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Dave & Buster’s […] recently announced plans to let patrons place real-money bets on the company’s main attraction: its arcade games.

The suburban gaming den’s new betting operation is part of a partnership with Lucra Sports, a technology company that describes its product as “gamification services.” In practical terms, Lucra licenses its software to other businesses, allowing them to integrate certain kinds of betting into their existing apps and websites. Lucra deals in the kinds of bookie-free “peer to peer” bets—say, on the results of a night of bowling or a game of pickup basketball—that might have previously been sealed with a handshake.

The chain is expected to roll out all of this in the coming months, and it will be available only to adults

Beyond that, neither Dave & Buster’s nor Lucra Sports—which both declined to comment—is saying what kinds of betting will be allowed and at what scale.

Gambling on games of skill has a much easier time cruising past legal roadblocks.

Because of these legal distinctions, Lucra Sports—which has financial backing from a host of sports executives and professional athletes, including former Milwaukee Bucks owner Marc Lasry and former NFL player Emmanuel Sanders—says its services are legal on some level in 45 US states.

Even in their relatively milquetoast skill-game form, these kinds of betting services normalize something that feels a lot like traditional gambling as most Americans now experience it

Kids too young to grasp how football works or what betting on it might mean will soon be able to encounter a version of it at the arcade, potentially priming them to open their own betting accounts once they hit legal age.

That Dave & Buster’s would decide to dive in right now is best read as an indicator of just how nervous traditional entertainment industries have become about gambling and its capacity to devour their customer base and its disposable income. In its 2022 annual report, Dave & Buster’s identified the spread of legalized gambling as an existential threat, even as the company was continuing to grow and its stock price was soaring.

this move feels motivated more by the fear of being left behind while others profit than by a genuine belief in the value of the product itself.

The vision that’s dancing in executives’ heads, I have no doubt, is something akin to the opportunity to be a little Las Vegas in every American suburb. They should probably be more wary of the likelier—and grimmer—alternative: becoming something closer to most of the other casinos in America, where no parent would ever dream of throwing their kid’s birthday party.

  • Telorand
    5·
    30 days ago

    Generally, arcades have not done terribly well. There used to be a lot of video arcades all over out there in the 1980s. Video game hardware has gotten a lot cheaper, and a lot of people just have it at home now.

    Why bother with going to an arcade when you could go to a cozy place with a Steam Deck? Why pay to play old games on an arcade cabinet when there’s countless handheld emulators out there?

    It worked when people had to go to a mall or arcade to play things, but nostalgia can only attract so many people, anymore. The market is no longer captive, and the people who played in arcades have grown up, gotten jobs, families, Steam Decks, and beefy gaming PCs of their own.

    The only demo left is the hobbyists, and even they can now build their own arcade cabinets to get some of the experience.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      2·
      30 days ago

      I mean, there’s probably still some niche, but the niche can get pretty small.

      Movie theaters kinda did this before the arcades did. Used to be that it wasn’t normal to be able to watch movies at home, but once that happened, the space for movie theaters got a lot smaller.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie_theater

      New forms of competition

      One reason for the decline in ticket sales in the 2000s is that “home-entertainment options [are] improving all the time— whether streamed movies and television, video games, or mobile apps—and studios releasing fewer movies”, which means that “people are less likely to head to their local multiplex”. This decline is not something that is recent. It has been observed since the 1950s when television became widespread among working-class homes. As the years went on, home media became more popular, and the decline continued. This decline continues until this day. A Pew Media survey from 2006 found that the relationship between movies watched at home versus at the movie theater was in a five to one ratio and 75% of respondents said their preferred way of watching a movie was at home, versus 21% who said they preferred to go to a theater. In 2014, it was reported that the practice of releasing a film in theaters and via on-demand streaming on the same day (for selected films) and the rise in popularity of the Netflix streaming service has led to concerns in the movie theater industry. Another source of competition is television, which has “…stolen a lot of cinema’s best tricks – like good production values and top tier actors – and brought them into people’s living rooms”. Since the 2010s, one of the increasing sources of competition for movie theaters is the increasing ownership by people of home theater systems which can display high-resolution Blu-ray disks of movies on large, widescreen flat-screen TVs, with 5.1 surround sound and a powerful subwoofer for low-pitched sounds.

      Drive-in movie theaters got hit even earlier:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive-in_theater

      Decline (1970s–1990s)

      Several factors contributed to the decline of the drive-in movie industry. Beginning in the late 1960s, drive-in attendance began to decline as the result of improvements and changes to home entertainment, from color television and cable TV to VCRs and video rental in the early 1980s. Additionally, the 1970s energy crisis led to the widespread adoption of daylight saving time (which caused drive-in movies to start an hour later) and lower use of automobiles, making it increasingly difficult for drive-ins to remain profitable.

      Mainly following the advent of cable television and video cassette recorder (VCR), then with the arrival of DVD and streaming systems, families were able to enjoy movies in the comfort of their homes. The new entertainment technology increased the options and the movie watching experience.

      And, they apparently did a similar-to-D&B’s, more-adult-oriented shift to try to mitigate losses:

      While exploitation films had been a drive-in staple since the 1950s, helped by relatively limited oversight compared to downtown theaters, by the 1970s, several venues switched from showing family-friendly fare to R-rated and X-rated films as a way to offset declining patronage and revenue, while other venues that still catered to families, began to show R-rated or pornographic movies in late-night time slots to bring in extra income.[citation needed] This allowed censored materials to be viewed by a wider audience, including those for whom viewing was still illegal in some states, and it was also reliant upon varying local ordinances controlling such material. It also required a relatively remote location away from the heavier populated areas of towns and cities.