Yes, the barcade business model works. Mostly as a bar. Most often the machines are owned and operated by an outside contractor or dedicated hobbyist (who knows how to fix them.) The games make it a destination for families with kids, and the adults play some but really spend on food and drink. Same as how a tabletop game store is really making money on the food items, not the trading cards.
And as for your last, yes, virtual pinball games don't come close on ball physics. Real ball motion is so much more than a pair of X-Y coordinates and velocities. A real ball slides and spins and scrapes across the playfield and the objects in all sorts of ways. A ball's motion is very 3d even on a 2d playfield - it can have a spin axis aligned anywhere on its sphere.
Flippers too. It's much more than one object moving at one velocity. There are really subtle details in the interactions with the rubber on the flippers - a real ball will sink into the rubber by a fraction of a millimeter and rebound in ways that depend on that. Flippers accelerate and decelerate on a time scale of single-digit milliseconds, with all sorts of subtleties that an experienced player can feel. Response time matters too - a computer platform is usually limited to 1/60 second input resolution by the host hardware and OS, while a real machine responds hard real time instantly.
And of course nudging - no virtual controller comes anywhere close to all the things you can do to a real machine, shoves and pushes and slaps. No game physics engine comes anywhere close to all that detail in all these areas.
> Yes, the barcade business model works. Mostly as a bar.
In my city, there is one that is not only popular but has been in operation for 20 years or so. It has a couple hundred arcade machines, mostly pinball, and looks like that's their main business.
But the reality of the economics is proven by one aspect of how they operate: if you buy a drink at the bar, you get to play all the games for free. If not, they're 25 cents per play.
Not the original commenter but pinball is huge in Seattle, they might be referring the Shorty's, which has been around for 25 years. They also have an arcade including an old school bowling machine and an awesome vibe even if you're not gaming. Just down the street there is Jupiter with even more machines. I'm not so huge on the arcade/pinball so there's more I'm missing too.
Way back when we needed practice we would put ashtrays under the front legs and slow the game down. It improved my game turning pinball from an exercise in futility to something fun. Getting close to knocking out the top players, FUK, DIK, and CNT became a goal. I so wanted my initials, TIT up there on the leader board.
Massive opportunity in Atlanta for any barentrepreneur.
The main arcade on Edgewood ("Joystick") is super popular, but only has 8 or so machines. They're not in good shape either. People want to play, but it's too crowded.
The similar "adult dog park / bar" concept has been absolutely exploding. "Fetch" bar started just across the street from me a few years ago and they've since expanded to over ten locations in three different states. It's huge. And it's always packed to the brim with over a hundred people.
Plus you get to charge membership fees per dog in a subscription model.
People want to drink and bring their dogs.
If the west coast doesn't already have this, get on it. I can't imagine there's much moat apart from branding, but it's got huge growth opportunity.
Like all things I worry about it being a fad. It’s big now but what’s to say these trends last? It can hard to maximize the investment it takes to make a great repeat experience.
I know that’s always the risk for sure, but I’d bet in a longer run of the barcade market than dog bars, but I’ve been wrong before
Fetch is fantastic! For a long time my partner would bring our dog there on weekday mornings—when it is less crowded—and grab a coffee and work. They have bark rangers or whatever they're called to make sure nobody gets in a fight so owners can actually get work done.
I hadn't ever considered whether the place was a fad or not, but they are definitely benefiting from the trend towards WFH.
The dog bar thing is absolutely here to stay, and it's actually sort of crazy that it took this long. The one near us is more like a dog park that also happens to have a bar and a food truck and good wifi, but it's just such a big win as a dog owner. You get to hang out somewhere actually pleasant while your dog plays in a controlled space with folks watching and breaking up any major scuffles. For a reasonably well off- especially younger- dog owner it's kind of a no brainer.
I guess if dog ownership crashes that would be a problem, but I really don't see that happening any time soon.
The good part is if the fad dies - you still have a bar. one of those businesses proven to make money for hundreds of years (thousands? - I'm not up on my ancient history, but I suspect it was a good way to make money even in BC days). If the dog part fails, just remodel to whatever bar type will make money next. If you are running a business you should have a budget to do a significant remodel every 10 years anyway, 10 years from now you will know if the fad is still going strong to dieing.
It's been a "fad" for about 15 years or so and has a long history before that. I've personally been collecting for 25 years and pinball has never been more popular except in the 1970's.
Super popular here in Seattle. I was talking with a friend the other day about how to start a small metal venue in the area and their advice was to teach dogs to like metal because there's no way you compete with a dog lounge on revenue.
