When even physical gacha of football players does not work anymore, you know the arcades are in big trouble in Japan. C'est la vie.
I think the picture is more nuanced than "arcades are in big trouble" in Japan - they've faced many hardships, but card gacha, particularly examples using high-profile licences, is not at death's door as a concept, despite the dominance of prize games. Alongside rhythm games, they still remain the biggest video arcade releases - joystick titles have had a harder time overall.
Bandai Namco, for example, have recently released Mobile Suit Gundam Arsenal Base,
a brand new arcade gacha which has proved to be so popular that they struggled to keep up with demand for cards. And for all the dire talk of famous Tokyo game centers closing, several new ones have now opened, a few even occupying space which had been shuttered. Game Panic branches appeared in the former Shinjuku Playland Carnival and Adores Akihabara buildings in the past few months.
オープンして数日後の平日朝一にいってきました！東京都新宿区 2021年11月13日（土）オープン！〒160-0021 東京都新宿区歌舞伎町1-20-1ヒューマックスパビリオン新宿歌舞伎町1F/2F営業時間などはTwitterをチェック！https://twitter.com/Gpkabuki西武新宿駅より徒歩3分...
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Sega could have engaged with and benefitted from these eventual signs of recovery in the industry to a greater extent, but their arcade presence has of course already been irreversibly diminished. And alongside the obvious COVID hit that the business took, I think the key to understanding why this happened is taking a look at what they were doing pre-pandemic - and from 2018 to early 2020, that's a slew of constant failures, with few brand new successes to speak of at all.
In card games alone, you had both
Soul Reverse, then
Chrono Regalia - in-house, original IP gacha, treated as blockbuster releases - bombing and dying after just one year of support each. Kemono Friends 3, the last in Sega's line of arcade gacha aimed at children, had a short lifespan too. WCCF was also renewed to FOOTISTA, and from what players and fans have been saying about its end of service,
I get the impression that many actually stopped playing because of its changes before COVID.
However, Sega arcade R&D is known to remain in some capacity. One project it has recently released is Eiketsu Taisen, a brand new crossover iteration of their prolific Sangokushi and Sengoku Taisen series. It is offered to operators as a conversion kit for all WCCF machines, something also seen with Initial D: The Arcade last year, which replaced the dead Sega World Drivers Championship cabinets. Semiconductor shortages and the added costs involved are largely to blame for this.
大戦シリーズ最新作『英傑大戦 三千世界の波動』のプロモーション映像、「闘いの狼煙を上げろ篇」です。○『英傑大戦 三千世界の波動』とは『英傑大戦』は、実物のカードを操作してプレイする対戦型カードアクションゲームです。アーケードゲームの歴史を創ってきた歴代シリーズ『三国志大戦』、『戦国大戦』に登場した武将はもちろん、...
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Sega's licenced otaku gachas, Fate/Grand Order and Kancolle Arcade, have additionally retained support, and receive frequent updates to this day. The former is the newest, and managed to make a particularly strong start in 2018, but the latter is older and notably uses the Nu hardware, which is becoming outdated. Eiketsu Taisen now uses the newer ALLS, and Chunithm was similarly upgraded to run on it last year, leaving Kancolle and the waning Wonderland Wars as the last titles standing on it.
But moving forward, I would not expect large-scale arcade IP like Soul Reverse any time soon. The losses incurred by titles like that even before COVID appear to have dissuaded Sega from making them, and if any more new releases do appear in the short-term, they are probable instead to be an upgrade of an existing title e.g. Kancolle or make use of another popular licence.
