The brutal reality of redemption games.

[69er]

@Shipwreck Arcade above … I would take on to oppose your bet !!!! It would not be rammo in todays market… 1980s yes for sure! But not now. Never fill the place! Too many phone games. Other interests too!

We recently had a few old classics mixed in the arcades and they took very little income .. good twin drivers or motorbikes are ok as are many of the dual gun shooters but games popular 80s/90s have had their best days…

I am not anti redemption .. some great fun games are out there .. we had quite a few.
One of my favourites Dinosaur Shoot … unlimited machine gun firing at a video screen like house of the dead graphics and ticket wins for points … only 4ft tall adults have to kneel to play so great for kids!!!

I just hated filling the ticket vend units 2000 tickets in folds of 5 held by a weak elastic band you remove in use … some games hold 6000 plus and each pack has a sticky tab to join it to the previous one and only go one way up to vend correctly . If they escaped your grip they concertina all over the show….. it’s worse than a handle of a bucket of 2ps breaking loose spreading coins for some distance round your feet!

£80 of 2p is 3/4 bucket about same as a bag of spuds ……(4000 coins) I have several buckets repaired with lock tongues.

Wall space you say to develop is now taken up with locking glass cabinets full of teddies , dice games, digit spinners, key rings, kitchen appliances (kettles , toasters , elec tin openers etc ) .. star prizes 24” TV or supersize soft plush toys?

Not appealing to players looking for classic Arcadia stuff …. The main regulars have program emulators on phones and go for some fruits where the phone picks up the reel pattern & predicted plays and they bet heavy to win on improved odds … best move against them is switch percentage keys every two weeks and the program compensates with changes to match…. Good laugh!

Glad I am now retired as the games are often drab … and tho arcades tightly pack teddy cranes or put key rings far back on pushers we gave away thousands a year.
People carrying a topical frozen doll or meerkat or Batman soft toy is best promotion for other players but cranes pay on percentage setting in addition to player guiding skill? The machine counts coins in and the prize chute has a sensor counting prizes out (like supermarket checkout sensors) the prize value is programmed in and the win ratio tho fairly random is balanced over hundreds of plays to give operating profit and fair return to players. ( if set up honestly)
(((who says a prize worth £3 should take £5 on average but if you manually enter prize value overrated at £10 it then typically needs £15 of coins to win a three pound toy?))) the gaming board can raid and view settings without notice beware!!!! They seal cash boxes and revisit after a couple of weeks if they suspect fraud?

Luckily most arcade owners abide totally with rules and the law but you can’t drag players to a machine and make them play?
Staff may be on the fiddle though?????
Many are part time seasonal , students, other unemployables? …

 

[69er]

When I first joined these forums around 20 years ago lots of collector wannabe arcade owners used to state “ how I would love a small/ medium shop and fill it with classic vids in my local town”

it made me cringe thinking even back then it would be doomed to failure? Tho odd ones there’s no denying right place right catchment crowds can work but often not long term. … you need take into account rent electric wages own returns and mostly if your project fits with town planning and local council permits etc. and the attraction of less desirable groups hanging around.

Do you diversify into rock band or slogan T shirt sales to attract the target age group or similar investing in stock and how does that fit with local high street trading ?? Alsorts of hurdles especially councils… and police!
You may get multitudes of noisy motorcyclists etc. and how late can you open alongside other closed shops ???

 

[Shipwreck Arcade]

@Shipwreck Arcade above … I would take on to oppose your bet !!!! It would not be rammo in todays market… 1980s yes for sure! But not now. Never fill the place! Too many phone games. Other interests too!

We recently had a few old classics mixed in the arcades and they took very little income .. good twin drivers or motorbikes are ok as are many of the dual gun shooters but games popular 80s/90s have had their best days…

I am not anti redemption .. some great fun games are out there .. we had quite a few.
One of my favourites Dinosaur Shoot … unlimited machine gun firing at a video screen like house of the dead graphics and ticket wins for points … only 4ft tall adults have to kneel to play so great for kids!!!

I just hated filling the ticket vend units 2000 tickets in folds of 5 held by a weak elastic band you remove in use … some games hold 6000 plus and each pack has a sticky tab to join it to the previous one and only go one way up to vend correctly . If they escaped your grip they concertina all over the show….. it’s worse than a handle of a bucket of 2ps breaking loose spreading coins for some distance round your feet!

£80 of 2p is 3/4 bucket about same as a bag of spuds ……(4000 coins) I have several buckets repaired with lock tongues.

Wall space you say to develop is now taken up with locking glass cabinets full of teddies , dice games, digit spinners, key rings, kitchen appliances (kettles , toasters , elec tin openers etc ) .. star prizes 24” TV or supersize soft plush toys?

Not appealing to players looking for classic Arcadia stuff …. The main regulars have program emulators on phones and go for some fruits where the phone picks up the reel pattern & predicted plays and they bet heavy to win on improved odds … best move against them is switch percentage keys every two weeks and the program compensates with changes to match…. Good laugh!

