Article on the Decline/Death of Arcades

[brophog]

Below is a little dated article from another site, and I'm sorry if it was posted previously, but I haven't seen it and it brings up some good points.

The basic premise of the article is why consoles are not to blame for the death of arcades in the United States. The writer brings up some great points. This site, in itself, is a testament that arcades are not dead, they've simply ceased being the commercial venture they once were.

You look around at all of us gathered here and you can see that the spirit is alive and well. We may have started these projects out of nostalgia, but I think it's safe to say many of us have found new joy in gaming. I know I have.

http://www.shoryuken.com/forums/showthread.php?t=34763

[versapak]

There are certainly many things that attributed to the decline of arcades, but I still feel consoles are the number one reason.

This guy talks about coffee shops, and why people don't just drink coffee at home. Why? Because going to the coffee shop is more convenient. People go to the coffee shop, because the coffee is good, they don't have to go through the trouble of making it themselves, and they can do it in a mad rush out the door.

He also talks about why people still go to movie theaters, instead of just staying home watching a DVD. Why? Because movies come to theaters several months before they hit DVD, and they are presented in a massive environment not easily matched at home. Heck... If most people had a huge projection screen, and superb sound system in their homes, then they probably wouldn't be going to the theaters, even if it did mean waiting several months to see a film.


People don't go to arcades, because they can play equally great games at home. They can go hang out anywhere, if what they are looking for is socialization, why bother going to a place that will suck down your dollars like it was breathing air, just to play entertainment that can be found at home?


Most of us remember the arcade experience of old. We remember it being a hang out, a place to socialize, a place to compete head to head with other street fighters, but we did that at arcades, primarily because that is where the games were, not because it is where are friends were.

The generation of kids that were from the arcade hey day grew up. They got responsibilities that took from their socialization time, their friends did the same, people moved a way, and money began going to less frivilous things.

Our kids didn't grow up with the arcade environment for their socilization needs, and they grew up with the great games being at home. It doesn't matter how much advertising an arcade does, or how nice their attendants are. Arcades will NEVER be the social gathering they once were.

It is certainly possible for an arcade to be successful today, but it is as a novelty place only.

[brophog]

The movie analogy is an interesting one. Movie theaters are starting to feel the same decline as arcades have. Ticket sales continue to drop and prices continue to rise (one is the cause of the other, just which one I don't know!). Theatres at the moment are shuffling movies much quicker than before, hoping to capitalize on new releases.

There is some talk in media circles of changing the way movies are released. Right now, movies are released in basically 3 ways: theatre, rentals/sales, pay per view.

The downside is that marketing must be initiated for each of these endeavors.  There is talk of releasing movies simultaneously for all formats in an effort to save money.

Would movie theatres be replaced at that point? There is fear that would happen.

Which brings us full circle to the arcade argument. There are two dominant points in this article that reflect on both the movie experience and the arcade experience.

Convenience vs Sociality

In many respects, we're becoming a society of loners. If you want to take this analogy one step further, look at laundry mats. It may seem a little ridiculous when we're focusing primarily on entertainment and realism, but the old fashioned laundry mat was once a community gathering point.  You didn't just do laundry, you talked about current events and made it a social affair. That's been so long gone that many don't remember it.

[RayB]

In many respects, we're becoming a society of loners.

Totally agree with you. You can see it in kids today. Staying at home is now more entertaining than hanging out with your friends outside. Ironically, much of that indoor time is spent on IM messaging, who else but their friends that they won't hang out outside with.

[Kremmit]

What I think is funny, is that guy thinks Street Fighter type games can save arcades.

Fighter games are what KILLED arcades.  I'm not saying they did it singlehandedly; as the article points out, arcades as we knew them were already hanging by a thread.  Fighter games just delivered the Fatality move.

Back when I was first old enough to play video games (barely), Pac Man was big.  I was really young, but I put my quarter up on the marquee (well, my dad did), and before long, it was my turn.  I was awful, partly because I just innately suck, but also because I was just a little kid, and I'd never really played a video game before.  Nevertheless, it was fun.  It was exciting.  And I wanted to play it over and over and over and over, much to my parent's dismay.  Slowly but surely, as I gained experience, I got better.  I learned to play some other games, just as slowly.  And along the way, I fell in love with video games, and they were a big part of my life from then on, right up through high school and into my first two years of college.

