HA1 Task 3 - Buisness Models

Task 3 Business Models

Arcade/Coin

The arcade or coin era of gaming usually consists of children and adults going to their local bar, arcade or anyway where there was an arcade game to play. The would deposit their hard earned pocket money into machines bigger than them and then there would’ve been two lines and a little square that would bounce of them, side to side, making little noises when one line hit the square or when the square would make it past the lines and the a number would show making it a game.

Pong the ‘first’ game. It may not be the very first game but it sure was the very first arcade game that existed. It took 6 months to make. Al Acorn the greater, designer and programmer. When shown to Nolan Bushnell he would make tweaks to the game such as the score and the bouncing angels of the ball and most famously the noise it made, naming the game ‘Pong’.

When they finally perfected this and slotted it into a little box and put it in a bar it actually made quite a bit of attention, the coin box jammed as it would not take any more coins. They then saw this as an opportunity to make it to the big times. They made thousands of more and placed them in bars, restaurants and fun fairs all around America. This started the Arcade era of gaming.

It lasted from the 60’s all the way to the 80’s; Atari started a whole new generation. But then someone wanted in Warner Bros. they bought Atari for $30 million while keeping Nolan and all the staff from the original Atari they changed too much that made it worse. One of the reasons why Atari and the Arcade era took a downfall, team by team Atari started to leave Warner creating EA and Activision. Atari’s time was coming to an end, just like the arcade era.

Console/Box Ship, Done

Nowadays we go to the shop, buy our console and maybe a game or two, then that relationship between the manufacturers is over. We may have gone back but never for long as we were always in and out. There were actually 8 generations of this though, (2 set before the 21^st century);

Starting with Magna Vox’s Odyssey, and ending with Fairchilds’ Video Entertainment System. This was the start of the home gaming era and end of the arcade era, but still arcades are up and running quite successfully and there is always the bar which will have a fruit machine or two in it. But not like home gaming systems that era is now dead and not coming back. At least not for a long time, since we are but a search engine away from playing these simple and not fun (not anymore) games

But now even this is coming to an end everyone seems to be downloading games and DLC (downloadable content) and now with broadband getting faster so is gaming. There is smaller and big games coming out every day with 7 generations of consoles (8 coming soon) soon everything will be done online, including buying games, playing, and new software. Most of this is already easily done in minutes.