For the second quote you go off on a tangent about costs. I'm just saying that sitting on the couch at home with your friends is not the same experience as putting your money on the machine to compete against someone you may not know. If you prefer the home environment with your friends then that's cool. I for one preferred the competition to be had at the local arcade.

I agree to a point with your thought on the costs. But to me a good bit of that is the fact they kept using more and more expensive machines that required an increase in pricing. There's no way someone can tell me that a classic stand up machine with a PC in the cabinet costs as much to buy/maintain as those huge behemoth cockpit games. These new machines may have been an attempt to counter consoles since most people will not put a race car cockpit game in their home, but for the most part were boring. Who wants to rock a fake horse forwards and backwards in a crappy rendition of a horse race? If the industry, in the US for me, had stayed away from that nonsense then I would have gladly gone to the arcade despite having a nice console at home. Right now I would love to be able to take my kids to an arcade like I remember having fun in despite having a nice console at home. But those arcades hardly exist any more. Even in local bowling alleys they have those stupid cockpit games.