Street Fighter II was insanely popular.  I don't have to tell you guys, you know.  The thing was everywhere, often there were several of them in one arcade.  And before long, there were imitators galore.  Before long, arcades were divided up:

1% pins and cranes;
19%  "old" games that nobody really played anymore;
20% drivers;
60% fighters

Street Fighter II came out during my 2nd year of college, or at least that's when I saw it first.  It appeared at the laundromat where my roomates and I did our clothes.  And just like a everyone else, we were in love with it.  It was usually just the three of us playing, two on SFII and one on the Funhouse pin that sat next to it.  We used to kill each other nonstop until the dryers quit.  We were mostly button mashers- we learned a few moves, but we were working in a vacuum- there were no other players, so we never got a chance to learn from anybody else, just or own closed circle.  And it's not like we were in the laundromat every day.

And then one day there was some dude in there that knew what was up.  He delivered the royal smackdown on all of us, and wouldn't relinquish the machine.  What we really wanted was to play each other, but there was no way to get rid of this other guy.  Being as we were in our early 20s, this was hardly a big deal, it's not like we spent the rest of the afternoon crying about not getting to play each other at Street Fighter.

But I wonder what would have happened if I'd been that same kid that sucked at Pac-Man in 1993, when every video game was Street Fighter?  Imagine:

I walk up behind some older kids playing Mortal Kombat.  My dad puts my quarter up for me (assume he doesn't know MK is unsuitable).  One of the big kids gets killed, and moves out of the way for me.  The game starts, and 5 seconds later the other player rips my skull out of my head in a shower of blood, using my spine for a handle.

I do not play again.  I do not learn and get better.  I do not move on to other games, and I do not fall in love with arcade games for the rest of my childhood.  What I do is run home and cry to momma and have nightmares and wet the bed until I'm 25.  And if I ever do get into video games, its nice, solo console action at home, without fear of embarrassment at the hands of a more experienced gamer.  I may even get good, and start playing against other kids, but it'll be on consoles, because consoles are what I learned on and fell in love with.  And console-style games that you can play for hours and save your progress are the games I enjoy.

No doubt, if the arcade manufacturers had not gone crazy making nothing but fighters, my hypothetical little kid may have learned how to play something else, but fighters were practically all that was on the streets for a few years in the mid-90s.  The games earned, so the ops put them everywhere.  The ops bought more, so the manufactureres made more.  But they alienated a whole generation of new gamers, and when the kids that were playing SFII grew up, nobody else stepped in to take their place, because they were all at home playing Final Fantasy XXIVII.

Who killed the arcades?  Ken, Ryu, Blanka, Dahlsim, E. Honda, and Chun Li.

[brophog]

That's kinda stretching it a little bit, don't you think? I don't know if fighters were the death blow but maybe it was our inability to do things in moderation. There's no doubt that fighting games DID bring in a lot of money and re-energize the industry, even if they could also be construed as eventually harming it.

In other words, since 1 fighter became popular, we have to make 900 clones. Really, something similiar happened in the 80's console crash. Everyone was making video games back then and it really diluted the quality of the product and undervalued it.

I think the enemy of the arcade may have been games before all else. Like we've said, the video game industry has generally been one quick to capitalize and slow to change. If someone makes a Mario platformer, everyone makes a platformer. Or first person shooter, one on one fighter, shmup........the list goes on. Truly innovative games are rare, yet clones are plentiful.

The games that we love, to this day, are generally the simple ones. Arcades, almost by their nature, demand simple yet addictive games. Specialty games like racers, particularly ones needing skis or similiar specialized equipment, are simple, but not addictive. It's cool to play once, but then it gets old.

If you look at what still does well it's things like DDR or Golden Tee. Both are incredibly simple yet have a hidden complexity. Many of the classics have this same asset.

It's not too hard to play Pac-Man........but it's an entirely different thing to master it.

[RayB]

I do not play again.

[Q*Bert_OP]

Who killed the arcades?

[Witchboard]

Maybe saying "Fighters" were the end of Arcades is too specific?  Maybe we should generalize "Head-to-Head" competition games instead?  It seems everybody was fine when you were fighting for a top score, one person and one credit at a time.  It wasn't personal, it wasn't pressured and the other guy wasn't in your face.  Now that you're fighting for your quarter in a head-to-head battle to see who stays and who goes on a machine, maybe it changed things.  There was always Wizard of Wor, but there were other things to kill you, not just "the other guy."

