Rebirth of America, this is my era

Chapter 37: A reply to the data in Chapter 36

First of all, thank you all for reading this. A friend just told me that some readers said that there were errors in the data in my previous chapter. I looked at it carefully and found that it was my writing that was easily misunderstood.

First of all, the arcade industry is the worst industry in the gaming field. This sentence is a strong subjective one in my remarks. I am sorry if it has caused misunderstanding. However, where did this sentence come from? In fact, it was said by the book friend with the digital ID, "The profit margin of arcade machines is very high, higher than that of the red and white machine." What he said is true, but a lot of money cannot go into the pockets of developers.

Take the book "Space Invaders" by the digital ID book friend as an example. In 1982, there was a book called "Video Games" written by Daniel Cohen, which recorded the sales of "Space Invaders". On pages 1978 and 10 of the book, it was written that in 6.7, "Space Invaders" sold 500 units in RB, with revenue reaching 18.25 million US dollars, and each machine could earn nearly US dollars a day, with an average daily turnover of million US dollars, and billion a year. But Taito, the developer of "Space Invaders", did not get this money.

In other words, "Space Invaders" earned 1978 billion in 18.25, and Taito only got 36%, and this has to be deducted from the cost of making the arcade machine. The actual money he got was several times more exaggerated than Gabe Newell's commission.

It is on this basis that I say that arcades are not profitable for developers, which is the most rubbish thing to say.

Of course, I know that my words are very absolute, which shouldn't be the case, but when writing this paragraph, I did put myself into the mindset of a game developer. Imagine that you work so hard to make a game, but in the end you can only get 20%. Isn't this too unfair?

Then there is another point. What the digital reader said is very right. Arcade machines make money very quickly. This is something I overlooked in the previous chapter. In "Game Over: A History of Nintendo's Global Conquest", written by David Sheff, the author recorded the situation when "Donkey Kong" was selling well. When "Donkey Kong" was a hit, RB's 100 yen coins could not be exchanged in banks, but a lot of money was earned by entertainment cities. What really made Nintendo experience the fame of "Donkey Kong" was actually the porting.

So, from the perspective of making money quickly, arcade games are indeed very impressive. Space Invaders made nearly $139.2 billion, but when the game was popular, Taito's revenue from Space Invaders was $30 billion, which was not even profit.

I believe you can understand what this gap means to capitalists, right? Seeing others making a lot of money from their products is more painful than killing themselves.

Especially when the protagonist is a time traveler and has memories of his past life, let alone other things, the cost and income of Rockstar in the "Give Him Love" project are much higher than that of "Space Invaders". So, it is true that arcades make money quickly, but it is also true that the proportion that developers or development companies can get is very low.

Perhaps it is because I did not describe it clearly, or because I am too subjective, so the writing style of the previous article may have misled you. If I conveyed inappropriate ideas, I am sorry.

Finally, I want to say that I do read the comments, but my author account has been banned, so I can only respond to you by opening a single chapter, and this method actually greatly affects the reading experience.

So, most of the time, I will try to avoid writing a separate chapter, and will say a few words at the end of the chapter if possible. The main reason why I wrote a separate chapter today is because I didn’t finish writing the notes for the previous chapter, and I could only write 500 words there, which was not enough for me.

But there is one thing I can explain first. In order to make the story seem real enough, most of the information actually has a source. Only a small part, such as the little gossip about why Ralph Baer reconciled with Atari that I noted earlier, will be explained in advance.

But even so, because the time period is relatively long, and the historical span is older than my age, I have no way to really verify whether a lot of information has been falsified. If you have any discoveries and point out the errors, I would very much welcome them. After all, I chose this unpopular topic because I like it. I like that period of time when humans were shining, and I like many inventions that scientists made for the benefit of mankind.

Finally, thank you all for reading my long story.

Fortunately I didn't go
2023:4, evening of April 13, 22.

(End of this chapter)