Opening an Arcade

[noiseredux]

If there was a local arcade full of retro classicss (SF2, Ridge Racer, Space Harrier, etc) and it served beer. Well. I'd have a lot less money.

[tmly]

Not totally related but very interesting. I love his blog and read it daily...very intellectually written.

http://www.chewingpixels.com/gaming-as-performance/

[otaku]

sadly this is a very bad idea most likely I know the local arcade owners and the one state provider of machines the guy that provides machines said the last game he sold which is very popular as far as arcade machines go nowadays took 2 years to pay for itself before it started making money. Not to mention alot of the arcades around here have to trade or sell machines to acquire new ones and they have to offer way more stuff than just arcade machines (food, rides laser tag etc) economy is bad to...even for gaming...

[Jrecee]

Honestly you'd be better off opening a restaurant and putting some arcade games in it.

[Dakinggamer87]

Bad Idea Jeans.

Not trying to come off as cocky, but facts are facts. I got my MBA a few years ago, and although I've only been a marketing consultant for four years, I know a bad idea when I hear one.

I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but unless you have a few hundred thousand dollars somewhere around that you're not afraid to lose, it's a no go. Just look at the arcade market. In the U.S, it's almost non-existent, and that's for a reason. Consoles slowly killed the arcade business. Getting a loan to fund start up costs would be extremely difficult, as it would be close to impossible to conduct a proper industry/market sector analysis that would be needed to persuade a bank or the government for a small business loan.

Plus, the gaming companies are working against you. They're way more interested in the production and selling of console games than making cabinet games, which they should be. Less cost, more profit. Makes sense.

In order for an arcade to be profitable, and to be financially sustainable in the current market, you'd have to do things drastically different from past arcades. Dave and Busters is fairly successful at changing the idea of what an arcade is, and that is what you would have to do. But keep in mind that D&B is a multi-million dollar machine backed by well-off investors. I'd love to see an arcade where all the games bring something to the table that you can't do with console games. Bring back games like Super Hang-On and Afterburner, but add more realism to them. Every flight game at an arcade should have a cockpit you sit in, buckle up, and allow for complete 360 degree movement. Racing games should put you in a model car, with screens surrounding every window. But, like I said earlier, most game companies aren't focused on that.

Sorry, but in short, unless you have a groundbreaking idea with a ton of financial support, consider the arcade dead.

Yeah, I totally agree.. I sure miss the arcades!!

[Erik_Twice]

I think arcades can be quite profitable and the problem with them is bad managment that didn't change it's ways when the Playstation hit.

In fact I once helped a friend of mine to do a work about opening an arcade for Economy class and we realized it can be done.

First of all I think the new arcade model is the "all you can play" variety if you are not inside a shopping mall. Shopping malls can use the old model perfectly because even if only a small percentage of the people go in there there's so many people they are always full.

However the "old" model may work perfectly. For example here, in Spain (And probably most of the EU), most arcades have their games at 1€ the credit (Which is very high compared to the rest of the world), thus when an arcade opened with it's games at 0.5 € we found we were spending more money than before. In fact the 1€ one credit is a bad translation as the thought 1€ = 100 Pesetas when 1€ is a 66% more than 100 pesetas.

Something my friend and I realized is that old games have much more attraction power than new games and they are a lot cheaper. Time Crisis IV costs more than 10k dollars, with that money you can fill a room with retro classics. In fact more people will play Tetris than Time Crisis.

Also most modern arcades suffer the "two genres sindrome" in which every game is either a light gun game or a driving game and let's be frank, that's boring and there are no a lot of good arcade driving games worth playing right now. The may be attracted but after two games they are leaving because they don't want more racing.

We also discovered that there are lots of gems and other games that I have never seen before but seem incredibly fun to play, For example there are some Wario-Ware like titles for up to 8 players or Boxing Mania (We had one in a nearby arcade until it exploded for being so used).

Now that I think about it, get that game, people will spend a lot of money in it. It's also a cheap game so it will return benefits soon.

I have more ideas but I don't feel like writing more walls of text right now.

[crux]

These guys know what's up. http://www.barcadebrooklyn.com/
I wonder if the way to succeed is to cater to the crowd who grew up on arcades, serve beer and food with lots of arcade cabs to play on.

Barcade is a nice novelty, but I can tell you firsthand that they don't take great care of the machines. High scores aren't saved and many of the joysticks were in terrible disrepair. That said, they have a damn fine beer selection and a pretty decent arcade selection as well. It's Williamsburg though, so a place like that is more about the hip than it is the game.

To give you an idea of what running an arcade entails, the best and longest running arcade I know of (http://thebreak.net/) is a complete dive. The walls are bare, the drop down ceilings are moldy, and the entire place is in such disrepair that my wife doesn't even feel comfortable being inside of it. On the other hand, it has the best selection of domestic and import fighting games and rhythm games in the entire tri-state area and is probably one of the top two arcades in the entire north-east.

It's simply an expensive and non-lucrative business to start. The most successful ventures I consistently see are restaurants and bars with games, which depending on the clientele you want to attract, isn't necessarily the worst choice. Of course, opening a bar is even more difficult than an arcade.

[Anapan]

There are 2 local arcade-type establishments here - one's called Scandia Golf & Games and the other is Malibu Grand Prix. Neither of their fairly large gaming areas seem to be played very often, and the games are in mostly bad repair, they do seem to make decent money on the other attractions at each one.
Scandia has both indoor and outdoor minigolf, a pizza/junkfood service, animatronic robot monkey band, virtual sports (batting cages etc.) and a pretty big ticket-games area.
Malibu has go-karts and has mostly shut their once awesome arcade area down to make a mini-restaurant area.

Unfortunately the actual arcade-type games are the least popular in both and the games I liked in them are barely playable because of their bad state of repair.

There is one place I've actually seen many games being played, but it wasn't really an arcade per-se. Last time I was in Edmonton there was a brand-new Bubble-tea cafe with random overpriced anime goods, some internet rental services and *really* big-screen TVs with console game-systems hooked up. Every Saturday they open up the gaming/lounge area for anyone to hook up their retro systems and play multiplayer games or show off their shmupping skills. There was always 2-4 people with laptops playing deathmatches over their LAN in the lounge area. It was mostly filled with asians (I only got to stop by there a couple or 3 times but being white I kinda stood out from the crowd). Amazingly It seemed to be making big money tho (maybe because it just started up when I got there) and the operating/startup cost must've been payed for within the first month (one employee/owner)! If I were to start a business with a strip-mall sized room, that's what I'd put in there.

[RadarScope1]

I've posted this several times before, but there's a retro arcade in my city that does gangbusters business. It's $5 all you can play and 25-cent pinball (to help pay for maintenance of those machines). They went all out with the theme and have people of all ages, men and women, coming in. Kids who were born well after arcades died have b-day parties there. It's a cool place.

But a traditional arcade is pretty much doomed. It just doesn't work anymore.

[DaGamingMonkey]

Opening an arcade has always been a dream but deep down I know the chances of failure are to high....

The best arcade I've been too which still had a decent amount of pinball games and older games is Ground Kontrol in Portland Oregon