[Kremmit]

Maybe saying "Fighters" were the end of Arcades is too specific?  Maybe we should generalize "Head-to-Head" competition games instead?  It seems everybody was fine when you were fighting for a top score, one person and one credit at a time.  It wasn't personal, it wasn't pressured and the other guy wasn't in your face.  Now that you're fighting for your quarter in a head-to-head battle to see who stays and who goes on a machine, maybe it changed things.  There was always Wizard of Wor, but there were other things to kill you, not just "the other guy."

I'll buy that, as far as it goes.  But most head-to-head battle games were fighters, and I think the violent, mean nature of fighter play provokes a different feeling in the loser than they get when they lose at, say, Space Duel. 

I'm not saying that these games were THE cause, more like the final nail in the coffin.  Heck, I LIKE head-to-head games.  In moderation.  But I think the over-abundance of them, and fighters in particular, throughout the mid 90s seriously hurt the industry by turning the young ones off.  And I think it was even worse for kids with no easy access to a full-sized arcade.  A lot of kids, their only regular access to video games is at the 7-11, or some other place where they've only got 1 game. In the mid 90s, a lot of places, kids had their choices between Street Fighter and Street Fighter.  And those games stayed on location a long time, they didn't swap out as often as older games used to, because ops didn't move a game until it stopped earning in the location it was in.  And when they finally DID move it, it was so they could replace it with SFII - Championship Edition.  And when they moved that, it was for Mortal Kombat.  A one-game location could easily have 100% fighters for a few YEARS. 

[armax]

I think some of y'all nailed it.  I like fighters but I did tend to avoid the arcades.  I didn't come for the socialization, I came for the games.  I may be the minority when it comes to this.  I had a social life outside the arcade.  My friends and I had other interests outside video gaming (role playing games were big back in the day).  I frequented arcades when I was in the mood.  Fighters tended to keep some people on a particular game for long periods of time and kept many people's games relatively short.  Some thrived on competition, some played at their own pace.  I didn't frequent the arcade with enough money and/or regularity to even compete on fighters.  I tend to think I'm the majority in this respect.  You had diehard regulars, but most tended to try their hand at many different games rather than 1 or 2. 

Do I think consoles contributed to the decline of the arcade?  For the most part, I feel the answer is yes.  Most did not go to arcades to meet new people, most frequented arcades to play games, most often with friends known outside of an arcade (again, most kids did have social lives outside of the arcade).  Consoles were an excellent way to hang out with your regular buds and not have to spend a bundle in the long run (and at the time the games on consoles were not as great graphics-wise, but the game play was fun and different from the clones that started populating the arcades).   This is just my perspective of arcades in my day and in my area.

[Skadar]

I also agree.  I enjoy playing fighters against my friends.  I do NOT enjoy playing against strangers.  Hence fighting games in the arcades were very intimidating to me and I tended to avoid them.  My friends and I would do our fighting at home on the SNES.

On the plus side, however, I "discovered" the wonder of pinball while waiting for strangers to clear off of the arcade fighters.  Indiana Jones Pinball, Medieval Madness, Monster Bash.... fantastic stuff.

[RayB]

I'm not saying that these games were THE cause, more like the final nail in the coffin.

[brophog]

Maybe saying "Fighters" were the end of Arcades is too specific?  Maybe we should generalize "Head-to-Head" competition games instead?

For a segement of people, I think this is right. But I'm not buying it on the larger whole for gamers.

Home console play has never been really good at head to head. You have split screen issues a lot of the time that are more easily avoided in the arcade. You also have a very limited number of people that you typically play with on home consoles. I've definitely enjoyed console play with others, but it's typically in larger environments, like college dormitories.

Plus, there is the argument of online gaming which is so popular and such a driving force in video games now that it makes the solitary argument you are presenting rather weak. Maybe it is simply a matter of anonymous gaming that makes online play work versus arcade play. Then again, there is a little satisfaction that comes from teasing one another directly, especially amongst people you know. You can't get that through online play with either a keyboard or headset.

At any rate, I think online play shows that there is a huge social aspect to gaming and that head to head gaming is indeed a large force in the industry. First Person Shooters and Fighters, two genre's driven by multi-player, are some of the most successful games in the past 15 years. These games have single player modes, but they are played for their multi-player aspects as the computer AI in both genres tends to be either extremely cheap or easily conquerable.

[the3eyedblindman]

I just liked the whole cabinet aspect of arcade games, a big cabinet that played 1 game with big, simple controls, booming sound, good graphics, etc. A home console could never compete with that.

