Thanks to Edward Castillo for the tip, here is a little news regarding locations in California to discuss.
First let’s talk about the closure. About 4 years ago I had a post here on AH about a venue that opened up in LA which attempted to do the arcade concept but without the coin-op games, focusing more on home game consoles. I have been interested to see how it would pan out since on occasion I hear about venues giving such a thing a shot but I’ve never heard of anyone making a bunch of profit from it. It seems that might be the case with Powersurge although who knows exactly why they have decided to close. Although 9/10 times it happens to be a lack of cash flow. I can’t say I’m surprised – if your venue doesn’t have something truly unique to offer then its an uphill battle in the mud to get somewhere. Powersurge had a “fitness” angle to them, which I think means that they focused on motion/gesture gaming. But whether they had a good circuit of tournament players to feed the bills beyond that fitness angle, I do not know. I do not believe they had any arcade games or exergames with some hardware aspect to it. It was more just focus on game consoles.
As Powersurge closes, not far away a new venue has opened their doors which is similar, although their focus is not on “fitness” but upon fighting games. Called the Ultimate Gaming Center, they opened a little under six months ago in Panorama City, CA and have kept their focus on a variety of 1-on-1 fighting games and tournaments. They have a heavy selection of game consoles but they a small selection of arcade games on hand with plans to expand on it in the future. With only 4 games – a NeoGeo with a multicart, Capcom Vs. SNK 2, Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 and Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike they don’t have enough where it likely makes a huge dent in earnings but I think its good that the owner seems to be on-board with them to a degree.
This is an interesting contrast to mull over here. I think if I had tried to do something like Powersurge then I wouldn’t have been successful. I used to have a PC network at my arcade and it died once kids got tired of paying to play Call of Duty on an hourly basis. They had a good enough rendition at home (I got some mileage out of mods but after a while that loses its luster too) and most were unwilling to try out anything else if it didn’t have that illustrious CoD title slapped on the front. World of Warcraft went nowhere, any other MMOs even moreso. It is notable that my region has some of the highest numbers of computer-ownership in the US so owning a PC is not a challenge here either. But I did quiz some of the people who used to be regulars here and it usually came down to the fact that they had CoD at home and that’s all that they really wanted to play.
I also could compare these console-centric venue concepts to the most recent generation of game consoles themselves – I don’t see any exclusives on the Xbox One or Playstation 4 that make them worth the price tag right now so why should I go out and pay $400 for yet another Netflix box? People buy things like expensive new game consoles because they are going to have the games they can’t get anywhere else or do something that the others can’t do. When you run an entertainment venue there has to be various compelling reasons to get customers in the door and to stay there to pay for some games. I do remember hearing people claim when I started that a video arcade was a silly idea since they could just play what they wanted to in MAME but those detractors forgot or didn’t realize that arcades have new games which are often exclusive to the format and we also have various unique physical/mechanical games to boost our gaming profile, such as air hockey, pinball, skee ball, etc. Of course I have covered this at length in my book, which I suppose I do not promote enough at times 😉
Ultimate Gaming Center looks like they have enough to compel players to leave the couch as they are focused strongly on the niche of fighting fans but as we saw recently with the needed changes at Super Arcade, I think it is risky to rely on one segment of gamers to turn a profit. Granted it can work for a while – when I first opened, my PCs outearned the arcades but once I Â moved to a better location and added more games, that all changed. When I moved again and had even more space for arcade games, it wasn’t even a contest between the PCs and Arcades any longer. To UGCs benefit, using game consoles does get around the major issue with fighting games in the arcade industry these days, that of practically every single one getting a console release for cheap at some point. They also seem to have established themselves as a good place to compete which should give them some earnings momentum as well. Hopefully that momentum keeps up for them as they expand their arcade selection and they won’t suffer from Powersurge’s fate.
Am i the only one that finds it strange that fighting game tourny scene (in the west) happens on consoles and not on finely tuned arcade cabs… something seems a bit off to me.
Your not looking at it from both sides. There are def advantages on running tournaments on consoles over arcade even moreso when modern fighting titles are concerned. Even Japan these days run some of their events and tournaments on console ports.
The problem is that hardcore fighting games from manufacturers like Capcom are only available on home consoles. I’m sure if they were available for the arcade the tournaments would be played on cabinets.
If you go to a fighting game tournament, you’ll notice people use all sorts of different controllers. Sanwas, Seimitsus, Horis, Hitboxes, 6-button pads, stock pads, etc etc.
And then within those you’ll often see people with modded controllers, sometimes they make an 8-button stick into a 6-button, sometimes they’ll swap out the square gate for an octo gate, etc.
Restricting everyone to one type of control is not going to bring out the best competition – moreover, with a Bring-Your-Own-Controller policy, anything that goes wrong with the controller falls on the fault of the player. If they controls on an arcade machine go wrong, then the fault lies with the owner or the tournament organizer. Such issues will at the very least delay the tournament until the issue is resolved, if not outright preventing the tournament from continuing to run altogether.
Well said friend.
as long as they have an xbox one to play killer instinct, I’m down!
They do. Two stations for Killer Instinct I believe 😉
NOTE: Powersurge didn’t closed because of the money flow. It closed because Dave & Busters opened right next to it (seriously, less than 50 steps away) in Westchester
Well, that would have caused the cash flow problem right there 😉 Why go and play home console games at an out of home venue when you have exclusive out-of-home games right next door anyways?
Yeah. Like Tilt did when Round 1 Puente Hills moved in, I believed they packed up and left instead of fighting it out.
Correct. I vividly recall Tilt closing its doors before R1 established itself in the Mall. Can’t say I blame them. Prior to closing up I remember that arcade looking quite rundown. Alot of their fighting games cabs were in need of some maintenance.