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NEWS: GiGO (Formerly Sega) Akihabara Arcade #4 to Close on September 25

It's weird to see these iconic establishments disappear from Akihabara. Japan was the one place where arcades were still surviving (and huge arcades), but Covid 19 seems to have put a serious dent in this business. Not only the long closures during the "quasi-state-of-emergency" but also the huge shift in workplace culture. With WFH becoming more and more common in Japan (something that actually started before Covid), fewer and fewer people hit these arcades on the way home after work. Add to that the fact that there hasn't been any tourists in Tokyo for two years, and none of this is surprising...

... but it's still weird to walk down a certain street and not see the expected establishments

(add to that, I noticed that Hobby Paradise was closed on Wednesday night. )

at this rate i will never be able to see these places before il ever get a chance to go there and try them out.

Why is japan taking so long to reopen?

Thespacemaster wrote:

at this rate i will never be able to see these places before il ever get a chance to go there and try them out. Why is japan taking so long to reopen?

The current 200K+ Covid infection rate certainly isn't helping.

Tempest wrote:

... but it's still weird to walk down a certain street and not see the expected establishments (add to that, I noticed that Hobby Paradise was closed on Wednesday night. )

Hobby Paradise has closed up for changes a good few times since their relocation. Seen them open up at their current location to close for like a month and then re-open. Then them closing to rearrange for a day or two and reopen without any issue after that.

I'm going to suggest here that lack of reopening the borders to normal tourism (and not the current woeful guided tours only) had absolutely nothing to do with the amount of covid cases in Japan.

According to a police white paper, the number of gaming arcades has been decreasing since 1986, from where there used to be 26,573 of them across Japan to now only 4,022, as of 2019. This number has declined even more since the Covid pandemic, as many businesses that rely on physical interaction have closed down. If you’ve played the famous Yakuza video games series, you’re probably familiar with the Shinjuku Playland Carnival arcade in Tokyo’s Kabukicho entertainment district. However, that too closed down in November 2020.

The numbers released by the Japan Amusement Industry Association (JAIA) in February 2021 indicate that the size of the market for arcades, valued at 705.5 billion yen in 2019, had in fact grown by 3.5% from 2018. While the market had actually been shrinking in size from 2011 to 2014, dropping to 588.3 billion yen in 2014, it started to see steady growth from 2015 to 2019.A contributing factor to the rising popularity of arcades before 2020 was the changes to the Law on Control and Improvement of Amusement and Entertainment Businesses – typically known as the “fueiho” in Japanese – in 2015, which made it so that children below 16 years age would be allowed into arcades up to 10 PM when accompanied by a parent or guardian.

This is not to say, however, that traditional video game arcades were doing particularly well before the pandemic. Though the arcade business as a whole was doing better, a closer look at the numbers indicates that a lot of this growth had come from “prize games” such as crane game machines being installed in venues that are not arcades: It is not uncommon to see such machines in department stores, restaurants, and assorted amusement facilities, and these are counted as part of the market.

Prize games (which are 89.46% crane games) accounted for a whopping 55.3% of the arcade game market in 2019, with second place going to medal games at 29%. Video games, trailing in third place, accounted for only 11.7% of the market in that year.