[Kremmit]

Home console play has never been really good at head to head. You have split screen issues a lot of the time that are more easily avoided in the arcade.

What split screen issues do you have at home that the arcade doesn't have?  Either

A: one screen, all action takes place in one window (Arcade = SFII, Console = SFII);
B:  one screen, action is on split screens (Console = Mario Kart, Arcade = Xybots); or
C:  Multiple monitors (Arcade = Tournament Cyberball, Console = PS2 with link cable). 

Is there another option?

Plus, there is the argument of online gaming which is so popular and such a driving force in video games now that it makes the solitary argument you are presenting rather weak.

Online gaming is relatively new- was there any significant online console play before PS2 / Xbox?  Arcades did their dying in the late 90s.

At any rate, I think online play shows that there is a huge social aspect to gaming and that head to head gaming is indeed a large force in the industry. First Person Shooters and Fighters, two genre's driven by multi-player, are some of the most successful games in the past 15 years. These games have single player modes, but they are played for their multi-player aspects as the computer AI in both genres tends to be either extremely cheap or easily conquerable.

True, in today's post-arcade industry.  But not relevant in the mid & late 90s, during the death of the arcades.

[MaximRecoil]

What split screen issues do you have at home that the arcade doesn't have?

[brophog]

This is a great conversation, BTW.

But I think the best answer given is game cost. Arcades are businesses first and foremost and the price of the games themselves for owners is a very large problem. It almost becomes so costly that no matter how many customers you bring in, you can't adequately cover expenditures.

And it's not isolated to arcades. For as much as fanboys of the next generation systems argue over specs, they're forgetting a key aspect: Development cost.

It will easily cost several million dollars to develop games for the PS3 and XBox360. The Revolution may be going a slightly different way, so it may be less.

But the other two systems are clearly trying to wow us with technical specifications. It already costs about a million dollars for a current generation game to be fully developed (varies by system/title), and the power of the next systems greatly exceeds that by which we can currently produce.

EA, Squaresoft, and a few others produce titles that can absorb that kind of time and financial requirement. Games like Madden and Final Fantasy will sell on name alone. But what about other companies? Smaller companies are already at risk by those that wish to acquire them rather than compete. Can they produce, much less compete, in an environment requiring so many resources?

Innovation? Can anyone risk a game failing? Innovation comes with risk, and for every game that innovates there are several that are either poorly produced, poorly marketed, or misunderstood.

[RayB]

Innovation? Can anyone risk a game failing? Innovation comes with risk, and for every game that innovates there are several that are either poorly produced, poorly marketed, or misunderstood.

Just going along with what you said...
There was a time when 2 programmers could get together, come up with a game within a few months, and put it on a test location to see how it did. If it failed, oh well. Either they tweaked it or scrapped it. 4 months salary for 2 developers isn't much. But now imagine how much work would be needed to even reach a level where it can test well on location. wooo expensive.

[KevSteele]

My thoughts on the matter:

http://retroblast.com/misc/arcades.html

It was probably a combination of all the factors already mentioned. Arcades have to offer something unique to justify their existence, and that became harder and harder to do as the consoles grew in power.

Now I see things like Nintendo's new motion- and orienation- sensitive gyro controller, and I wonder what the Arcades can do to distinquish themselves and come up with an experience you can't get at home.

Kevin

[SirPoonga]

Now I see things like Nintendo's new motion- and orienation- sensitive gyro controller, and I wonder what the Arcades can do to distinquish themselves and come up with an experience you can't get at home.

What modern arcades are doing now, full cockpit/interactive games.   Now a days you basically find at an arcade
1) full cockpit racing sims
2) full imersion flight sims (multiple monitors, cockpit)
3) DDR
4) fighters
5) skill games
6) gimmicks like Turret Tower (which rocks)

With the excpetion of DDR and fighters you aren't going to find those others at home.  If you have a full Turret Tower cabinet at home you will now become my best friend.  Any game where you have to lock yourself in and put on a seat belt will rule
http://www.namcoarcade.com/nai_gamedisplay.asp?gam=turtow

Also, the arcades I have gone to in the last couple of years are national chains.  Gameworks and Jillians.  Both have bowling and bar.  Gameworks had a restaurant.  Both didn't allow underage after 10.
They are really more of a social gathering place now where there happens to be many arcade games.

