Arcade Collecting > Arcade1Up & Similar
Could the Arcade 1up thing have been succesful if handled differently?
yotsuya:
--- Quote from: Gilrock on February 27, 2019, 12:15:39 pm ---Unfortunately it seems like any time a product comes out commercially the quality is sacrificed for cost and/or they get crushed by trying to compete with Chinese knockoffs. I saw it happen a few times in my other hobby of Christmas lighting. I met a guy at an Expo that had a product that let people put a series of smart leds on tree and the sequencing was delivered over Bluetooth and he had a patent for his idea. You can see his stuff at geekmytree.com. I know he was featured on Shark Tank but I can't remember if he got backing or not. Anyways once he expanded commercially to keep the cost down they switched from smart pixels to dumb pixels so instead of every pixel being controllable it ended up with the entire string had to be one color so only one control chip at the top of each string to save on parts cost. Then he started getting hit with lawsuits from patent trolls claiming they had rights to simple aspects of the design like using data commands to turn on an LED. He ended up going out of business. The DIY community was disappointed in the product because after switching to dumb pixels they were not as useful for hacking purposes. Second product I can think of is Really Big Lights. These things were really popular and sold like crazy for a year or two and next thing you know Home Depot is selling a lower quality copy of the product so they ended up going out of business. Both these products seemed like a huge success the first year or two. I'll be curious to see where Arcade1Up stands in 3 years. I don't understand anything about what version of MAME they used to run these things but arguing that they didn't do anything wrong because they aren't in court yet is stupid. Again in the Christmas lighting world I've seen one vendor flat out steal another vendors design and have it copied in China and the folks impacted were smaller players and did not have the resources to fight them in court. Doesn't mean they are legit because they weren't sued.
--- End quote ---
Good points, Gil. I’m curious if we’ll start seeing knockoff Arcade1Ups any time soon.
pbj:
They're already Chinese knock offs. :dunno
Zebra:
--- Quote from: pbj on February 27, 2019, 02:29:44 pm ---They're already Chinese knock offs. :dunno
--- End quote ---
I was gonna say that too. If you asked me to say what an Chinese knock-off of our fav arcades would be like, the 1UP is pretty much it. Poor build quality with careless low quality emulation just like all the knock-off ten million in one "PCBs".
yotsuya:
--- Quote from: Zebra on February 27, 2019, 02:49:53 pm ---
--- Quote from: pbj on February 27, 2019, 02:29:44 pm ---They're already Chinese knock offs. :dunno
--- End quote ---
I was gonna say that too. If you asked me to say what an Chinese knock-off of our fav arcades would be like, the 1UP is pretty much it. Poor build quality with careless low quality emulation just like all the knock-off ten million in one "PCBs".
--- End quote ---
Well, yeah, I get that, but If somebody can undercut whatever Arcade1Up is making, you don’t think they’re going to try it?
Mike A:
What would that be?
A cardboard box with a screen drawn on it in crayon?
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