Glad I am now retired as the games are often drab … and tho arcades tightly pack teddy cranes or put key rings far back on pushers we gave away thousands a year.
People carrying a topical frozen doll or meerkat or Batman soft toy is best promotion for other players but cranes pay on percentage setting in addition to player guiding skill? The machine counts coins in and the prize chute has a sensor counting prizes out (like supermarket checkout sensors) the prize value is programmed in and the win ratio tho fairly random is balanced over hundreds of plays to give operating profit and fair return to players. ( if set up honestly)
(((who says a prize worth £3 should take £5 on average but if you manually enter prize value overrated at £10 it then typically needs £15 of coins to win a three pound toy?))) the gaming board can raid and view settings without notice beware!!!! They seal cash boxes and revisit after a couple of weeks if they suspect fraud?

Luckily most arcade owners abide totally with rules and the law but you can’t drag players to a machine and make them play?
Staff may be on the fiddle though?????
Many are part time seasonal , students, other unemployables? …

I found a few years ago that some seafront arcades were holding onto the odd random slightly retro arcade games that no one was playing like a Sega Rally with dodgy monitors or a fighting game that nobody wanted. They would of been better off with a Outrun or Enduro Racer Deluxe and for fighting games a version Street Fighter 2 would of still attracted people. I think it's all about organising, Field or Dreams 'If You Build It, They Will Come'. I took over a gym a few years back that had some nice old school heavy duty equipment and free weights but the membership was dwindling and the atmosphere was all wrong. On a shoestring budget i totally changed the place by moving around the equipment to better positions, taking down some unnecessary partition walls, putting up large self made Marvel/DC poster comic collages and various fitness, martial arts, bodybuilding posters. Offered a couple of free personal training sessions on new memberships. Got a new range of supplements and sold freshly made protein drinks. The place was rammo in no time. Membership skyrocketed. The percentage of females joining up went up considerably. Members who had been training there for years couldn't believe how much the place had changed in the professional look and atmosphere. A revamp and word of mouth can have a drastic turnaround on some businesses.

 

[Max...]

If anyone missed it reading this topic see my recent one on Meade’s book ‘Arcade Britannia’. It totally explains in amazing detail why British arcades evolved (ie f@@ked up) as they did - it’s a whole mixture of historical reasons totally entwined with the British gambling culture and Government meddling- video games are not the only factor by far…

 

[Bods]

Trouble is with Retro Arcades what do you have in there to bring back people time after time and not just the occasional visit? to me it has to be a big venue with machines most haven't got even if they have some vintage arcade cabs at home. It's never been easier to play the old games on a PC or with Phone etc and still then how many regularly play them, if majority aren't even doing that because too busy working or getting on with standard family life or sat on smart phone, the chances of them piling down a local retro arcade joint are minimal, or more unlikely to return if its only got a few games you like out of 30/40 and you still don't get the full retro arcade experience when there on free play vs lasting a minute for 60p in todays prices like the old days

At home I can still pop in coins and see how far I can get on 1 credit with no time limit to doing it and no costs apart from little electric, I couldn't be bothered trolling into city centre to play some emulated cabs or standard uprights I can play at home now, if they had a load of Sega, Taito, Konami Simulators then that's a different matter, need to be ones I can't play at home

 

[John Bennett]

i need to chirp in here

so as a 10 year old when you put 10p into a Donkey Kong game and your game lasts about 30 seconds, how was that different to these sorts of machines, they have just moved on. All us old bastards in here got good at some of these games so the 10p wasnt the quick win for the operators anymore, so they removed all of these machines that some of us can play for 20 minutes on a single 10p and replaced them with something else for the new generation.

imagine giving a 10 year old kid 50p and asking them to go and play pacman...no reward at all for them because they would never make it past the first 2 levels, same with every other game from that generation, how many people did you actually see in the 80's doing well in games in an arcade on one credit?

we are all great now we are older, but we have had the benefit of learning patterns in things like MAME

It's an interesting one.

I can get 1000 tickets for £1 by 1CC'ing Wild West Shootout, if the difficulty is set sensible. But in some arcades it's set off-the-scale so I'm lucky to last 1 minute. I guess that technically makes it just like the games of old - fair or unfair depending on the arcade.

But on the other hand, it often feels like redemption games have an exponential difficulty level. Or at least they're set to that.
There's a Flappy Bird game on holiday that offers 2000 tickets for clearing 50 pipes. At around 40 pipes it quickly becomes utterly impossible so you wind up with about 20 tickets.
Maybe operators are more inclined to whack the difficulty to maximum for ticket machines as they quickly realise when they're replacing the reels regularly.

Whereas most arcade games seemed to be set to a normal-ish difficulty back in the day (or pretty consistent amongst arcades and way easier than how they seemed on MAME with the dips set to max). I doubt most arcades would've bothered to time the length kids played the games.