I'm kinda suprized these places don't have full environmental classics.  For classics they usually just have centipede, pacman, and galaga.  I'd think an afterburner or disc of tron would still do decently for a classic in a place like that.

[RayB]

Redemption games have already taken over... It's all coin-pushers and other stupid "games" where you only care about getting the most tickets out of it.

[KevSteele]

Also, the arcades I have gone to in the last couple of years are national chains.

[SirPoonga]

I haven't seen a pinball machine in sometime except maybe and older one at a local bar.

I'd love an arcade that was full of classic skill games and pinballs.  I don;t think anything can replace mechanical scoring of older pinballs

[Skadar]

I love pinball machines from the pinball rennaissance era, early to mid 90s when they started using the LED displays and dot-matrix animation.  I can only seem to find pinball machines at theme parks and beach-side vacation areas (Hampton Beach, NH).  Surprisingly, there are almost no pinball games in Wildwood, NJ, which has a huge boardwalk with rides, etc.  Last summer I only found a single pinball worth playing there, Lord of the Rings.

I recently found a couple of good pinballs at Rye Playland, NY.  I may have to make another visit before the season ends.  They also had a great mechanical baseball game that I used to play as a kid for a dime.  You squeeze a handle to hit a (wooden?) ball that rolls down a ramp towards your bat.  Very fun old-school game.

If you want to see pics, check this thread.

[RayB]

I agree with you Skadar. I think pinball was stagnating around then, and Williams really set things on fire with the release of Highspeed. That was the first pinball that really "grabbed me" and made me want to play more than a couple games.

Most of the subsequent Williams releases also held that same kind of magic.

[Kremmit]

Most people don't have two TV's side by side in their living room, or two identical consoles; or even the link cable on hand.

So you buy the cable, lug an extra TV (hopefully the same size screen) into the room (along with an extra TV stand mind you) and buy a duplicate console or have a friend bring theirs over if they have one and wire it all up. Repeat for each time you fire up the game; unless you intend to leave everything set up just that way for a long time; in which case you will need to purchase another TV because your extra one isn't sitting where it is supposed to be anymore; and if you borrowed the console from the friend; another one of those will need to be purchased as well; unless he doesn't want one at his own house anymore.

Compare that to the extra costs the manufacturer must add to a dual monitor game:
 

• Designing / building an arcade machine that has to go into a custom cabinet (rather than a cheap mass produced Dynamo);
• The cost of an extra monitor;
• The added shipping costs;
• Lost profits from not selling (many or any) conversion kits for the game (because there are few dual-monitor cabinets out there waiting for conversion);
• Lost profits due to games not sold due to the reluctance of arcade owners to put one giant, hulking machine into space that could house 2-3 standard games;

I think that adds up to a similar barrier to entry.  You only see head-to-head dual monitor setups rarely in the home, and you only see it rarely in the arcade, too.

It will easily cost several million dollars to develop games for the PS3 and XBox360.

Just going along with what you said...
There was a time when 2 programmers could get together, come up with a game within a few months, and put it on a test location to see how it did. If it failed, oh well. Either they tweaked it or scrapped it. 4 months salary for 2 developers isn't much. But now imagine how much work would be needed to even reach a level where it can test well on location. wooo expensive.

Not necessarily.  PomPom Games is just two guys.  Mutant Storm is a terrific arcade-style game for the PC that's more fun than anything else I've seen in the last few years.  (It's so much fun, there are at least two members here building dedicated cabs for it- I'm one of them.)  They managed to get it ported to X-Box Live, and it did so well that MS is letting them re-make it and it will be a launch game for the X-Box 360. 

Now I see things like Nintendo's new motion- and orienation- sensitive gyro controller, and I wonder what the Arcades can do to distinquish themselves and come up with an experience you can't get at home.

What modern arcades are doing now, full cockpit/interactive games. Now a days you basically find at an arcade
1) full cockpit racing sims
2) full imersion flight sims (multiple monitors, cockpit)
3) DDR
4) fighters
5) skill games
6) gimmicks like Turret Tower (which rocks)

With the excpetion of DDR and fighters you aren't going to find those others at home.

I think the old games are, for better or worse, done for.  These are the industry's only chance for survival.  Mutate or Die!

This is a great conversation, BTW.

Ain't it, though?

[RayB]

Not necessarily.

[KevSteele]

That's awesome! Gives the little guy some hope. I love Mutant Storm (only saw andplayed PC version though).

