Comment on How do you feel about the removal of tokens from arcades ?
ignirtoq@feddit.online 1 day agoArcades have to charge more than a quarter per play now due to inflation. The price isn’t just you renting the machine for the duration of the play, it’s you paying a small slice of the rent on the arcade location, the income of the workers, the maintenance of the machines, and the electricity for the lights, AC/heating, and so on. No arcades would exist today if they could only charge quarters.
magiccupcake@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Even accounting for inflation arcades should be cheaper.
The compute hardware costs much less and is much more power efficient.
Other power hungry features like lights and displays are both cheaper and more power efficient.
The argument that they still need to be expensive makes so little sense, other than the physical space they occupy.
missingno@fedia.io 16 hours ago
Have you seen what modern arcade games are like? In order to set themselves apart from consumer hardware you can get at home, modern games have been leaning heavily into unique hardware gimmicks (of course this has always been a thing to an extent ever since Beatmania and DDR, but it's much much much much more of a thing now since these are effectively the only kinds of games that get released in arcades anymore). Which does mean specialized cabinets are more expensive now, and maintenance is a whole can of worms - Wacca at my local Round 1 has had display issues for over a year and I've just assumed it's never getting fixed because Marvelous is no longer servicing parts for it.
Look up how much a Maimai or Chunithm cabinet costs. We've come a long way from the JAMMA era when operators could get new games on the cheap by reusing an old cabinet and just swapping out the PCB.
On top of that, some modern games even require revenue sharing agreements where the operator has to give the publisher a cut of every credit played, which cuts into profit margins even further. I think they literally can't just charge a quarter for some of these games.