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Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

340 points by danso 5y ago

userbinator 5y ago
and the conversion kit (which “allows an operator of a Key Master game to convert the game” to a skill-based one) I wonder what the "conversion kit" contains, since any one with a software background probably knows that it may take nothing more than patching out a single "don't let player win yet" conditional jump in the software/firmware. Indeed, the code skill-based game would be simpler from that perspective, since it does not have to behave randomly or track the payouts. Of course, setting the number of attempts to 1 (assuming there's no lower limit) could have the same effect.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  I'm gonna guess the "kit" is a jumper, and a piece of paper telling you where to plug it, and the code has the payout-tracking mechanism gated with a conditional checking voltage on a pin that's bridged by that jumper.
Someone1234 5y ago
Here's a video where someone buys one ($3500 used) and goes through the setup experience: https://youtu.be/FSLu--j2ooo?t=730 https://youtu.be/FSLu--j2ooo?t=730 Setup experience begins at 12:10. If you want to skip to win-threshold setup then 12:50. You can configure it per zone (up to 5,000 per win). While interesting, I'd imagine this lawsuit also requires showing less clear-cut issues like if consumers were misled, and if they were misled if that is legally permissible. The technicals on this one are maybe less interest than the legal/consumer rights/labelling side. Purely in terms of how the machine works it is a "gambling" machine with skill required to even give you the opportunity to gamble against the win-threshold/rng.
Cerealkiller050 5y ago
I remember seeing and playing this on a cruise ship. It was a dollar per try, and I shoved in 5 bucks. By the 4th try it was NOTICEABLE that if you press the button at the "right time", there was a lag before it overshot it and you failed. I pretty much could guess that something like the article discusses was at work, and was simply more a game of luck. Obviously I stopped after that, as a pure luck game is not as fun. If I had known that the default was 700 losses before payout as a default, I would have had a nice drink or 3 and counted the many people that tried it throughout the day As a side note, saw one winner at the machine get a wrapped stack of 500, 1 dollar bills
- Bluecobra 5y ago
  I played this in a cruise casino as well, knowing full well that the odds were stacked against me in international waters. I didn’t win. Near the end of the 10 day voyage the machine was mostly empty, I wonder if anyone actually won or they just removed the cash to make it look like it’s a winner.
  - sen 5y ago
    My wife won a Nintendo DS on one (when they were new) on a cruise ship, we were absolutely convinced nobody ever won anything on them, but it's still fun to give it a shot... no different to casinos or any other gambling. That's the only time I've ever heard of anyone winning /anything/ on those games though. In Japan the machines pay out a lot more often due to the strict laws against gambling, but the prizes are a lot smaller. You'll put ~$2 in and get a soft toy that probably cost 50c to make, but it still makes it feel a lot more fun than trying/failing to win bigger prizes.
  - technothrasher 5y ago
    Like any gambling, you always want people to see others winning. It makes people more likely to play. You just want to make sure that the payout is always some percentage of the take and no more.
- megameter 5y ago
  Like with gambling devices, redemption games all seem to have operator-adjustable payout. I recall playing "Stacker" for a little while in the 2000's. It used an LED dot display for gameplay, which was a simple timing game where you "built" a tower by stacking up the blocks, with it getting faster at each level. What it did was exactly as you describe: it had a minor reward level that you could always win, and then a few levels above that where the game would cheat and instantly warp the block ahead to make you lose. I did get a win out of it once(and got an iPod mini), so I think I did come out ahead, but that was it. Overall, it's better to be good at pinball(replay scores) or DDR(adoration of strangers).
  - 5y ago
Something1234 5y ago
State gaming boards really need to investigate arcades in general. They are much worse than the casino with the same kinds of games, but a much worse payout. I once calculated it out when I was on a bus trip I would get back 70% of what I put in (n=$100). At the arcade you're lucky to get 5 cents back, and most of the time the games are not even fun. We need to put together a team of experts to audit all of these machines.
- koz1000 5y ago
  I worked on a redemption device a long time ago, one of those "stop the lights" game for a large manufacturer. There were a few jurisdictions, Iowa and New Jersey come to mind, that were already aware of the nature of these machines and required the manufacturers to have their software audited and validated by (state approved) third-party gaming labs identical to what the slot machine companies do when getting code approved for release. The key point was that the probability of a win couldn't be adjusted on the fly to make the target payout percentage (kind of what the article says). The probabilities had to be fixed for every player on every game. Although the first method is a lot easier to write, software-wise. =) For the rest of the jurisdictions, the default payout was 40% and anything was fair game to hit that number. Remember that the next time you're in a Chuck E Cheese.
  - nomel 5y ago
    > The probabilities had to be fixed for every player on every game. For every play of the game, or across all of those game machines sold?
    - koz1000 5y ago
      The operator-set percentage and payout was always local to the machine. There's no way to network these things, and even when do you see networked progressive slot machines (e.g. IGT's Megabucks), the RNG and payout is always local to that machine.
  - Something1234 5y ago
    On the same note could you name any of the third party labs? I'm interested in the topic.
sethammons 5y ago
Reminds me of this one: https://youtu.be/vXBfwgwT1nQ https://youtu.be/vXBfwgwT1nQ Guy builds a robot to time pressing the button to get the light to land on the winning sections and demonstrates it is not skill but a random number generator.
- barakados 5y ago
  I like how you say it’s a guy and not MARK ROBER
  - varikin 5y ago
    Does that matter? Is everyone suppose to be aware of this guy?
    - dylan604 5y ago
      What? You aren't familiar with one random guy on the internet that maybe makes some videos in a very niche market that you may have never even heard of before? What? Do you have some sort of life of something preventing from crawling every single crevice on the interwebs?
      - viraptor 5y ago
        Not quite as niche as you describe. He figured out how to fairly consistently hit youtube recommendations / top videos. If you use youtube, there's quite a good chance you've seen one of his videos on the frontpage or seen his name a few times, even if you never watched them or aren't interested in his content.
        dylan604 5y ago
        This may be something you haven't considered, but there are ways of using YT with never seeing the front page. Some people don't just "browse" YT, or watch video after video after video following some algorithmically chosen playlist. It is possible to watch a single specific video and then leave the site. Just like you can also read a single tweet without infinitely scrolling through the bedlam.
tracedddd 5y ago
The stacker game with the moving blocks always frustrated me, I spent way too much money trying to win that one and got quite good at everything but the last round. I wonder if that one is rigged too.
- lupire 5y ago
  It certainly is.
- musicale 5y ago
  Yeah, the last round of Stacker is rigged/random.
- LaserDiscMan 5y ago
  Stacker is definitely rigged: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofEb9fM8m0Q&t=214s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofEb9fM8m0Q&t=214s
- salamandars 5y ago
  It's definitely rigged, and even allows the owner to choose how difficult it is just like the one in the article. Where I grew up there was two places next door to each other which both happened to have stackers. One had junky prizes like cheap earbuds, and the other had great prizes like a gameboy or mp3 player. Sure enough the later was more popular, but no one ever won. Once you got good at the game the one with the junk would 'allow' you to win pretty reliably every dozen or so attempts.
lupire 5y ago
Good. These covert casino machines are a blight , and all of them should be banned and the proprietors prosecuted.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  I wouldn't mind if all gambling was illegial in the USA, including the lottery.