I've got the PC version on my "MAMEframe" cab, and the XBox version on my Quasicade cab - dual analog sticks makes for a sweet gameplay experience with Mutant Storm.

Kevin

[stratjakt]

Puzzle Pirates and Alien Hominid are two more recent examples of small-guy low-budget success stories. 

To liken it to the movie industry, sure most of the stuff is big-budget killer effects umpteen-zillion dollar salaries for an A-list cast - it's been that way for nearly a century - but then there's always something like Blair Witch, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Rocky, Reservoir Dogs..  The list of cheap indy films that hit it big goes on and on..

Someone made mention of theatres hurting because of home rentals, and piracy, I just wanted to point out that this is BS.  The movie industry has been breaking box office records year after year.  They constantly foist this crap on the public so we feel sorry for them and dont say boo about zany laws they lobby for.. 

I read some doofy article where some hollywood producer (one you've heard of, the name escapes me) was blaming cell phones for lost profits, and actually wants to legislate some sort of de-facto non-disclosure agreement for movie patrons..  His logic is this..  Once upon a time, say 10 years ago, Hollywood could dump some bucks into some stinker of a movie, hype the crap out of it, and make its profit opening weekend, before everyone knew it sucked..  But nowadays, when it opens thursday night, and sucks, people - as their walking out - can be submitting their opinions on webpages, calling or texting their friends to tell them about it..  So the word is out before the 8 o'clock show.  The article mentioned "The Hulk" specifically.  My answer would be "dont make movies that suck", but what do I know..

Whoah, tangent there..   Anyhow, back to the subject of arcades, I read an article online, somewhat older, that was blaming Sega for putting the nails in the coffin.  The argument went like this, in the beginning, every cabinet was basically custom.  Nintendo had their way, Midway theirs, Konami another, and so on.  Conversions were a ---smurfette---, unless you stayed with the same company (a kit to make DK into DKJR, for example).   Then came the JAMMA age, spurred by the industries demand for easier/cheap conversions. 

Arcades flourished in the mid-80s, and it was very cost-effective for operators to just replace boards, marquee's and CP's when a game stopped sucking quarters.  Cabinets were fairly generic.

I guess it's the same as the "big sims" argument, but Sega went against the grain and really led the charge back into dedicated machines - Daytona, Enduro Racer, etc..  Operators had to drop 5-digits on a whole new rig that took 4 men and a half a day to install.

Honestly, of all the various factors, in the end it was consoles, pure and simple. 

I remember as a kid, about once or twice a year a bunch of friends and I would have the big day-trip to the amusement park (Canada's Wonderland, before Paramount bought it and ruined it - tangent), and the highlight of the day - hell the highlight of the summer for me - was when we'd all spend about an hour in their arcade.  It always had the newest games, we'd all be talking about it on the car ride up - wondering what new games were out, "i heard theres a new Dragon's Lair!" "I heard there's this game where you can be a godzilla or a wolfman and smash buildings!", etc..  You couldn't recreate the games at home, home ports of the arcades sucked.

Nowadays, home consoles are more powerful than the arcades.  The Atomiswave is basically a Dreamcast, in the era of XBox 360..

Also, once was the time you couldn't really recreate the arcade experience at home  - now you can't recreate the home experience at the arcade.  Arcade's have no real Half Life or Halo or any other multiplayer FPS's, no adventure experiences that take you weeks or months to complete (Final Fantasy, et al), no MMORPG's, no WoW, etc..

And can any of you honestly say that you put 50 cents into one of those Ms Pac/Galaga machines when you can play it at home?

If a "classics" arcade opened near your home, offering say a dozen or so 80's era games, would you go drop 20 in quarters, when you have your mame machine at home that plays the exact same games?

Those machines live at bars now, where drunkenness and boredom grabs the odd quarter..

[RayB]

I saw the Hulk. It was "ok". If they'd stopped increasing movie budgets to insane levels, they'd make more money. It's their own fault. I can see spending over $100 mill on Lord of the Rings, but a movie like the Hulk shouldn't cost more than $20-30. 

They just need to start reigning in people's crazy fees. Especially movie actors. $20 mill as pay for appearing in one movie? That's insane.

[stratjakt]

We've strayed offtopic, but the point about the Hulk wasn't whether it was good or not, but the fact that fiscally, it bombed.  It lost money at the box office.

