Arcade Heroes Year-In-Review 2024: Business, New Games, History & More

Welcome to the Arcade Heroes Year-In-Review of 2024. Let’s take a look back at the last twelve months and provide a “State of the Industry” report for you to consider. We have done these most years on the site; our last for 2023 unfortunately ended on a slightly sour note, but that’s not always the case. How did this year work out? Let’s take a look.

Year-In-Review: The Website

2024 marked the 18th year in the operation of Arcade Heroes. We didn’t make any drastic changes to much, although there have been a few backend changes outside of our control that have caused some slight headaches. If you look at any old posts pre-late 2016 and don’t see an embedded video or media from an external site where it should be, check back soon (or use the Wayback Machine to see an older capture where it will show up) – that’s all in the process of being fixed still, thanks to some inconvenient formatting changes on WordPress’ end…

YouTube continues to be our best point in social media growth, last year just cresting 17k subscribers, while for 2025 we are now within striking distance of 20,000. I’ll have to figure out something fun to do once we have surpassed that threshold.

Co-contributors like Ted, Oga-Shi and Kevin Williams have also been a huge boon and deserve credit here, as I’ve become a lot busier this year. They have allowed more stories and coverage to get out there than would have otherwise taken place. All three have attended international trade shows I was not there for, Kevin wrote another of his occasional special features to sum up all the latest developments in the rhythm gaming scene (which has had a big 2024), and Ted also helped put together a great interview featuring Oga-Shi that you can read here.

Going into 2025, there will be even more interesting content and a new area of the site we will be looking into doing, based on some suggestions by Oga-Shi a short time ago. But we’ll wait to discuss that for when we have something moving along there, which might begin next month…

Business Talk

For those who are new to the site, I operate a real arcade location in Salt Lake City, UT by the name of Arcade Galactic. When I started documenting the development of that arcade on the site here, it was known as the Game Grid Arcade, but I had to change the name in 2020 to avoid an expensive court fight (one that I could have won with enough capital, since I had the name first, but the below video explains my decision).

Also in 2020, I opened up a second location, but ended up closing it on the last day of 2022. Unfortunately business just wasn’t strong enough to continue and there were some other personal issues that operation was indirectly causing. In hindsight, I’m grateful to have given it a shot, but also grateful for recognizing when I needed to close it down. While bringing in a lot of new games to the OG location did give the business a nice boost throughout the year, November 2023 saw a precipitous decline in revenues, leaving that month as the worst performing November in my company history.

This year had not been faring much better, starting off just OK and hobbling along until we hit the Summer, where we had a fairly terrible season – compensating for the amount of equipment on-hand, even worse than what we saw coming out of lockdowns in 2020. Things were actually getting quite bad, enough to the point where I was going to have to start selling off a lot of games to keep the doors open – not a situation you want to find yourself in, as that can easily snowball into a death spiral that ends in bankruptcy. It’s not sustainable to sell all your stuff off for very long.

I know I was not alone, as I had several fellow operators call me up or email me asking how business was going. Except for one that I talked to, everyone was seeing a big decline in revenues just as I had. These also were from all over the country; it was enough of a trend that we started seeing surveys asking operators how their business compared to the year prior. Majorities reported that revenues were down, sometimes by small amounts, some by large margins. I did the math on my months and one month was 5% down compared to the year prior, then the next was down 23%. I did a video on this subject too. Even the mighty Dave & Busters wasn’t immune from this trend, with a bit of a mess happening when it comes to their management as of late.

Fortunately enough for me however, November 2024 was the complete opposite of the year prior, with business going back up again. Perhaps it was the arrival of some better movie releases that brought people into the mall and arcade, or there was a boost from all the political happenings that month. It’s always hard to ascertain without being able to poll customers directly. Regardless of what the explanation might be, it has been nice to see things getting a nice pick-up to end the year on a high note, at least at my joint.

Still, on the other hand, the debt I’d accumulated from the second location remains a pressure point, preventing me from investing in new equipment that would also help bring people in. That is compounded by a lot of games having critical parts fail, where it doesn’t help when the parts are either super expensive to replace, or you can’t get help from the service side of the companies in question.

Assuming and hoping that business continues in a positive direction in 2025, then I should be able to resolve some outstanding debts (my main focus), and invest into at least one new piece. Although it is looking very likely that will be a card system, and not an actual new game or two – especially with how expensive many are now. Until then, I’m one of the last token holdouts you can find.

Trade Shows

2024 has been a positive year for trade shows, with many successful examples and a lot of good coverage of them here on AH. Special mention should go to the AAA and GTI shows out of China, which we got better snapshots of than ever before thanks to Oga-Shi. Elsewhere in Asia, exA-Arcadia also made some big waves by using EVO Japan to announce a plethora of new titles.

The year started out as always with EAG; we had a great preview and a full recap of that show from both Ted and Kevin Williams. This was followed a couple of months later on this side of the pond with Amusement Expo 2024 in Las Vegas, which I attended as I usually do. One of the bigger surprises to come out of that event is that a company local to me, Alan-1, announced that they had obtained a license from Atari to produce the Atari Recharged games as arcade games, debuting with Asteroids. The polished version of that was just released last month.

I was also able to attend California Extreme, Utah GameXpo and Pinball Expo this year, which helped in a way for missing Bowl Expo (which I only missed because I slept in and missed my flight after not double checking the flight time – whoops). We still got coverage of that thanks to Brandon Willey of the LBX Collective though, whose weekly show continues to feature AH’s own Arcade Corner.

Of course, the mother of all arcade-related trade shows remains IAAPA. The 2024 event just gone was a great one, with lots of excitement and new arcade games to go around. It shouldn’t be a shock to anyone that out of all the attendees, Bandai Namco easily had the most interest from you guys, with their two leading lights of Taiko No Tatsujin and GoldStorm Pirates (but especially Taiko) doing a lot for that.

Meanwhile, back at Amusement Expo we saw Raw Thrills get the most views for their biggest VR push so far, with Godzilla Kaiju Wars VR, King Kong Skull Island II, and the debut of T-Rex Safari Adventure VR all available on their booth. This push has certainly paid off for them in the case of Godzilla, though the others don’t seem to be as big, and if they do have anything more in the VR pipeline, it is not yet known.

As always, there was far too much out of IAAPA to cover in one post, so if you haven’t already, you can explore the announcements of IAAPA 2024 via these fine links:

Part #1: Raw Thrills; TouchMagix; Amusement Source; Wahlap; Alan-1; Night Heron 

Part #2: Bandai Namco Amusement; Sega Amusements; LAI Games; UNIS

Part #3: Pinball (Stern; Jersey Jack; American Pinball)

Part #4: exA-Arcadia, Indies, & More

Part #5: Redemption, Simulators, & VR

Some may have also missed the coverage out of Japan’s Amusement Expo this year due to it happening so close to IAAPA nowadays; find that here.

New Games Releases 2024

As tracked on this page, here are the games that were released to the North American side of the industry this year. I do need to shore up some things on VR arcades, as sometimes the stuff I see at IAAPA has been out for a while, while other times it’s new.

Coming Soon 2025

IAAPA has naturally given us a preview of what’s up next for 2025, and it looks like a pretty solid slate of new arcade releases. Among those, we already know Alpha Ops VR Strike (Sega Amusements), Chef It Up (MonkeySplash Studios) and Kaiju Rampage (LAI Games) will be landing soon. Bandai Namco will also have the second shipment of Taiko No Tatsujin for the US (plus its possible European release), and the Western launch of GoldStorm Pirates following its first appearances in Japan since October – which will surely be among the biggest games to look out for in the coming months too.

exA-Arcadia have also got a ton of new games to come for their platform as usual, with highlights including Yuzo Koshiro’s Earthion EXA Label, Asuka 120% Burning Fest Exallent, and Airgallet EXA Label. But these are just the beginning – all exA fans should look forward to Amusement Expo 2025, where there will apparently be several major announcements made for upcoming games…

Then as was teased this morning, expect a brand new Stern Pinball machine to start shipping out next month – Dungeons & Dragons. This isn’t the first time that D&D has been a pinball machine, but it has been a while, and Stern doing a take on it has been much rumored. Also note that Stern always does this kind of reveal now; JAWS was a game they unveiled right at the beginning of 2024:

I also can confirm that Alan-1 is going to have a very aggressive release schedule with some interesting surprises; their Avian Knights game begins shipping out in January (pre-orders are open now; we’ll have a story up about it soon), and it will soon be followed by many other titles.

Location Watch

As always, we have tracked all the new arcades that have been opening up, usually on a bi-monthly basis. Despite the ups and downs, new location openings have kept happening this year. Granted, a high proportion seem to be further stores for established chains now (particularly in Japan), and there has been some really dry periods for them (e.g. Spring)… but then big bursts soon after.