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    The problem with these machines isn't just that they're gambling. It's that they try hard to make you think they're not.
  - Igelau 5y ago
    The last time I was in Atlantic City it was quite depressing. I saw some desperate drunk get thrown out after he put his fist through one of the game machine screens. It's the regulated kind that always seems like a sleazy stealth tax on the poor. I'm okay with people playing poker privately for stakes, it's the casinos that I can't stand.
  - pitaj 5y ago
    Let's bring back prohibition while we're at it.
  - boring_twenties 5y ago
    Sounds great, then we can all gamble in underground rooms, with not only dramatically worse odds but for extra excitement, a risk of armed robbery!
    - quickthrower2 5y ago
      This is where crypto helps: you can be robbed in a safe and comfortable way.
sunshineforever 5y ago
You know the horribly irony is that wagering machines that are 100% skill based are illegal. The only exception, I've seen "The Fishing Game" in a texas bar. It's a 2D game where you shoot fish in a pool table like screen. Bullets cost money, fish death pays out.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  Are they illegal or just uncommon because they could be abusable? As if they were illegal wouldn't things like rewards for a hole in one, or "guess" how many the beans in a jar would be illegal? Plus aren't most carnival games technically 100% skill?
  - cwillu 5y ago
    "Abusable" is an interesting word choice.
    - boomboomsubban 5y ago
      From the view of the business. A pure skill gambling game could cost them all their money.
      - cwillu 5y ago
        It's still an interesting word choice: the one offering an exchange considers being taken up on it by an informed counter-party to be "abusive".
- bashmelek 5y ago
  I don't think the "Fish game" is skill based exactly--from what I understand the end payout depends largely on what fish the inner workings of the game decides to throw your way
musicale 5y ago
IIRC the argument that they use for "rigged" machines like this (including most claw machines, Stacker, Key Master, etc.) is that it's not technically random. But for all practical purposes it is random for the average player who walks up to the machine (or worse if non-sucker players are exploiting the machine's algorithm) so such machines really should: 1) be advertised and regulated as games of chance (e.g. being required to disclose the odds of winning, etc.) 2) be subject to FTC rules about deceptive advertising
- dml2135 5y ago
  I think they are currently subject to FTC rules against deceptive advertising -- isn't that the basis of this lawsuit? However, FTC rules are only enforced civilly by damaged parties, IIRC. I don't think the agency engages in any proactive enforcement of false advertising laws. But someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
eihli 5y ago
Had an idea when I saw one of these on a cruise ship. Every time we spent time within eyesight of the machine, I timed it and counted how many plays went in. After a couple of days, I had something resembling an average number of plays per hour. The machine was one where the prizes were visible, so you could tell how many had been won. Now I had a bound on the number of plays per prize. Estimate number of plays based on amount of time passed. Check if prize has been claimed. If not, it's due. You don't have to be too accurate with your numbers. Just get within ~50% to beat the vig.
danans 5y ago
As an aside, I had no idea Sega were still making "old fashioned" mechanical games, which is how they started with slot machines and jukeboxes in the 1940s. I thought they had long since become a mobile game and IP licensing company (i.e. Sonic the Hedgehog)
- kube-system 5y ago
  I was curious about what else they make, looks like their parent conglomerate still does make gaming machines. I think I've probably played some of these in the US... https://www.segasammycreation.com/en/cabinets?office=usa https://www.segasammycreation.com/en/cabinets?office=usa
- gryson 5y ago
  Are you familiar with the Yakuza series, Persona series, or Puyo Puyo series of video games (among many others)? Sega is one of the top publishers of video games in the world. In 2020, they were ranked #1 publisher by metacritic based on average game score: https://www.metacritic.com/feature/2021-game-publisher-rankings-summary-table https://www.metacritic.com/feature/2021-game-publisher-ranki... They were also #1 in 2016, and are usually in the top 5. It's a running meme on social media that despite Sega's success as a publisher, many people only know them for Sonic the Hedgehog :)
  - danans 5y ago
    I'm not familiar with those games. My personal Sega saga began in the 80s with the Master System, and ended with the Genesis and Game Gear (which I still own!), and which I credit with sparking my original interest in computing technology. I did of course play plenty of Sega arcade games, but I didn't know until much later that they started out supplying coin-op slot machines and amusements to military bases in the 1940s and 1950s. It seems like the company went through 3 or 4 lifespans before they entered my awareness in the 80s.
- MiddleEndian 5y ago
  Sega makes all sorts of arcade games, not just PC and console compatible ones but those ones at arcades (or barcades, bowling alleys, etc.) where you sit on a plastic motorbike or fake skis or rumbling carseats with steering wheels, those are usually Sega.
cratermoon 5y ago
Wake me when people sue FB/IG/Twitter/etc for gaming the user with their deliberate use of variable rewards schemes to hold your attention
foobarian 5y ago
The claw machines are also rigged. I saw manuals for one where it offers a way to configure pressures in the pneumatic mechanism that closes the claw, and there was a brilliant paragraph of advice not to set the win probability too low in order to keep the customers happy :)
- FridayoLeary 5y ago
  >The claw machines are also rigged. We know.
smoldesu 5y ago
I've played it before at a movie theater, I remember there was a noticeable latency between the time when you pressed the button and the machine responded (felt like 250-400ms). I watched some other people play it while I waited for the film to start, and it almost appeared to be buffering inputs at an extremely low polling rate, such that it might be impossible to even line it up in the first place. Very strange game, I guess I'm not really surprised.
nathanaldensr 5y ago
How much money is going to be spent on this court case when a five-minute analysis of its software would tell the obvious truth...
- userbinator 5y ago
  In this case even the manual for the machine would be enough to show that it's not purely skill-based. Also, not enough people know reverse-engineering, much less how software works in general.
annoyingnoob 5y ago
There is a local place that has an arcade with machines that give tickets. My kids loves it. I figured out which games work best just by watching other people, over many visits. I became friendly with one of the staff and he told me the top 3 payout games. Now the kids win all the time. We definitely avoid machines like the key blaster.
comex 5y ago
Full complaint (PDF) for anyone curious: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/20994663/sega-lawsuit.pdf https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/20994663/sega-lawsuit...
rasz 5y ago
Talking about rigged arcades, the worst rubber banding offender out there, NBA Jam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kyk2s4HTPpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kyk2s4HTPpk
bnycum 5y ago
I went to an arcade this month for the first time in years and it shocked me just how many games of “luck” they had. It was easily the majority of games there. Felt like I was in a kids casino with no regulations. Also felt like a sucker because you had to pre-pay for a card with credits, and there wasn’t any games that took more than a minute to play so I ended up playing them.
- 542354234235 5y ago
  >Felt like I was in a kids casino with no regulations. Exactly. At least casinos are regulated so that, even if the odds are bad, they still have to be “random chance”. If I put my money in a slot machine, there is some percent, no matter how low, that I could win on any play. With this machine, and likely many others, its literally a 0% chance for some ridiculous number of plays. That is the difference between a game of luck and a scam. And that’s not even getting into that the game is pretending to be a game of skill, while actually being a scam of a game of chance.
- BrissyCoder 5y ago
