Sega sells off its arcade business due to coronavirus


I didn't even know there where still Arcades with videogames around... the only similar stuff I see are only full of slot machines and poker machines... only those... :'(
 
I remember when anywhere big, whether video-game related or not had a naomi machine in the corner at least running something like Virtua Soccer most of the time.
 
@PowerGod : Arcades are still pretty popular in Japan. They include video games, but also crane games, pachinko machines, photo booths, etc.
They were actually a big part of Sega's business before COVID.
 
The Japan seen from external eyes seems like the dreamland to me :'(
Not only for Arcade but yes, it's one of their great cultural benefits. We never had a real Arcade culture in germany, at least not for the last 35 years. Incredible strict age restrictions for any type of "gambling" prevented a healthy Arcade-Youth like it should have existed. Instead we have an really unhealthy legal gambling industry with their rotten and dark Adult gambling halls. Bad trade but these Las Vegas types of gambling had a lobby, the Arcade industry had not.
Wasted opportunity.
 
The gambling halls I have seen were so dark and silent... there were also couples, sit one next to the others, completely silent fixing the monitor and putting in money after money... and some "guardogs" around looking at everything people did...
One of them stopped one of my friends who wanted to play with a slot machine, because seems like the "internal rules" prevents you from playing where someone else has played before... maybe it's some statistical stuff to make less people win on a machine...

With videogames was all fun, the Arcades where full of light, with a constant sound of pressed buttons, and laughs and compliments and people speaking... all was so alive.
 
Note pachinko parlours are also gambling dens (albeit using a loophole so that legally they aren't). Japans laws are about as stringent as they are over here, although they're not implemented at all effectively, allowing this pastime to blossom.

Basically you pay for little ball bearings, which you can feed into the machines. There's a tiny bit of skill in playing those machines, but it's mainly pure luck whether you'll end up with more balls or less. You can take those balls back to the counter for a voucher I think it goes, then you can leave the establishment, and more often than not go in a different door that's actually part of the same building, and exchange that voucher for a prize. I'm not sure you can turn that back into money there, but when the prizes include stuff like gold jewellery, it's pretty easy to sell that for a profit if you were luck in the parlour.
 
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