Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

polygon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 238 posts

Re: Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

#181

Post by jeltz »

pfundstein wrote: post #75
rubyn00bie wrote: post #63

Oh, I thought this was known. I'm not even joking... A few years ago, I was at a local comic shop, and I watched someone (a kid) play the machine and appear to get a "perfect" shot, key went exactly into the fucking hole... but then it just pulled back. No prize! I was stunned when the kid asked an employee essentially "WTF?" and the employee replied "there's a chance the key may not turn even though it's lined up."…

It is simply gambling for kids. These 'games' are much more profitable than traditional arcade games (street fighter/mario kart/pacman/etc/etc), and when you boil them down it's because they're essentially slot machines.

It is not even gambling. Slot machines are regulated and not allowed to be rigged.

Re: Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

#182

Post by [deleted] »

dylan604 wrote: post #37
varikin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that matter? Is everyone suppose to be aware of this guy?

What? You aren't familiar with one random guy on the internet that maybe makes some videos in a very niche market that you may have never even heard of before? What? Do you have some sort of life of something preventing from crawling every single crevice on the interwebs?

[deleted]

Re: Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

#183

Post by james-skemp »

Uberphallus wrote: post #144
TeMPOraL wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> machines that nobody expects to be fair I for sure did. In fact, on my long list of "someday/maybe" projects, there was this one entry sitting for some 15 years now: build a little machine for the claw crane game, that would time a button press perfectly. I just saw the video where Mark Rober does this to another arcade game[0], so I won't bother anymore - I can already guess the outcome. I also don't know anyone e…

> I also don't know anyone else in my circles who thought the claw crane was a game of chance. Maybe it's cultural/regional? Everyone around me gets explained they're rigged as a kid (I'm late 30s), maybe in your country they prefer to feed the excitement/illusion of kids? I'm Spanish, and we have a saying that goes "fallar más que una escopeta de feria", roughly translated to "failing (to work properly) even more th…

> "failing (to work properly) even more than a gun from a fair"

Born in the 80s, in the US, I understood that carnival games are rigged in some way, but that arcade games were skilled based.

Only as an adult did I start to learn that the 'games of skill' in arcades were worse than carnival games.

I should have known arcade video games were rigged, given the cheap deaths/impossible to dodge attacks, but there's no reason I should have known the crane and other physical 'skill' based games were, for the reasons already mentioned by the GP comment.

Edit: reading further down, it looks like this may have been a recent change with the crane games. That makes me feel better about the arcades I used to frequent as a kid (mall and skating rink).

They were crappy, but I know people won stuff from them. But the usage rate was also quite high, given how popular arcades were back then.

Re: Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

#184

Post by nkrisc »

Caylio wrote: post #105
HarryHirsch wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skill when the machine decides to let you win, no chance when the machine doesn't want you to. It's not at all like poker and very much like the well-known shell game with a pea.

The machine can only "decide to let you win" if you have the skill to get close, otherwise no chance.

If the very last step of the process is that the machine decides if you won or not, it's not a game of skill.

It takes a degree of skill and coordination to pull the lever on the slot machine, yet we don't call them a game of skill because of that.

If you're 100% accurate and you still lose, it's a game of chance.

Re: Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

#185

Post by jeltz »

Uberphallus wrote: post #140
garethsaxby wrote: post #48

I remember a long time ago in the UK, around 2003 or so, there was a similar problem with Fruit Machines (Slot machines found in UK bars and pubs). Through dumping the ROMs and emulating the machines, it was found that the machines were effectively forcing losses at certain points in gameplay; from the same memory state, you bet high and the machine goes low, or you bet low and the machine goes high, giving you zero…

Interesting. In Spain first the state takes a cut from the moment a coin goes in, and from the remainder they're bound to return 65% of the money collected, minumum. The machines have a government-certified black box to perform this accounting. Now, the law doesn't say anything about prize structure, and it's common knowledge that big prizes tend to appear within 10 plays when it's "cooled down", because machines inc…

In online gambling the games are never (or virtually never) rigged. Online slots also almost always pay out 96% or more. You make less money in the long runig you do not let your players win, but I assume small places like bars do not like that volatility.

Re: Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

#186

Post by baseballdork »

jeltz wrote: post #181
pfundstein wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is simply gambling for kids. These 'games' are much more profitable than traditional arcade games (street fighter/mario kart/pacman/etc/etc), and when you boil them down it's because they're essentially slot machines.

It is not even gambling. Slot machines are regulated and not allowed to be rigged.

> not allowed to be rigged

I guess I don't understand what "rigged" means in this context. I thought slot machines could essentially be "tuned" for payout by the owner (e.g. pay out 0.96x of what's put in on average), much like these toy machines.

Re: Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

#187

Post by adolfojp »

simonh wrote: post #178
Uberphallus wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're certainly scummy but, I mean, this isn't any different from the claw crane machines that are usually exempted from gambling laws under certain conditions (win chance, prize value, where they're located, etc); machines that nobody expects to be fair.

I think there's a difference between a a game with a skill element and a random chance element that are always consistent, and one where the game arbitrarily decides that because someone won 200 tries ago nobody playing now is allowed to win. I understand that with the claw machine the claw is unreliable, but the same claw is always equally unreliable and each time I play I could actually win, and my skill does affec…

You can adjust the strength of the grip of the claw machine.

A friend of mine worked at an arcade.

He made the grip tighter whenever he had a surplus of prizes that nobody wanted and looser when he had good new stuff.

He wasn't even coy about it. He would tell the kids who always hung out at the arcade when he was doing it so they could go nuts.

Re: Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

#188

Post by lostgame »

suction wrote: post #164

When I lived in Japan, I was really surprised what the average Japanese person thought about Arcades. There are Sega-, Taito-, Konami- and other branded Arcades in the bigger cities, but "normal" people wouldn't go near them, because they are run by the Yakuza or Yakuza-owned front businesses. With the ongoing rumours that Konami itself is a Yakuza company (see the news around the Hideo Kojima firing scandal) and Nin…

There are similar rumours - and have been for years, before the creation of the actual 'Yakuza' game; about SEGA as well.

The launch of the game did nothing to help those rumours, but certainly made it a bit more difficult to find information about online. :P

Re: Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

#189

Post by indymike »

gadders wrote: post #146
rubyn00bie wrote: post #63

Oh, I thought this was known. I'm not even joking... A few years ago, I was at a local comic shop, and I watched someone (a kid) play the machine and appear to get a "perfect" shot, key went exactly into the fucking hole... but then it just pulled back. No prize! I was stunned when the kid asked an employee essentially "WTF?" and the employee replied "there's a chance the key may not turn even though it's lined up."…

The claw machines doing this as well now. If it's not your turn to win the grabber is weaker than normal.

Shh. Don't tell anyone. -- Dad who like to count plays on the claw machine and tell my kids... "Play that one. I have a good feeling about it"

Re: Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

#190

Post by lostgame »

ddtaylor wrote: post #154

While I think Sega has effectively sold a gambling machine I'm not sure if they should be liable in these lawsuits. They sold a tool that could have been configured correctly to comply with local regulations. The owners manual explains to the operator that they can configure this probability, which they could simply set to 1 to bypass the entire gambling mechanic.

Would it be possible for SEGA to ensure the game does comply with local regulations before selling it?

I can imagine it would be the same, e.g. with slot machines?

Ideally; these machines should not be able to work in ways that can be over its local limits.

Wishful thinking, but...in a perfect world.

Post reply on HN