Comment on Why Dave & Buster’s Is Transforming Its Arcades Into Casinos
Telorand@reddthat.com 3 months agoGenerally, arcades have not done terribly well. There used to be a lot of video arcades all over out there in the 1980s. Video game hardware has gotten a lot cheaper, and a lot of people just have it at home now.
Why bother with going to an arcade when you could go to a cozy place with a Steam Deck? Why pay to play old games on an arcade cabinet when there’s countless handheld emulators out there?
It worked when people had to go to a mall or arcade to play things, but nostalgia can only attract so many people, anymore. The market is no longer captive, and the people who played in arcades have grown up, gotten jobs, families, Steam Decks, and beefy gaming PCs of their own.
The only demo left is the hobbyists, and even they can now build their own arcade cabinets to get some of the experience.
tal@lemmy.today 3 months ago
I mean, there’s probably still some niche, but the niche can get pretty small.
Movie theaters kinda did this before the arcades did. Used to be that it wasn’t normal to be able to watch movies at home, but once that happened, the space for movie theaters got a lot smaller.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie_theater
Drive-in movie theaters got hit even earlier:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive-in_theater
And like D&B, they apparently did a similar, more-adult-oriented shift to try to mitigate losses: