JAMMA (also known as the Japanese Amusement Machine Manufacturers Association) announced today that testing will begin on April 1st, 2009 for the use of a universal cashless e-payment system. The test will last for one year and take place in four different game centers covering several hundred games. From what I could get out of the translation, it sounds like an IC Card system will be used which might not be new although the effort to get all game centers using the same system at one point is certainly a large endeavor. I imagine that the system will have to be inexpensive to implement down the road so that any size of game center could use the system – I know of a few arcades in my area which tried card systems several years ago which eventually gave up on the effort for reasons usually associated with costs and security. Still, there are some good advantages to using cashless systems as you don’t have to worry as much about employees stealing quarters or tokens (although this is where security comes into play – if they can make cards with a lot of points/credits on them and sell those on the street then that’s certainly not good for the operator.)
We’ll have to keep an eye on how this turns out and if successful I am sure that we will hear more about this effort in the not-to-distant future.
[JAMMA site: Experimentation with a new cashless system to go into effect April 1st] [Discuss on the Forums]
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Just as an additional note, the link posted mentions Edy so I figured I might as well wax a bit on that.
Edy (http://www.edy.jp/) is an existing e-money service, somewhat like the JR lines’ Suica card system, in which you use a IC card (or phone with Sony’s FeliCa technology) that you can load money on and then use it in place of actual money for a lot of stuff, like purchases at stores. In that way, it’s sorta like a prepaid credit card that you can touch upon sensors in order to charge something (analogous to Visa’s PayPass system here in the US). Note that an Edy card is, by default, not a credit card, although there do exist credit cards that have Edy built in.
The reason why they’re testing this is so that they hope to lessen the use of coins and thus not have to deal with actual currency as much. Also, because Edy is already established, Edy cards/accounts aren’t easily manipulatable and people are more inclined to use it (because they already have it, so there’s not much of a transition).
Japanese coverage of EDY (Euro Dollar Yen)
http://www.itmedia.co.jp/news/articles/0403/03/news085.html
I could agree no more about the Japanese e-payment system. I’ve been appreciating their technology for a very long time. Still, I am always amazed at how their problem solutions turned out to be such an amazing creation.
So how this turns out? What are the current updates about this e-payment system? Is there anything about a cashless payment system that includes a self-service kiosk, amusement theme park POS and other stuff similar to https://www.embedcard.com/ ?