The traditional strategy with "summer blockbusters" was you could pump a mint into any old piece of crap script, then promte the hell out of it - hulk happy meals at mcdonalds, blah blah, you know how they saturate you with movie promotions during the summer, and then you'll make your money opening weekend.  If the movie stinks, nobody will see it 3 or 4 times.  But the old-school print reviews (ebert and the like) dont hit the streets for a couple weeks.  But now, if I see the six o'clock show, I can have my review up online before the 8:30 show starts..  You can check my review by your cellphone before you buy tickets..

The article I read basically blamed this for the failure (I should say less-than-breathtaking success, movies still make big $$ - just not as big as they like) of the Hulk.  I read another interview with Lucas where he was basically singing the same tune, laying a big blame at the interweb pirates for the "failure" of the prequels (again, failure as in I only made 100 million in profit but I wanted 500 million).  Of course, anyone who's ever seen a handy-cam shot internet bootleg can see this is ridiculous..

Another reason for the "failure" of the movie industry I've heard is video games.  Kid's today have way more entertainment options than I did as a kid.  I've read the video game industry has surpassed hollywood in profits.  I can say that if I give my kids 20 bucks each, they're more likely to go to EB and look for some used PS2 or gamecube games than to buy a DVD or go to the movies..

Shwarzenegger recently signed a bill banning the sale of M rated games to minors in California (gee, the movie industry never needed gov't policing to keep kids out of R rated movies).  Not that I'd suggest that Shwarzenegger would intentionally try to cripple the VG industry, because it's not like he has any ties in the movie industry, right?  I wonder if he'd sign a bill preventing the sale of Terminator or Predator to minors. 

More ranting from me, I just find Ah-nolds recent crusade against fantasy violence, well, funny in a two-faced ---uvula--- sort of way.

[RayB]

My point was, that if Hulk only made $40 million, had they spent $20 million instead of spending $60 million, they would have profitted rather than had a loss.  They keep upping the production budgets, but our ticket prices can't match that kind of spending. It's just impossible. There comes a point when a ticket costs too much and people just say "enough!" and don't go see the crappy movie.

[stratjakt]

It's more like they spend 60 million, bring in 80 million, but wanted 200 million.  Therefore, online reviewers and pirates have stolen 120 million dollars from them.

Movie attendance is way up and keeps climbing.  Those googleplex theatres keep popping up all over the place.  5 years ago there was one 3-screen cinema here, now there are 4 cinemas, one with 20 screens.  And then Lucas pops on TV telling me the movie industry is "dying" because of the evil intertron.

[armax]

Actually, I heard just the opposite.

[KevSteele]

Yeah, didn't you hear all the moaning in the news reports about the streak of 17 or 19 weeks in a row of lower movie attendance this summer?

Movie attendance was down quite a bit this year, and the movie studios are in a panic to find out why...

Kevin

[stratjakt]

And yet, for the year to date, revenues are higher than last year, which was higher than the year before..

The moaning in the news is what I mentioned before.  Profits arent down, attendence isn't down, it's just not what they want.  They're only up 3%, they want it to be up 10%.. 

Actually the first google hit on "movie attendence statistics" said attendence is down about 4% after 10 years of steadily rising.

Bleh.. Just read the news reports and see who they blame.

Who do I blame?  Name film worth seeing released this year..

People go to the movies now more than ever, they just dont pay 10 bucks a ticket and 5 bucks for popcorn to see whatever crap is there.

[armax]

And yet, for the year to date, revenues are higher than last year, which was higher than the year before..

The moaning in the news is what I mentioned before.

[RayB]

Our local multiplex had tickets that at their peak cost $13 cdn. per adult. Well, while such prices bring in higher PER-PERSON revenue, I think less people were going, precisely BECAUSE of those prices.

Then last spring, they started a new price point that was supposedly going to be only for the summer. ($9.95). Well recently they announced they were keeping that price, so I guess attendence must have risen a bit as  result of more reasonable costs.

[Witchboard]

Why should I go to the movies?  It costs me the same for my wife and I to watch one movie at the theater as it does for me to wait a couple of months and buy it on DVD with the option of viewing it multiple times at no extra cost.  My couch is most certainly more comfortable than any theater chair.  My feet don't stick to the floor at my home and with my setup I'm not missing anything the theater can offer in regards to screen size or sound.  Plus I can pause the movie when I have to run to the bathroom instead of getting a synopsis from my wife of what I missed while I was gone.  I see no advantage of going to a theater to watch a movie.  Just my .02 since we're off topic.