  I had pretty much the exact same experience recently. What also annoyed me when our child was much younger was how many of the toys people bought him were cheap plastic with flashing lights and sounds and how much these reminded me of slot machines.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    > cheap plastic with flashing lights and sounds To be fair, kids don’t care about cheap plastic, and they love flashing lights and sounds. Expensive plastic toys have the same flashing lights and sounds. Though I’ll admit that even more expensive wooden toys don’t, they generally still try to incorporate play with light and sound into the toy somehow.
    - BrissyCoder 5y ago
      > To be fair, kids don’t care about cheap plastic, and they love flashing lights and sounds. People love all kinds shit that is objectively bad for them... sugar, heroin, gambling, cryptocurrency. > Expensive plastic toys have the same flashing lights and sounds. The cheap adjective was unnecessary.
rectang 5y ago
At this point, I just assume any commercially successful software game is optimized to extract every last cent out of the target audience through subtle psychological brutalization. Surely there are exceptions, but it's like buying from Amazon: it takes too much work to sort through the ripoffs. The fun is spoiled because it requires constant vigilance and active resistance to avoid spending too much money. "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." — War Games (1983)
- wly_cdgr 5y ago
  The obvious solution is to play only critically acclaimed commercial failures :) There are plenty
  - rectang 5y ago
    How many of the critics are on the take, though? Ratings anywhere can't be trusted. The higher the profile of a critic, the more incentive there is to corrupt them, and the more likely it is that their published opinions are just shilling for the commercial entities that own them.
    - wly_cdgr 5y ago
      I doubt very many are directly on the take, but I think there's a lot of semi-conscious self-censorship and score / review disconnect that goes on at the well known sites, for all the talk of a hard wall between editorial and advertising. And there's a lot of "content" that is just very thinly veiled PR for an upcoming release. I also think there's a good deal of corruption and nepotism around stuff like the IGF and IndieCade, from my experience swimming in those circles (I did an MFA game design at NYU) I was mostly just joking around, but I do think there are reliable ways of finding good games: -look at player scores/reviews on Metacritic -look for games with many reviews on Steam that have Very Positive or Overwhelmingly Positive ratings but that you've never heard of -Tim Rogers (look, I kinda hate the guy too, but he's the real deal) -More seriously (and this is the best option), blogs / Discord communities / Twitter walls of good indie devs like Michael Brough, Zach Gage, Terry Cavanagh, Stephen Lavelle, etc. Like, check out freeindiegam.es, or join Brough's Discord. I am old so I don't know the new waves but you could scroll through a few hundred listings on Itch, look up some Twitter accounts from there, and find them. Most of the very best stuff is of course not on consoles at all but on PC, web, and mobile
spike021 5y ago
At least in Japan for their UFO Catcher and similar games, it's still pretty fun because you tend to be able to get childhood memory goods (pokemon/digimon/etc. stuffed animals). Plus while there can be a rigged factor to the machines, you can still pick up some mechanics that help you shortcut to getting the item to drop. Of course it costs money and you don't always "win" but if you can pick up the pattern, it does become a bit of a fun challenge.
- jacobkg 5y ago
  What’s ironic is that when I visited Tokyo a couple years ago I didn’t play any of these games because I assumed they were rigged like in the US. Now that I know the payouts are more favorable maybe I will give them a try next time
  - spike021 5y ago
    They are definitely still rigged. It's just that IMO the prizes and challenge still make it decently entertaining for me. But don't get me wrong, many 100y coins are lost in the pursuit of trying to win.
- psychomugs 5y ago
  You can also pull the gaijin card and complain to the staff that the setup is too difficult, and they'll rearrange it to make it easier.
garethsaxby 5y ago
I remember a long time ago in the UK, around 2003 or so, there was a similar problem with Fruit Machines (Slot machines found in UK bars and pubs). Through dumping the ROMs and emulating the machines, it was found that the machines were effectively forcing losses at certain points in gameplay; from the same memory state, you bet high and the machine goes low, or you bet low and the machine goes high, giving you zero chance of winning. There was a campaign called Fairplay that I believe resulted in a fairly small print label being placed on the machines stating that they would at times give no chance of winning; not a great win, but at least it was being said somewhere - http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/fairplay/fruit/breakthrough.htm http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/fairplay/fruit/bre... The FairPlay site by Stuart Campbell is actually still up, although I remember first reading about it back in PC Zone personally. There's details on there about replicating the findings, but unfortunately the links are broken; http://www.worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/fairplay/fruit/index.htm http://www.worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/fairplay/fruit...
- Uberphallus 5y ago
  Interesting. In Spain first the state takes a cut from the moment a coin goes in, and from the remainder they're bound to return 65% of the money collected, minumum. The machines have a government-certified black box to perform this accounting. Now, the law doesn't say anything about prize structure, and it's common knowledge that big prizes tend to appear within 10 plays when it's "cooled down", because machines increasingly shut big prizes down when they notice they have a compulsive player on them.
  - jsbdk 5y ago
    I also remember they have a sticker with the chances of winning.
  - jeltz 5y ago
    In online gambling the games are never (or virtually never) rigged. Online slots also almost always pay out 96% or more. You make less money in the long runig you do not let your players win, but I assume small places like bars do not like that volatility.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
But it IS a game of skill....it's just, the skill is being able to identify that it's rigged, rather than dexterity skill
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  That's the meta-game.
  - wly_cdgr 5y ago
    No, yeah, you're right. Clumsy joke
    - quickthrower2 5y ago
      I liked the joke for what it’s worth
Aeolun 5y ago
I don’t understand how anyone can see a game like this and not immediately know it’s not about skill. If it was about skill the prices would be sub-$1 knick-knacks.
- Igelau 5y ago
  Children. Just last week my son told me they tried Key Master at a bowling alley. I told him those games all have switches to control the win rate. He didn't believe/understand me, so it was nice to have screenshots of the manual literally saying "these are the switches that control the win rate".
jtokoph 5y ago
This is the best part: > In 2015, Sega and another angry player reached a class action settlement, but the settlement was rejected by the judge due to administrative reasons, like a high attorney’s fee and failing to identify and paying affected class members. You can take advantage of people as long as it's impractical to identify them.
rubyn00bie 5y ago
Oh, I thought this was known. I'm not even joking... A few years ago, I was at a local comic shop, and I watched someone (a kid) play the machine and appear to get a "perfect" shot, key went exactly into the fucking hole... but then it just pulled back. No prize! I was stunned when the kid asked an employee essentially "WTF?" and the employee replied "there's a chance the key may not turn even though it's lined up." So... it's a game of luck and not a game of skill. All I could think was "doesn't that make it straight up gambling then?" Who would be liable for changing the mode of operation? Regardless, it's fucking sketchy and all around pretty awful to take advantage of people like this... $5 million is a bullshit fine for literally stealing from kids. I still feel bad for that kid, it was like a Nintendo Switch or something fucking cool he, IMHO, had stolen from him...
- abaracadab 5y ago
  So it sounds like skill + luck: key in the hole gives random chance of winning. Honestly, these kind of lawsuits are ridiculous. People need to sue General Mills for false advertising instead because sugary cereals causing diabetes; or any other big-food company brainwashing children on YouTube kids.
  - nkrisc 5y ago
    That’s just luck.
    - cortesoft 5y ago
      No, because if you really suck, you can’t win at all. It is like poker, which is a combination of skill and luck.
      - Karunamon 5y ago
        Okay, I can accept that. But poker is still considered gambling, and we wouldn't allow arcade owners to target poker games at children. Why should this be allowed?
IncRnd 5y ago
Normally, you need three items for the device to be a gambling device, chance, consideration, and reward. There must be payment for consideration to win, and you need a chance to win. Since the device has controls for the rention percentage, that leans towards these are not gambling devices, since jurisdictions can differ. However, it is not exactly a skill device, either. There is an option to convert it to skill based, but I doubt an operator anywhere used that option. That is also why the manufacturer put the effort for that on the operator to install, so that it likely wouldn't get installed.
Waterluvian 5y ago
I’m fascinated about the idea that some team had to decide on this. Then another team had to design it. Then another team had to program it. What are the practical mechanics of how you do something shady or illegal in an otherwise legit company? I wonder if discovery will reveal any interesting communications or designs on the matter. Would love to see source code.
umvi 5y ago
Is it even possible for a "game of skill" arcade machine that dispenses high value prizes to be profitable? Seems like any such game would just breed expert players that clean house and win all the iPads with their skill. If not, surely it would invite some hacker or tinkerer to invent a device to augment their skill and (again) clean house and get a bunch of cheap iPads. Maybe you could have arcade machines where you: - play AlphaGo/Stockfish - factor a huge prime - Some other "hard" feat and if you succeed you get an iPad. Those are the only "games of skill" that wouldn't get you bankrupted by expert players
- Larrikin 5y ago
  The luck mechanic could be made obvious. For example the game where the lights go around a circle and you try to land in front of you for the most tickets could instead have you land the light somewhere and then dice are rolled to determine your actual landing spot. I'm sure a real game designer could think of something more fun where your skill at the game increases your chances but ultimately luck at the RNG determines your prize.
- a_t48 5y ago
  The arcade machines in actual Japanese arcades are pretty fair, at face value at least. Though the prizes are typically not worth as much.
- seanhunter 5y ago
  Unless you're Jonathan Schrantz, who famously beat stockfish on the hardest difficulty as black by playing the Stafford gambit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27829913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27829913 That being said it doesn't work with Stockfish 12. But yeah dressing what is essentially a pure con (I don't think these even count as games of luck given the payout is not fair from game to game) as a game o skill is terrible.
  - jerrre 5y ago
    Your link goes to this current page, I assumed you were linking to an article about that anecdote.
jtsuken 5y ago
Gambling should be a compulsory subject in primary school. By the time they reach high school: - Every kid should know how to play blackjack and poker. - Every kid must know how to compute the odds of winning. - Every kid should know how to verify the odds presented to them. - Every kid should know at least three ways of cheating and being cheated This might make the earth population a bit more resistant to panic and overreaction in times of uncertainty. Hopefully, fewer people will drink chlorine, stockpile toilet paper, participate in ponzi schemes, go to a real war against a fictitious enemy.
- diogenesjunior 5y ago
  Moderation. Moderation is key.
- R0b0t1 5y ago
  Then you'll just have people invent more smoke to hide the fact it's gambling. Trading card games are a good example. The game is, to a limit, one of skill, but you are gated by the cards you open in your scratch off ticke- I mean pack.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
    Plenty of people have fun playing trading card games by just making the best of the cards they get and, of course, trading. Most people I know who play or played them (including myself) were like that. Of course, you can get obsessed with getting the best cards and end up wasting unhealthy amounts of money, but it's not the most common behavior. While I see the point that those games can be seen as having a gambling component, I don't think it's fair to group them together with pure gambling where there is no or almost no motivation to the game other than the possibility of winning a prize, like slot machines, roulette, or the game in this article.
- rootsudo 5y ago
  They do, it's called probability and statistics. Doesn't mean kids care. Or teachers, or parents.
cable2600 5y ago
Sega claims to retrofit Keymaster to PrizeLocker that is more of a game of skill than luck.
pelorat 5y ago
Claw machines are rigged as well. Not with a count of 700 but still there's a counter. Performing the equivalent of "card counting" on these types of machines are a hobby for some.
dclowd9901 5y ago
It’s funny, I was just thinking today about House of the Dead and if it was actually possible to beat the game on one credit. It seems like there’s a lot of sections that a player could not possibly aim and shoot fast enough to get through. I realize there’s no actual prize in those games like the key master games, but I still think it should be possible to beat an arcade game on one credit if you’re skilled enough.
RedComet 5y ago
Shameful, but common knowledge.
ddtaylor 5y ago
While I think Sega has effectively sold a gambling machine I'm not sure if they should be liable in these lawsuits. They sold a tool that could have been configured correctly to comply with local regulations. The owners manual explains to the operator that they can configure this probability, which they could simply set to 1 to bypass the entire gambling mechanic.
- lostgame 5y ago
  Would it be possible for SEGA to ensure the game does comply with local regulations before selling it? I can imagine it would be the same, e.g. with slot machines? Ideally; these machines should not be able to work in ways that can be over its local limits. Wishful thinking, but...in a perfect world.
monkeyboot 5y ago
Here in Asia/Taiwan, the claw machines by-law must display the money required to be spent to Win the prize. These are a good example because they are also skill+gambling. All claw machines Trigger a win if X dollars a spent in a certain duration. I suspect these key machines are based on a similar logic. AFAIK Poker Machines in Australia at licensed venues aren't required to display winning odds :/
chrischen 5y ago
I built a raspberry pi powered machine to press the button and time the game and then slow motioned it in action: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=79hE-vf2tzs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=79hE-vf2tzs Basically it would delay the release to just miss if you happen to time it perfectly. I complained to the Metreon theater in SF and they had the machine removed the next day. I also read of lawsuits years ago so I’m surprised I still see this machine worldwide.
suction 5y ago
When I lived in Japan, I was really surprised what the average Japanese person thought about Arcades. There are Sega-, Taito-, Konami- and other branded Arcades in the bigger cities, but "normal" people wouldn't go near them, because they are run by the Yakuza or Yakuza-owned front businesses. With the ongoing rumours that Konami itself is a Yakuza company (see the news around the Hideo Kojima firing scandal) and Nintendo having started as a supplier for Yakuza gambling parlours, I wonder if video game arcades in Japan are simply the modern version of those gambling parlours. So if there are rigged arcade machines, I am not surprised.
- lostgame 5y ago
  There are similar rumours - and have been for years, before the creation of the actual 'Yakuza' game; about SEGA as well. The launch of the game did nothing to help those rumours, but certainly made it a bit more difficult to find information about online. :P
  - krapp 5y ago
    Guru Larry's channel covered one such rumor that "A certain Japanese game publisher" hired the yakuza to kidnap a developer's sister[0]. Covered in "The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Vol. 2." [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K2muFAuJsg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K2muFAuJsg
lobocinza 5y ago
Also: Counter-Strike loot boxes.
whemy 5y ago
It reminds me of this documents[1] I saw a few years ago about how a Black Tie crane (claw) machine works, how the machine will automatically calculate when to win. [1]: http://jeu-des-6-palets.fr/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/black-tie-toys-crane-redemption-game-operators-manual-coastal-amusements.pdf http://jeu-des-6-palets.fr/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/black-...