Yes. Rent will eventually approach the profitability of the most profitable business that can be put on that land. In a large and rapidly growing city, "eventually" is very quick.
> the machines are owned and operated by an outside contractor
The OP mentioned 1-Up chain in metro Denver. Their games are owned and serviced personally by the owner. He had the experience operating arcades and partnered with someone who had the restaurant/bar experience to make a very successful, multi-location business.
When real money is in the line, physics and real touch matter. They had to change roulette because certain players learned minor flaws delivered an advantage.
> And of course nudging - no virtual controller comes anywhere close to all the things you can do to a real machine, shoves and pushes and slaps. No game physics engine comes anywhere close to all that detail in all these areas.
"Anywhere close" might actually be a little closer than you think. Ever take a peak down the virtual pinball rabbit hole? The KL25Z microcontroller board at the heart of many visual pinball builds has an accelerometer to measure nudges etc. Most builds also have a real tilt bob if you get a little over exuberant. Then there are real shaker motors, surround sound feedback, multiple displays for the backglass and DMD etc.
Way of the Wrench on YouTube has the best set of videos I know of on the topic of building your own cab. It would really be a blast to build something like this.
Indeed. Certainly not arguing that point. The challenge is in seeing how close you can get, and if getting that close results in something that is a lot of fun and worth the effort. And of course, if you can get something that is very good, then the variety of the virtual approach takes hold: something like VPX can emulate everything from electromechanical machines to the latest creations, with all the classics in between.
Galloping Ghost outside of Chicago charges $25 for unlimited play. There is no option to pay any other amount and there is no food or drink. They have around 900 games going as far back as Pong.
It's a little weird to me to think of 50+ year olds hanging out at arcades.
I was a kid in the 70s and 80s and pinball/video arcades were the domain of middle and high school kids, roughly 12-16 years of age. It was a place to hang out before you were old enough to drive. There were very few adults there, certainly nobody 50-60 years old.
It was, but there were pinball machines at bars then too. Its not new. As an 18 year old we played pinball and drank the bar closed.
Although I must say my older brothers friends loved Space Invaders. I don't know maybe the coke and pot led to arrested development. I never got into video games, whether it was Tron, Pac Man, or Pong.
Does Dave & Busters fit into this category, or would you say they have the wrong focus? I've never been to a Dave & Busters, but they're a fairly large chain that long-preceded the current wave. Is Dave & Busters too much like an adult Showbiz/Chuck E. Cheese, rather than a more casual bar you can pop into?
Dave & Busters’ arcade games are not real arcade games; they are more like casino games. There’s no Galaga, no anything that has levels or characters, it’s all giant wheels that you spin or darts that you throw or bags that you punch. It lacks all intellectual appeal, and honestly seems more like a gym than an arcade.
It's worth calling out for younger folks, or those who didn't visit them before that happened...
They used to just have normal arcade games. I don't know when the transition happened, but I was stunned when I took my kids a few years ago and found it had transformed into what you're describing.
I am pretty sure local game stores make money when they sell booster packs to a kid at full price, kid sells them the best cards at a 30% discount and then the store resells it for market value. Sure there is risk here but they make it very hard to lose. Running the store lets them have options to purchase cards at a discount every time the sell a booster pack.
> Yes, the barcade business model works. Mostly as a bar. Most often the machines are owned and operated by an outside contractor or dedicated hobbyist (who knows how to fix them.)
To expand on this a bit, the actual maintainer of the machine is probably the most important factor of the quality of the barcade, at least if you're the type of person who cares about rulesets for games and will be irritated if something doesn't work because of a broken sensor. I like enthusiast owned/operated places because the owner who's actually playing the games will notice problems and fix them, as opposed to bars where any problems with the machine will either be broken until the maintainer gets around to it on their scheduled route, or possibly the problems never get reported at all. One possibly useful proxy for this is seeing where your local leagues play - in general they're more likely to be in places with well-maintained machines.
For San Francisco:
- Outer Orbit is my favorite place, even though they've recently removed a couple machines for more seating (more evidence that the bar/restaurant is the money maker). The owners met playing pinball, are heavily involved in the local scene, and do the maintenance themselves, so the machines tend to be in great shape. Decent Hawaiian food and a quite good beer list.
- Free Gold Watch is the place everyone always recommends because it has the most machines. My feeling is that they don't keep up on maintenance well enough because I always have trouble with tables always having enough small things broken about it that it's impossible to advance some modes. (On pretty much any modern machine every lane/ramp/hole is probably going to be required for some mode or another, so a single broken sensor breaks the entire game if you're trying for wizard mode.) It's definitely the place to go for the arcade experience with a lot of machines to choose from.
