Victory Game Center

Yoshiki Okamoto wrote: On the one hand, we want to make intense, deep games; on the other hand, we try not to have parts in our games that are annoying to players. It’s not just players either: we have to make sure our games satisfy arcade operators and shop owners, too.

arcadehero wrote: We’ve all heard the phrase: “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Unfortunately exaggerated death reports of the arcade industry have existed in some form or another since the industry crash back in the 80s. And yet…new games and venues mysteriously keep showing up regardless. Odd how that works.

So for a new arcade ‘death’ claim, it was mentioned yesterday that a report was floating around the internet about Bandai Namco having halted their arcade developments due to poor market performance. I saw a number of people on social media afterwards lamenting about the demise of Namco in the arcades but where that was the only source of the claim, it was worth doubting. For something that would be a major shake-up in our business, none of the Japanese arcade gaming websites were reporting that news. It also goes against the news of the Battle Pod & Tekken 7 Summer updates (both of which were unveiled yesterday) and that the company plans on showing a bunch of new games to the Japanese market later this week at the JAEPO 2016 event. The latter is especially something you would not do if you were canning all developments.

I reached out to Frank Cosentino, Senior Vice President of Bandai Namco Amusements America for comment. He responded:

Either that statement [from Nikkei] is “lost in translation” or just a misprinted error.
As you correctly noted, many new titles on the way

So there you go. Mr. Cosentino also confirmed that they will be at Amusement Expo 2016 in Las Vegas, NV, which starts exactly a month from today. Hopefully this news gets out, so feel free to share.

Ikeda: To be honest, I’m actually more of a survival player myself. That’s why we made the chaining more lenient compared with Donpachi, so that players like me with no interest in scoring could be able to enjoy it too.

Gwenster wrote:

Mav wrote: Are arcades dwindling in Japan now too? It’s been a few years since I’ve visited but they were still plentiful and ram packed.

No they’re not, they’re still visited everyday. Friday’s-> Sunday’s they’re jam-packed and i usually avoid the weekends if I wanna play my fave arcade games (Border break & Chunithm+) - you can pretty much find me in a Tokyo arcade about 3 times a week.

Since September 2015 Taito started introducing E-wallet card readers on all of their machines. Other arcades are a bit slow to adopt. But it’s so comfortable being able to use your SUICA/Pasma/NANACO etc. card to pay for your arcade games instead of having to change 1000 yen bill into 1x100 yen coins and stuffing your wallet if you don’t end up using them all.

This digital payment system also allows them to bypass the 100 yen coin thing, for example. They can set it so that at off-hours (weekday’s 10 AM - 4PM ) that machines have a 20% discount on credits. (which works out especially well for games that are credit for time based such as Border Break or Steel Vipers) but revert back to normal pricing at peak hours. This gives incentive to play on lunch-breaks or on off-hours.

Sixfortyfive wrote:

fireflame wrote:My feeling was that the customers were not that well informed about the difficulty and mechanics about those arcade games. Maybe there were some hardcore fans that knew a lot about them and how game mechanics actually worked, but for exmaple, i am not sure that kids were able to guess that. There was no explicit message in the start menu saying "this game has been designed with the intent of making you spend as much money as possible and may include artificial difficulty spikes. Spend your money cautiously". As a kid i would not make a difference between that nice game on an arcade machine, and gamesi could play on the familial microcomputer at home. There would be a differenc ein graphics and speed maybe, but it would not be easy to guess.

How old are you, really?

When a child of the '80s or '90s was dropped off at the mall arcade to kill time while his mother spent the next 1 to 2 hours shopping, he tended to learn real quick how to maximize the $2 that he was given for the afternoon, and more so for each subsequent trip. You'd survey the whole room and get a feel for what looked worthwhile based on what other people were playing or what you'd have already picked up from experience and word of mouth, and if something failed to impress you on your first credit then you weren't likely to spend another on the same machine. I'd go so far as to say that such players might have been the most financially discerning gamers of any type. They had to be in order to feel like they hadn't wasted what limited disposable income that they had.

I would also assume that when you play a game, you do not expect to win automatically, but you expect a "rather" fair" chance to win. If you play chess against a computer, you know that the computer maight beat you a lot, but you know that both sides are playing by the rules.

In the 1980's, there was absolutely no pretense that games were supposed to be beaten in the first place.

Even putting the arcade aside, most NES gamers never saw the endings to half the games in their home libraries.

Synth wrote: Yup. For example, as a kid, when I was sent to the arcade with a limited amount of money, I knew exactly what to avoid if I wanted to play for a reasonable length of time. First things first... FUCK CONTINUES lol. There was no way, even at the age of 10 years old, if a boss slapped me down in 10 seconds, I was putting in more money for the same boss to slap me down in 10 seconds again... nope... I was starting from the beginning, and playing for the 10 minutes it took to reach that boss. Eventually I'd learn to beat him and each coin was going to last longer from that point onwards.