you're asking the wrong audience. you need to go and talk to people who run arcades and understand them and their clients. your clients are the people who purchase arcade games, their audience are people who put tokens into the arcades. so you'd need to have a good relationship with those people and fully understand what those people want. The people here on itch are mostly game developers, we aren't your audience, we're your peers, we aren't your clients and we can't help you understand your market here. Some of us might have experience with your clients but that's not the same as just going to talk to said clients and making that direct connection.
That’s fair. We’ve been talking to operators, merchants, and venue owners too, and it’s been pretty eye-opening. But we also wanted to hear from devs to get a sense of what the whole ecosystem thinks.
So if we gave you real players in real venues and made onboarding painless… would you consider putting a game on it?
We’re building arcade cabinets that go into real venues (like malls, cinemas, lounges, etc.) where real people walk up and play.
Now here’s what we’re offering to devs:
- You build or port a skill-based game (Unity, Godot, etc.)
- We handle the hardware, onboarding, venue placement, and payout tracking
- You earn when your game gets played, just like rev-share on app stores
- You don’t need to deal with logistics, ops, or payment compliance
We're not asking you to throw your game into a black box. We're saying:
“We’ll bring the players. You bring the gameplay.”
I don't have a problem with developing for an arcade and would actually love to throw my hat into such a ring, but that leaves the question of how these rotations work, is it all over network? does that mean now there's always online DRM? I guess that's not as bad for a venue (but i'd still want it disclosed), but if there is facial scanning / biometric data collection, ads, or a lack of transparency in the pricing of the games, that would be an absolute no go for me. these are very real concerns in 2025.