- the Alamo theater actually has a reasonably decent room upstairs from the bar, across the hall from the theaters. Doesn't seem to get rotated much and I'm not convinced it's maintained regularly, but it doesn't get much traffic so it doesn't seem like stuff breaks quickly there. A lot of people seem surprised when I mention it's there.
- Gestalt always has machines in decent shape, but the bar itself might close any month now.
- Emporium/Musee Mecanique - I don't go to them often, but they're both more generalist arcades, so they'll have a few machines at varying maintenance levels.
I'm not sure how often https://pinballmap.com/ gets updated or how its coverage is outside the SF Bay Area, but it looks pretty accurate for me.
It's way more than just the sphere, it's simulating all the surfaces and materials that the sphere interacts with. Particularly the mechanical pieces with their own movement as well.
The comparable level of detail to get pinball right would be something like simulating all the rubber gaskets and surfaces in the ailerons and elevators, all the fluid dynamics in the hydraulics, and so on.
If you invested something like the $100 million that Boeing or Lockheed must have done in their simulators, you probably could. Video pinball isn't exactly that big economically, though.
It is absolutely possible to model a pinball machine very accurately with existing CAD software, and for much less money than that.
With GPU-powered physics, it might be possible to model this in real time. But if not, one could definitely run the simulations in CAD and export the results to a table (or fit to an equation) and use those in the game.
Is your CAD software simulating the increase in temperature as the coil fires frequently throughout a game, with the ensuing changes in coil strength and rubber resilience?
Is your GPU accounting for millisecond-level fluctuations in power as more lights and flashers are on at any given instant so any coil receives a tiny bit less power?
Are you accounting for a tiny bit of residual magnetism left in the balls after they departed from recent contact with a magnet?
You are correct that the limitation isn't technology. All this is doable with enough specialized computation - but the reality is that it's vast avenues of effort that nobody has done or likely will.
> Is your CAD software simulating the increase in temperature as the coil fires frequently throughout a game, with the ensuing changes in coil strength and rubber resilience?
Yes. That's a basic feature a professional CAE package. And the materials library includes a few hundred different rubber compounds and metals to model with as well.
Modern CAD is amazing. Back when I worked in the industry, we'd have customers whose simulations for jet turbine engines match the the sensor readings on the prototype almost exactly.
I don’t doubt that these interactions have some minuscule effect on pinball performance, but I’m skeptical that you couldn’t get close enough with some relatively simple models. Eg count the lights on and model a draw in remaining power available to solenoids.
Are plane simulators really simulating fluid dynamics in hydraulics, during real-time simulation? Is that even doable (assuming the simulation wants to be realistic).
Boeing is likely doing that in their CAD - but these are tests they they can throw at a super computer of some sort and let run for a week.
Flight simulators that are used to train pilots are unlikely to have this level of detail. There is enough variation in things like wind turbulence that they can ignore a lot of the other effects as if you can handle turbulence you can handle smaller errors as well.
Of course we can simulate a sphere, but to the point of the well written comment you a responding to, the simulation models in pinball video games don’t even come close the the complexity of the physics of a real world pinball. I played a lot of pinball as a kid, and I’ve played many pinball video games since. I was recently at one of these ‘barcade’ venues and tried my hand at pinball thinking I would be good at it. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I lost all 3 balls immediately just about every game. It’s incredibly difficult and unpredictable. Go to your local barcade and try for yourself :)
And as for your last, yes, virtual pinball games don't come close on ball physics. Real ball motion is so much more than a pair of X-Y coordinates and velocities. A real ball slides and spins and scrapes across the playfield and the objects in all sorts of ways. A ball's motion is very 3d even on a 2d playfield - it can have a spin axis aligned anywhere on its sphere.
Flippers too. It's much more than one object moving at one velocity. There are really subtle details in the interactions with the rubber on the flippers - a real ball will sink into the rubber by a fraction of a millimeter and rebound in ways that depend on that. Flippers accelerate and decelerate on a time scale of single-digit milliseconds, with all sorts of subtleties that an experienced player can feel. Response time matters too - a computer platform is usually limited to 1/60 second input resolution by the host hardware and OS, while a real machine responds hard real time instantly.
And of course nudging - no virtual controller comes anywhere close to all the things you can do to a real machine, shoves and pushes and slaps. No game physics engine comes anywhere close to all that detail in all these areas.