340 points by danso 5y ago

and the conversion kit (which “allows an operator of a Key Master game to convert the game” to a skill-based one) I wonder what the "conversion kit" contains, since any one with a software background probably knows that it may take nothing more than patching out a single "don't let player win yet" conditional jump in the software/firmware. Indeed, the code skill-based game would be simpler from that perspective, since it does not have to behave randomly or track the payouts. Of course, setting the number of attempts to 1 (assuming there's no lower limit) could have the same effect.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
I'm gonna guess the "kit" is a jumper, and a piece of paper telling you where to plug it, and the code has the payout-tracking mechanism gated with a conditional checking voltage on a pin that's bridged by that jumper.

Someone1234 5y ago

Here's a video where someone buys one ($3500 used) and goes through the setup experience: https://youtu.be/FSLu--j2ooo?t=730 https://youtu.be/FSLu--j2ooo?t=730 Setup experience begins at 12:10. If you want to skip to win-threshold setup then 12:50. You can configure it per zone (up to 5,000 per win). While interesting, I'd imagine this lawsuit also requires showing less clear-cut issues like if consumers were misled, and if they were misled if that is legally permissible. The technicals on this one are maybe less interest than the legal/consumer rights/labelling side. Purely in terms of how the machine works it is a "gambling" machine with skill required to even give you the opportunity to gamble against the win-threshold/rng.

Cerealkiller050 5y ago

I remember seeing and playing this on a cruise ship. It was a dollar per try, and I shoved in 5 bucks. By the 4th try it was NOTICEABLE that if you press the button at the "right time", there was a lag before it overshot it and you failed. I pretty much could guess that something like the article discusses was at work, and was simply more a game of luck. Obviously I stopped after that, as a pure luck game is not as fun. If I had known that the default was 700 losses before payout as a default, I would have had a nice drink or 3 and counted the many people that tried it throughout the day As a side note, saw one winner at the machine get a wrapped stack of 500, 1 dollar bills

Bluecobra 5y ago
I played this in a cruise casino as well, knowing full well that the odds were stacked against me in international waters. I didn’t win. Near the end of the 10 day voyage the machine was mostly empty, I wonder if anyone actually won or they just removed the cash to make it look like it’s a winner.
- sen 5y ago
  My wife won a Nintendo DS on one (when they were new) on a cruise ship, we were absolutely convinced nobody ever won anything on them, but it's still fun to give it a shot... no different to casinos or any other gambling. That's the only time I've ever heard of anyone winning /anything/ on those games though. In Japan the machines pay out a lot more often due to the strict laws against gambling, but the prizes are a lot smaller. You'll put ~$2 in and get a soft toy that probably cost 50c to make, but it still makes it feel a lot more fun than trying/failing to win bigger prizes.
- technothrasher 5y ago
  Like any gambling, you always want people to see others winning. It makes people more likely to play. You just want to make sure that the payout is always some percentage of the take and no more.
megameter 5y ago
Like with gambling devices, redemption games all seem to have operator-adjustable payout. I recall playing "Stacker" for a little while in the 2000's. It used an LED dot display for gameplay, which was a simple timing game where you "built" a tower by stacking up the blocks, with it getting faster at each level. What it did was exactly as you describe: it had a minor reward level that you could always win, and then a few levels above that where the game would cheat and instantly warp the block ahead to make you lose. I did get a win out of it once(and got an iPod mini), so I think I did come out ahead, but that was it. Overall, it's better to be good at pinball(replay scores) or DDR(adoration of strangers).
- 5y ago

Something1234 5y ago

State gaming boards really need to investigate arcades in general. They are much worse than the casino with the same kinds of games, but a much worse payout. I once calculated it out when I was on a bus trip I would get back 70% of what I put in (n=$100). At the arcade you're lucky to get 5 cents back, and most of the time the games are not even fun. We need to put together a team of experts to audit all of these machines.

koz1000 5y ago
I worked on a redemption device a long time ago, one of those "stop the lights" game for a large manufacturer. There were a few jurisdictions, Iowa and New Jersey come to mind, that were already aware of the nature of these machines and required the manufacturers to have their software audited and validated by (state approved) third-party gaming labs identical to what the slot machine companies do when getting code approved for release. The key point was that the probability of a win couldn't be adjusted on the fly to make the target payout percentage (kind of what the article says). The probabilities had to be fixed for every player on every game. Although the first method is a lot easier to write, software-wise. =) For the rest of the jurisdictions, the default payout was 40% and anything was fair game to hit that number. Remember that the next time you're in a Chuck E Cheese.
- nomel 5y ago
  > The probabilities had to be fixed for every player on every game. For every play of the game, or across all of those game machines sold?
  - koz1000 5y ago
    The operator-set percentage and payout was always local to the machine. There's no way to network these things, and even when do you see networked progressive slot machines (e.g. IGT's Megabucks), the RNG and payout is always local to that machine.
- Something1234 5y ago
  On the same note could you name any of the third party labs? I'm interested in the topic.

