gamble. So they are all just playing with tokens that cannot get turned back to cash. Of course, there is real horse racing where gambling is legal, and there are pachinco and slot machine parlors where gambling is also legal. So a lot of private arcades closed fairly quickly once they stopped making much money and turned into pachinco joints.
Namco is actually quite late in closing a lot of their stores. They make a lot of the large arcade games and are a big arcade game manufacturer, so it is understandable that they were a little late to fold, but regardless, arcades closing in Japan is extremely old news. They are also probably just using Wii as a modern excuse, since most arcade games have been ported successfully to non-Wii consoles. The dancing games are a prime example. In fact no arcade to Wii ports really come to mind...
In Japan the pachinco industry is far larger than the video game industry. In 2003, Sammy which sells Pachinco and Slot machines bought out all of Sega's stock.
Just FYI.
Seriously, compare a CPS-2 setup or something to an American made counterpart of the same era. They just simply don't compare.
and then there's the cabinets themselves, American cabs are these flimsy hulks of wood with low res monitors that break when you sneeze at them. In 1996, there was a major sea-change in arcade hardware. JAMMA was fine... in the 80's. 3 buttons, low res monitor, and mono sound. Fine. But come oh, 1994, 1995, hardware gets to be a whole lot better. VGA graphics, stereo sound, complicated input systems(not just multi-button fighters; light guns, optical and analog inputs) and something had to be done. So the JAMMA people got back together and came up with the JAMMA Video Standard, JVS for short. USB I/O(output for things like coin counters), stereo sound and 31kHz VGA high resolution monitors. Now, in 1996 there was only one company in America making arcade cabs and it was the Valley-Dynamo company(who got out of the cab making business all together), and all they made were low res, JAMMA compatible systems, completely ignoring the new JVS standard. Compare that to Japan and Korea where in Japan, you had Sega, Konami, Capcom, Taito, Namco and Andamiro making these sturdy metal candy cabs that still have long lasting monitors that just keep chugging along AND if not in the year 1996, had atleast by 1998 produced cabs that were JVS compliant.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Japanese arcades are WAY different from those in the U.S. Have you ever been to one? Most are divided into two sections, pay-per-play games, and token games.I have yet to see a Japanese Namco arcade made in the last 15 years that wasn't a token-style one.
So anyways, the pay-per-play ones aren't too much different from those here, but of course, you'll never find one under 100 yen. In fact, most of the games are over "standard size"(The size most people think of an arcade game being-these include DDR, Time Crisis, and the like) and require something along the lines of "200 yen to start, 100 per life after that". A bunch include a sort of "memory card" feature, where one buys a credit-card-style piece of plastic(Usually 600 yen or so) that acts as a memory card for one particular game-a feature which I personally used most in playing Ghost Squad-It would keep track of all the weapons you gained, costumes, levels cleared, stats, etc.
I've seen some crazy arcade games over there, including numerous card games where you place your units on some type of special table that reads the cards information, and you move the cards as units of an army to defeat the other player. Popular among the kids is a sort of janken beetle game(Which didn't really catch on here) where you buy cards that contain stats and you slide the card on a machine, you pick rock paper or scissors, and depending on your stats and what you picked, your beetle would proceed to smash his opponent with his horn.
Also dominant there are the pay-per-play(to win) games. Up to half of the entire arcade may be dedicated to the winning of random assortments of stuffed animals-or chips, video games, or just random toys-in games that are almost impossible to win. The Japanese take the crane game to a whole new level.
Then there are the token games. More often then not Namco, there is NO way to win. Seriuosly. Have you seen those frikken things? Basically, you buy tokens(100 yen for 12 or 500 yen for 70, say). And you use them to play games.
To win more tokens.
It is literally an endless cycle of using your tokens in some of the most odd games imaginable to win(or lose and then buy) more tokens to play the games to get more of those god damn tokens. Some of these games are sorta like miniature arcade games where the more tokens you used, the easier it was to "win". Other games include dropping a token into a slot at a certain time to bounce of of certain pins(a la pachinko) onto a continuously sliding back and forth rack of more tokens that, if you are lucky, would be knocked down in part by your certain token. The really "skillful" ones can sit there for hours on end playing and earning tokens, only to lose them in more games trying to get more tokens.
I must admit, I haven't been to an arcade in the U.S. in a while, but I'm sure most of the differences listed here are still true.
I mean, come on, I seriously doubt that ANY U.S. arcade EVER went and got "Typing of the Dead"(Admittedly, it was pretty fun because it still used the standard U.S. keyboard and letters but with Japanese words).
But anyways, this kinda surprised me because usually those places are frikken packed.
That gundam game lasts quite a while, though, and you usually have to wait in line to play, so it's not prohibitively expensive. Consider that you may very well spend 20 dollars to go to a movie, grab some snacks, etc. for an hour and a half or two hours and you can see that while $4.50 a game sounds like a lot, it really isn't all that bad.
The thing about arcades in Japan is that they generally contain a unique set of games that cannot be found outside of an arcade. Let me describe a typical Japanese arcade in Japan:
1st floor will have UFO games, aka "claw" games
2nd floor will have photo booths where girls like to go and take little pictures and stick them EVERYWHERE
3rd floor might have racing games, rhythm games
4th floor might be shooting games, more rhythm games, quiz games, scrolling-shooting games
5th floor might be one style of fighting games in the marvel vs. capcom or street fighter vein
6th floor might have fighting games like tekken and virtua fighter, the more 3d realistic ones
somewhere in there (or 7th floor) might be the gundam pod game, the other gundam game that's not in a pod but not nearly as expensive, maybe bingo games, a horse-racing game (where you sit around a big table and pretend you're watching real horses), a CCG/video game hybrid where you control units via cards you place on a table and manipulate physically, all sorts of stuff
Other than the gundam pod game, maybe, all games are 100 yen (a shade under $1) per play but they generally last a while (fighting games will be best out of 5, for example).
While certainly they can make a case for that the Wii's success keeps people from going to the arcade, it's not a case where people can play arcade games at home. They might choose to play different games on the Wii instead of going to the arcade, but you really cannot substitute a Wii for an arcade.
I used to manage an arcade in the USA. In my arcade, anything on a Sega Naomi system was also being released in near perfect ports for the Sega Dreamcast. And the Dreamcast was simply superb for pirating games off the internet since you didn't even need to modify it in order to play burned games.
So innovation and graphics would have justified the price of playing the arcade machines over playing the game at home. And this was years ago. I can only guess that the problem is worse now with the Xbox and PS3.
The glass is neither half full nor half empty. It is dirty and I don't do dishes!