This is some serious shylock shenanigans. What was up with US publishers and arcade operators?
>>12795316Lure them in with easy gameplay, then crank it up to squeeze every quarter out of them until they stop coming. Reset and repeat as needed.
Arcades weren't built for you to have fun, they were designed to make money and some arcade machines were much more egregious about it than others
Too manual and too simpleMake it automatically raise difficulty if someone doesn't lose lives fast enough, and maintain that difficulty for 3 minutes after a game-over just in case the same player restarts instead of paying to continue
>>12795316i only recall one arcade which made the games easier, but it was also using modded versions of Street Fighter 2. they were probably using unofficial pirate hardware or something. they also seem to be making more of their money from "carnival" games that spit out tickets to exchange for prizes.but that way back in the 1990s. now the ticket spitting games are even worse. requiring sometime like 2000 tickets or points for a tiny toy or a small packet of old candy. insane inflation. compared to exchanging 80 tickets for a plastic watch in that old 1990s arcade.
>>12795335>automatically raise difficulty if someone doesn't lose lives fast enough, and maintain that difficulty for 3 minutes after a game-over just in case the same player restarts instead of paying to continueMUSHA for Genesis supposedly had automatic difficulty.
Gotta hand it to SNK making it a standard to display what difficulty setting the game wad set to.
>>12795321Japanese arcade operators manual doesn't tell them to do this though.
>>12795316These instructions are just basic "try to make the difficulty fit your audiance", I don't understand what's supposed to be controversial over this, and if you think this feeds your "arcades were designed to fuck you over!!!" theory, it really doesn't , they even say to lower the difficulty when required. People will really misinterpret anything to try to make it fit their pre-defined opinions, it's pathetic.
>>12795403Don't touch the default difficulty settings is the golden rule, nice larp.
Don't ever investigate into learning about the ethnicity of the majority of arcade owners
>>12795426Koreans(Japan) and Yids(USA)?
>>12795403>they even say to lower the difficulty when required.They say to lower it when "unpopular". If a arcade game's set so hard that nobody wants to touch it, that means you're losing money.
>>12795416The golden modern rule you mean, just like savestates/rewind "QoL" are the golden rule in console games releases. By definition difficulty settings were designed to be used.
>>12795445>The golden modern rule you meanNope, ever since SNK added the difficulty being displayed when the machine runs outing the greedy fucks.
>>12795483
>>12795491>>12795483#4 is default
>>12795483>>12795491wtf i never noticed this. thank u, puzzle bobble devs!
>>12795335lots of arcade games do this, it's called rank
>>12795321>Arcades weren't built for you to have funYes they were. That's literally how they make their money.
Some Japanese arcades have machines set to the highest difficulty with a sticker on them indicating this.
>>12795520Fun is not a prerequisite for you inserting a quarterMaybe you're trying to get a high score, or you wanna beat someone else in a 1v1 versus game, maybe the graphics look impressive enough or the controller weird enough that you're gonna give it a try, maybe you fucking hate the game but it's so addicting that you're gonna shove another coin in anyways. None of these require fun to be had.SNK didn't make bullshit final bosses because they thought it'd be fun. They did it because you'd fail and have to insert another quarter to try again.
>>12795520there's a reason the term is "pay to win" and not "pay to fun"
Japanese market was different when they felt a game was bullshit they thought fuck this shit and dropped it.Meanwhile in the US some kid robbed his parents blind to brute force the game
>>12795520We can settle this by looking at communist arcade games from East Germany, which were operated to keep the public happy, not to make money. I have not been able to determine whether this machine has operator-controlled difficulty settings, but you'll notice that it does have a coin slot. They were built to take a 50 pfennig piece, but players found that it would also accept a 1 pfennig inserted in just the right way. As this became ubiquitous, operators experimented with free play, but ultimately re-activated the coin slots because long lines and large crowds waiting for their turns would form otherwise. Requiring a nominal payment turned out to be the best way to maximize the amount of "fun" that the machines could produce for the populace.
>>12795617Here's 80s Yugoslavia operated on the same model as the western ones.
>>12795638>Arcade Operators in Yugoslavia would increase the prices of tokens during peak tourist season
>flipping some switches off and on is too complex for opdouble digit iq
>>12796247>Too low iq for reading comprehension Sub 80iq
>>12795316And with time, once quarters stopped ruling games, games have slowly become toddlerslop with no friction whatsoever (read: no fun). Now engagement is the metric, and they know adding difficulty of any sort begins to peel players away.
>>12796818The rulling stoped before the popularity even peaked
>>12795336It's a similar case with ticket/prize games to the difficulty, in a sense. Modern ticket games make a big song and dance with WOW 100 TICKETS HOLY SHIT any time you play, but there's no actual physical "tickets" being spat out because they're all digital and saved to a card now. It gives people the impression they're winning big until they take it up to the prize counter and get told>sorry kid you need eleven billion tickets for the sticky hand or the bouncy ballPrize caps were lower back in the day due to necessity (physical tickets cost money and they only had a finite amount) but now the sky's the limit and it's fucking gay.