sethammons 5y ago

Reminds me of this one: https://youtu.be/vXBfwgwT1nQ https://youtu.be/vXBfwgwT1nQ Guy builds a robot to time pressing the button to get the light to land on the winning sections and demonstrates it is not skill but a random number generator.

barakados 5y ago
I like how you say it’s a guy and not MARK ROBER
- varikin 5y ago
  Does that matter? Is everyone suppose to be aware of this guy?
  - dylan604 5y ago
    What? You aren't familiar with one random guy on the internet that maybe makes some videos in a very niche market that you may have never even heard of before? What? Do you have some sort of life of something preventing from crawling every single crevice on the interwebs?
    - viraptor 5y ago
      Not quite as niche as you describe. He figured out how to fairly consistently hit youtube recommendations / top videos. If you use youtube, there's quite a good chance you've seen one of his videos on the frontpage or seen his name a few times, even if you never watched them or aren't interested in his content.
      - dylan604 5y ago
        This may be something you haven't considered, but there are ways of using YT with never seeing the front page. Some people don't just "browse" YT, or watch video after video after video following some algorithmically chosen playlist. It is possible to watch a single specific video and then leave the site. Just like you can also read a single tweet without infinitely scrolling through the bedlam.

tracedddd 5y ago

The stacker game with the moving blocks always frustrated me, I spent way too much money trying to win that one and got quite good at everything but the last round. I wonder if that one is rigged too.

lupire 5y ago
It certainly is.
musicale 5y ago
Yeah, the last round of Stacker is rigged/random.
LaserDiscMan 5y ago
Stacker is definitely rigged: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofEb9fM8m0Q&t=214s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofEb9fM8m0Q&t=214s
salamandars 5y ago
It's definitely rigged, and even allows the owner to choose how difficult it is just like the one in the article. Where I grew up there was two places next door to each other which both happened to have stackers. One had junky prizes like cheap earbuds, and the other had great prizes like a gameboy or mp3 player. Sure enough the later was more popular, but no one ever won. Once you got good at the game the one with the junk would 'allow' you to win pretty reliably every dozen or so attempts.

lupire 5y ago

Good. These covert casino machines are a blight , and all of them should be banned and the proprietors prosecuted.

hellbannedguy 5y ago
I wouldn't mind if all gambling was illegial in the USA, including the lottery.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  The problem with these machines isn't just that they're gambling. It's that they try hard to make you think they're not.
- Igelau 5y ago
  The last time I was in Atlantic City it was quite depressing. I saw some desperate drunk get thrown out after he put his fist through one of the game machine screens. It's the regulated kind that always seems like a sleazy stealth tax on the poor. I'm okay with people playing poker privately for stakes, it's the casinos that I can't stand.
- pitaj 5y ago
  Let's bring back prohibition while we're at it.
- boring_twenties 5y ago
  Sounds great, then we can all gamble in underground rooms, with not only dramatically worse odds but for extra excitement, a risk of armed robbery!
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    This is where crypto helps: you can be robbed in a safe and comfortable way.

sunshineforever 5y ago

You know the horribly irony is that wagering machines that are 100% skill based are illegal. The only exception, I've seen "The Fishing Game" in a texas bar. It's a 2D game where you shoot fish in a pool table like screen. Bullets cost money, fish death pays out.

boomboomsubban 5y ago
Are they illegal or just uncommon because they could be abusable? As if they were illegal wouldn't things like rewards for a hole in one, or "guess" how many the beans in a jar would be illegal? Plus aren't most carnival games technically 100% skill?
- cwillu 5y ago
  "Abusable" is an interesting word choice.
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    From the view of the business. A pure skill gambling game could cost them all their money.
    - cwillu 5y ago
      It's still an interesting word choice: the one offering an exchange considers being taken up on it by an informed counter-party to be "abusive".
bashmelek 5y ago
I don't think the "Fish game" is skill based exactly--from what I understand the end payout depends largely on what fish the inner workings of the game decides to throw your way

musicale 5y ago

IIRC the argument that they use for "rigged" machines like this (including most claw machines, Stacker, Key Master, etc.) is that it's not technically random. But for all practical purposes it is random for the average player who walks up to the machine (or worse if non-sucker players are exploiting the machine's algorithm) so such machines really should: 1) be advertised and regulated as games of chance (e.g. being required to disclose the odds of winning, etc.) 2) be subject to FTC rules about deceptive advertising

dml2135 5y ago
I think they are currently subject to FTC rules against deceptive advertising -- isn't that the basis of this lawsuit? However, FTC rules are only enforced civilly by damaged parties, IIRC. I don't think the agency engages in any proactive enforcement of false advertising laws. But someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

eihli 5y ago

Had an idea when I saw one of these on a cruise ship. Every time we spent time within eyesight of the machine, I timed it and counted how many plays went in. After a couple of days, I had something resembling an average number of plays per hour. The machine was one where the prizes were visible, so you could tell how many had been won. Now I had a bound on the number of plays per prize. Estimate number of plays based on amount of time passed. Check if prize has been claimed. If not, it's due. You don't have to be too accurate with your numbers. Just get within ~50% to beat the vig.

danans 5y ago

As an aside, I had no idea Sega were still making "old fashioned" mechanical games, which is how they started with slot machines and jukeboxes in the 1940s. I thought they had long since become a mobile game and IP licensing company (i.e. Sonic the Hedgehog)

kube-system 5y ago
I was curious about what else they make, looks like their parent conglomerate still does make gaming machines. I think I've probably played some of these in the US... https://www.segasammycreation.com/en/cabinets?office=usa https://www.segasammycreation.com/en/cabinets?office=usa
gryson 5y ago
Are you familiar with the Yakuza series, Persona series, or Puyo Puyo series of video games (among many others)? Sega is one of the top publishers of video games in the world. In 2020, they were ranked #1 publisher by metacritic based on average game score: https://www.metacritic.com/feature/2021-game-publisher-rankings-summary-table https://www.metacritic.com/feature/2021-game-publisher-ranki... They were also #1 in 2016, and are usually in the top 5. It's a running meme on social media that despite Sega's success as a publisher, many people only know them for Sonic the Hedgehog :)
- danans 5y ago
  I'm not familiar with those games. My personal Sega saga began in the 80s with the Master System, and ended with the Genesis and Game Gear (which I still own!), and which I credit with sparking my original interest in computing technology. I did of course play plenty of Sega arcade games, but I didn't know until much later that they started out supplying coin-op slot machines and amusements to military bases in the 1940s and 1950s. It seems like the company went through 3 or 4 lifespans before they entered my awareness in the 80s.
MiddleEndian 5y ago
Sega makes all sorts of arcade games, not just PC and console compatible ones but those ones at arcades (or barcades, bowling alleys, etc.) where you sit on a plastic motorbike or fake skis or rumbling carseats with steering wheels, those are usually Sega.