For all the Location Watch posts we made this year:

• January 2024
• March 2024
• June 2024
• August 2024
• October 2024
• December 2024

The Year In Arcade History

A topic we should probably cover at least a little more on AH is arcade history. That’s not to say we haven’t; some of our most-viewed pieces on the site concern the historical side of things rather than the here and now. But time and time again, the specter of companies not honoring their legacy enough comes up – despite nice efforts like Sega hosting a special history area at the last Amusement Expo in Japan, others seem all to happy to erase their very own past by deleting online material and treating past games as if they no longer exist. While that’s understandable if your work hasn’t done too well business-wise, where this leaves us is public documentation being scarce besides on sites like ours (never mind the open question mark on how much is saved internally).

And that’s just for more recent years… if an 70s/80s/90s arcade game is an obscure footnote or an underappreciated gem, it’s at even more risk of being forgotten now. Fortunately work is always being done there too – if you don’t check recent uploads of old industry trade papers and magazines like Play Meter on the Internet Archive, you are missing out. These have helped massively in writing an arcade history-focused follow-up to The Arcade Experience, which has been mentioned once or twice on here before and will still be coming at some point in the future (possibly not 2025 though).

It’s also worth noting that this was 40 years since 1984, which is one of the worst years on record for general video game performance. I’d always thought that ’83 was the worst time, but as I was researching the game crash for my aforementioned arcade history book, ’84 was the bottom of the crash. Fortunately, for all the ups and downs this year was much better than that, and things aren’t looking dour for 2025 at this point.

For now and for our part, these were the three main posts covering arcade history on the site this year:

Happy National Video Arcade Day 2024! – Our whistle stop tour of the big trends in arcade history 50, 40, 30 and 20 years ago to celebrate Atari’s incorporation

Celebrating 26 Years Of Sega’s NAOMI – The birthday of the Dreamcast always gets a lot of love, the NAOMI slightly less so. This post was the remedy to that…

Arcade Heroes Turns 18 – Let’s Look Back At Our Biggest Stories – Somewhat self-congratulatory, but an interesting look at what’s prevailed on the site

Top 10 Posts & Videos

With it being a strong growth driver these days, content on the AH YouTube channel does outrank that on the site now. However, there is an odd (but not surprising) viewing trend with it where older videos covering big licensed Raw Thrills games get many more views consistently than new content. This happens too on the site, but to a much lesser extent in that they don’t overwhelm new articles so much. At least this year, there is the most viewed video of the past 12 months in the Top 10 (2023’s didn’t make it): our coverage of NBA Superstars‘ announcement.

Meanwhile on the site, a good chunk of the Top 10 is taken by titles or topics with Bandai Namco and Sega attached, which isn’t too surprising to see – games from brands as strong as those always command more interest. But it is interesting that out of all the trade show coverage this year, it’s the AAA show (and EAG) that came out here… usually it was either IAAPA or JAEPO before that ranked high. It’s nice it has though, as Oga-Shi and Ted did help massively to make that better than ever before.

10- The EAG 2024 Recap – New Arcade Games For Europe

9- AAA 2024 Day 1: New Arcade Games Shown Off In China

8- New Details On Bandai Namco’s Animal Kaiser Plus

7- Dave & Busters To Launch Their ‘Store of the Future’ Format In Dallas This February

6- The Spirit Of NBA Jam Returns With NBA Superstars

5- Raw Thrills Launches ‘Hero Cards’ Series 3 Update For Minecraft Dungeons Arcade

4- Taiko No Tatsujin USA Version Release Details

3- Jitsu Squad Featuring Samurai Pizza Cats Unveiled At Amusement Expo 2024

Owing to us covering this one early (and it being linked in others’ coverage), the announcement of exA-Arcadia’s Jitsu Squad Feat. Samurai Pizza Cats has got a surprisingly big amount of views. Though it is a license, the Samurai Pizza Cats aren’t the most well-known cartoon crew in the world – still, cool to see some recognition, and serve as an early taster for even bigger licenses from exA…

2- Maimai DX By Sega Placed On Test In The USA

Not far behind the number one here, the test that Maimai DX got at Round1 receiving such interest online does prove the passion that those dedicated fans have for it. However, word on the street has been the second test held at Dave & Busters in Dallas didn’t do as well… so a wider release like a certain other arcade rhythm game is getting does not look especially likely for it right now.

1- Confirmed: Taiko No Tatsujin Is Launching In US Arcades This November

Unsurprisingly, this post ran away with the most views on the site for 2024, not even being the game’s only appearance in this Top 10. So far “US Arcades” has mostly just meant Round1USA locations, with them having indeed taken up nearly all of the initial limited shipment – but the second one coming next year should give more of a chance to others. Place your pre-orders now to get in on it…

Thanks for supporting the site and channel – we’ll see you in 2025!

The post Arcade Heroes Year-In-Review 2024: Business, New Games, History & More appeared first on Arcade Heroes.

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