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Comment by boomboomsubban | Hacker News Reader

How does someone blow that wad of cash on a game and convince some editor to let them write an article about it only to not include a picture of the cabinet in the article? I guess it could be their desire to monopolize they mention, but they don't seem adverse to bragging about it.

Also I'm surprised there isn't a somewhat niche pachinko parlor market in the US already. My quick search shows one place in Virginia advertising itself as the only US parlor. Maybe the difficulty of translation and the "selling gambling to youths" aspect of the frequent anime links keeps it away.

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Pachinko would be legally gambling in the United States and the loophole they use in Japan doesnt exist here.

There are elements of Pachinko that make it unattractive for casino's to mess with. All the machines would be licensed tech from Japan (cost), managing the balls (if you actually distribute them out) has costs associated that they dont get as many scaling advantages that Japan would get, the machines go through more wear and tear than slot machines do. Also its my understanding you redeem the balls to get your prizes (though some just print out tickets now?), so you would have to create some kind of redemption mechanism for the balls (and also create anti cheating measures agains this).

It's just a bunch of work for what doesnt appear to be much gain. The main appeal to the game is that it has more illusion of skill than slots do. And the gambling authorities would have to figure out what the acceptable win/loss rations are on the machines.

Wouldn't they technically be casinos and thus regulated?

My experience with pachinko in Japan felt very much like the old strip in Las Vegas emotion and vibe wise.

Yeah, I was picturing them as openly being casinos. You'd think at least Las Vegas would have some, a sort of international slots section. Hijacking culture is already their specialty after all.

There are some posters on here who work in gaming, maybe one of them will illuminate us, but I wonder if the odds are too hard to strictly control (which is needed to satisfy both regulators and casino owners).

The time is ripe for an anime/Japanese-focused casino in Vegas.

Pachinko is a slot machine and is gambling, but they use a loophole to not be considered such - it pays out tickets that you can use to get toys and stuff like an arcade, but they will buy the toys back from you for money.

Last time I was over there in 2019, one of the friends who came with me wanted to actually try Pachinko; I had never sat down at a machine in my aggregate ~1.5 years of living/visiting Japan, though I had walked through Pachinko places a few times. The one we sat down in was in Osaka I think. When you're done the machine you're at prints a ticket, the exchange desk in the same room (or building) gave us actually a small piece of gold- had the weight embossed on it- and there was an exchange business in the shop/building next door. We opted to keep the gold slivers because it was an interesting souvenir. Usually the prize desks in the pachinko area will have other small items you can exchange for as well. The external buyback business is suppossed to be independent to get around the gambling law of course.

In Japan. That japanese law has a loophole doesn't really matter for places in the US, where it doesn't exist.

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