cratermoon 5y ago

Wake me when people sue FB/IG/Twitter/etc for gaming the user with their deliberate use of variable rewards schemes to hold your attention

foobarian 5y ago

The claw machines are also rigged. I saw manuals for one where it offers a way to configure pressures in the pneumatic mechanism that closes the claw, and there was a brilliant paragraph of advice not to set the win probability too low in order to keep the customers happy :)

FridayoLeary 5y ago
>The claw machines are also rigged. We know.

smoldesu 5y ago

I've played it before at a movie theater, I remember there was a noticeable latency between the time when you pressed the button and the machine responded (felt like 250-400ms). I watched some other people play it while I waited for the film to start, and it almost appeared to be buffering inputs at an extremely low polling rate, such that it might be impossible to even line it up in the first place. Very strange game, I guess I'm not really surprised.

nathanaldensr 5y ago

How much money is going to be spent on this court case when a five-minute analysis of its software would tell the obvious truth...

userbinator 5y ago
In this case even the manual for the machine would be enough to show that it's not purely skill-based. Also, not enough people know reverse-engineering, much less how software works in general.

annoyingnoob 5y ago

There is a local place that has an arcade with machines that give tickets. My kids loves it. I figured out which games work best just by watching other people, over many visits. I became friendly with one of the staff and he told me the top 3 payout games. Now the kids win all the time. We definitely avoid machines like the key blaster.

comex 5y ago

Full complaint (PDF) for anyone curious: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/20994663/sega-lawsuit.pdf https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/20994663/sega-lawsuit...

rasz 5y ago

Talking about rigged arcades, the worst rubber banding offender out there, NBA Jam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kyk2s4HTPpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kyk2s4HTPpk

bnycum 5y ago

I went to an arcade this month for the first time in years and it shocked me just how many games of “luck” they had. It was easily the majority of games there. Felt like I was in a kids casino with no regulations. Also felt like a sucker because you had to pre-pay for a card with credits, and there wasn’t any games that took more than a minute to play so I ended up playing them.

542354234235 5y ago
>Felt like I was in a kids casino with no regulations. Exactly. At least casinos are regulated so that, even if the odds are bad, they still have to be “random chance”. If I put my money in a slot machine, there is some percent, no matter how low, that I could win on any play. With this machine, and likely many others, its literally a 0% chance for some ridiculous number of plays. That is the difference between a game of luck and a scam. And that’s not even getting into that the game is pretending to be a game of skill, while actually being a scam of a game of chance.
BrissyCoder 5y ago
I had pretty much the exact same experience recently. What also annoyed me when our child was much younger was how many of the toys people bought him were cheap plastic with flashing lights and sounds and how much these reminded me of slot machines.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  > cheap plastic with flashing lights and sounds To be fair, kids don’t care about cheap plastic, and they love flashing lights and sounds. Expensive plastic toys have the same flashing lights and sounds. Though I’ll admit that even more expensive wooden toys don’t, they generally still try to incorporate play with light and sound into the toy somehow.
  - BrissyCoder 5y ago
    > To be fair, kids don’t care about cheap plastic, and they love flashing lights and sounds. People love all kinds shit that is objectively bad for them... sugar, heroin, gambling, cryptocurrency. > Expensive plastic toys have the same flashing lights and sounds. The cheap adjective was unnecessary.

rectang 5y ago

At this point, I just assume any commercially successful software game is optimized to extract every last cent out of the target audience through subtle psychological brutalization. Surely there are exceptions, but it's like buying from Amazon: it takes too much work to sort through the ripoffs. The fun is spoiled because it requires constant vigilance and active resistance to avoid spending too much money. "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." — War Games (1983)

wly_cdgr 5y ago
The obvious solution is to play only critically acclaimed commercial failures :) There are plenty
- rectang 5y ago
  How many of the critics are on the take, though? Ratings anywhere can't be trusted. The higher the profile of a critic, the more incentive there is to corrupt them, and the more likely it is that their published opinions are just shilling for the commercial entities that own them.
  - wly_cdgr 5y ago
    I doubt very many are directly on the take, but I think there's a lot of semi-conscious self-censorship and score / review disconnect that goes on at the well known sites, for all the talk of a hard wall between editorial and advertising. And there's a lot of "content" that is just very thinly veiled PR for an upcoming release. I also think there's a good deal of corruption and nepotism around stuff like the IGF and IndieCade, from my experience swimming in those circles (I did an MFA game design at NYU) I was mostly just joking around, but I do think there are reliable ways of finding good games: -look at player scores/reviews on Metacritic -look for games with many reviews on Steam that have Very Positive or Overwhelmingly Positive ratings but that you've never heard of -Tim Rogers (look, I kinda hate the guy too, but he's the real deal) -More seriously (and this is the best option), blogs / Discord communities / Twitter walls of good indie devs like Michael Brough, Zach Gage, Terry Cavanagh, Stephen Lavelle, etc. Like, check out freeindiegam.es, or join Brough's Discord. I am old so I don't know the new waves but you could scroll through a few hundred listings on Itch, look up some Twitter accounts from there, and find them. Most of the very best stuff is of course not on consoles at all but on PC, web, and mobile

spike021 5y ago

At least in Japan for their UFO Catcher and similar games, it's still pretty fun because you tend to be able to get childhood memory goods (pokemon/digimon/etc. stuffed animals). Plus while there can be a rigged factor to the machines, you can still pick up some mechanics that help you shortcut to getting the item to drop. Of course it costs money and you don't always "win" but if you can pick up the pattern, it does become a bit of a fun challenge.

jacobkg 5y ago
What’s ironic is that when I visited Tokyo a couple years ago I didn’t play any of these games because I assumed they were rigged like in the US. Now that I know the payouts are more favorable maybe I will give them a try next time
- spike021 5y ago
  They are definitely still rigged. It's just that IMO the prizes and challenge still make it decently entertaining for me. But don't get me wrong, many 100y coins are lost in the pursuit of trying to win.
psychomugs 5y ago
You can also pull the gaijin card and complain to the staff that the setup is too difficult, and they'll rearrange it to make it easier.

garethsaxby 5y ago

I remember a long time ago in the UK, around 2003 or so, there was a similar problem with Fruit Machines (Slot machines found in UK bars and pubs). Through dumping the ROMs and emulating the machines, it was found that the machines were effectively forcing losses at certain points in gameplay; from the same memory state, you bet high and the machine goes low, or you bet low and the machine goes high, giving you zero chance of winning. There was a campaign called Fairplay that I believe resulted in a fairly small print label being placed on the machines stating that they would at times give no chance of winning; not a great win, but at least it was being said somewhere - http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/fairplay/fruit/breakthrough.htm http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/fairplay/fruit/bre... The FairPlay site by Stuart Campbell is actually still up, although I remember first reading about it back in PC Zone personally. There's details on there about replicating the findings, but unfortunately the links are broken; http://www.worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/fairplay/fruit/index.htm http://www.worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/fairplay/fruit...

Uberphallus 5y ago
Interesting. In Spain first the state takes a cut from the moment a coin goes in, and from the remainder they're bound to return 65% of the money collected, minumum. The machines have a government-certified black box to perform this accounting. Now, the law doesn't say anything about prize structure, and it's common knowledge that big prizes tend to appear within 10 plays when it's "cooled down", because machines increasingly shut big prizes down when they notice they have a compulsive player on them.
- jsbdk 5y ago
  I also remember they have a sticker with the chances of winning.
- jeltz 5y ago
  In online gambling the games are never (or virtually never) rigged. Online slots also almost always pay out 96% or more. You make less money in the long runig you do not let your players win, but I assume small places like bars do not like that volatility.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

But it IS a game of skill....it's just, the skill is being able to identify that it's rigged, rather than dexterity skill

quickthrower2 5y ago
That's the meta-game.
- wly_cdgr 5y ago
  No, yeah, you're right. Clumsy joke
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    I liked the joke for what it’s worth

Aeolun 5y ago

I don’t understand how anyone can see a game like this and not immediately know it’s not about skill. If it was about skill the prices would be sub-$1 knick-knacks.

Igelau 5y ago
Children. Just last week my son told me they tried Key Master at a bowling alley. I told him those games all have switches to control the win rate. He didn't believe/understand me, so it was nice to have screenshots of the manual literally saying "these are the switches that control the win rate".

jtokoph 5y ago

This is the best part: > In 2015, Sega and another angry player reached a class action settlement, but the settlement was rejected by the judge due to administrative reasons, like a high attorney’s fee and failing to identify and paying affected class members. You can take advantage of people as long as it's impractical to identify them.

rubyn00bie 5y ago

Oh, I thought this was known. I'm not even joking... A few years ago, I was at a local comic shop, and I watched someone (a kid) play the machine and appear to get a "perfect" shot, key went exactly into the fucking hole... but then it just pulled back. No prize! I was stunned when the kid asked an employee essentially "WTF?" and the employee replied "there's a chance the key may not turn even though it's lined up." So... it's a game of luck and not a game of skill. All I could think was "doesn't that make it straight up gambling then?" Who would be liable for changing the mode of operation? Regardless, it's fucking sketchy and all around pretty awful to take advantage of people like this... $5 million is a bullshit fine for literally stealing from kids. I still feel bad for that kid, it was like a Nintendo Switch or something fucking cool he, IMHO, had stolen from him...

abaracadab 5y ago
So it sounds like skill + luck: key in the hole gives random chance of winning. Honestly, these kind of lawsuits are ridiculous. People need to sue General Mills for false advertising instead because sugary cereals causing diabetes; or any other big-food company brainwashing children on YouTube kids.
- nkrisc 5y ago
  That’s just luck.
  - cortesoft 5y ago
    No, because if you really suck, you can’t win at all. It is like poker, which is a combination of skill and luck.
    - Karunamon 5y ago
      Okay, I can accept that. But poker is still considered gambling, and we wouldn't allow arcade owners to target poker games at children. Why should this be allowed?

IncRnd 5y ago

Normally, you need three items for the device to be a gambling device, chance, consideration, and reward. There must be payment for consideration to win, and you need a chance to win. Since the device has controls for the rention percentage, that leans towards these are not gambling devices, since jurisdictions can differ. However, it is not exactly a skill device, either. There is an option to convert it to skill based, but I doubt an operator anywhere used that option. That is also why the manufacturer put the effort for that on the operator to install, so that it likely wouldn't get installed.

Waterluvian 5y ago

I’m fascinated about the idea that some team had to decide on this. Then another team had to design it. Then another team had to program it. What are the practical mechanics of how you do something shady or illegal in an otherwise legit company? I wonder if discovery will reveal any interesting communications or designs on the matter. Would love to see source code.

umvi 5y ago

Is it even possible for a "game of skill" arcade machine that dispenses high value prizes to be profitable? Seems like any such game would just breed expert players that clean house and win all the iPads with their skill. If not, surely it would invite some hacker or tinkerer to invent a device to augment their skill and (again) clean house and get a bunch of cheap iPads. Maybe you could have arcade machines where you: - play AlphaGo/Stockfish - factor a huge prime - Some other "hard" feat and if you succeed you get an iPad. Those are the only "games of skill" that wouldn't get you bankrupted by expert players

Larrikin 5y ago
The luck mechanic could be made obvious. For example the game where the lights go around a circle and you try to land in front of you for the most tickets could instead have you land the light somewhere and then dice are rolled to determine your actual landing spot. I'm sure a real game designer could think of something more fun where your skill at the game increases your chances but ultimately luck at the RNG determines your prize.
a_t48 5y ago
The arcade machines in actual Japanese arcades are pretty fair, at face value at least. Though the prizes are typically not worth as much.
seanhunter 5y ago
Unless you're Jonathan Schrantz, who famously beat stockfish on the hardest difficulty as black by playing the Stafford gambit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27829913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27829913 That being said it doesn't work with Stockfish 12. But yeah dressing what is essentially a pure con (I don't think these even count as games of luck given the payout is not fair from game to game) as a game o skill is terrible.
- jerrre 5y ago
  Your link goes to this current page, I assumed you were linking to an article about that anecdote.

jtsuken 5y ago

Gambling should be a compulsory subject in primary school. By the time they reach high school: - Every kid should know how to play blackjack and poker. - Every kid must know how to compute the odds of winning. - Every kid should know how to verify the odds presented to them. - Every kid should know at least three ways of cheating and being cheated This might make the earth population a bit more resistant to panic and overreaction in times of uncertainty. Hopefully, fewer people will drink chlorine, stockpile toilet paper, participate in ponzi schemes, go to a real war against a fictitious enemy.

diogenesjunior 5y ago
Moderation. Moderation is key.
R0b0t1 5y ago
Then you'll just have people invent more smoke to hide the fact it's gambling. Trading card games are a good example. The game is, to a limit, one of skill, but you are gated by the cards you open in your scratch off ticke- I mean pack.
- Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
  Plenty of people have fun playing trading card games by just making the best of the cards they get and, of course, trading. Most people I know who play or played them (including myself) were like that. Of course, you can get obsessed with getting the best cards and end up wasting unhealthy amounts of money, but it's not the most common behavior. While I see the point that those games can be seen as having a gambling component, I don't think it's fair to group them together with pure gambling where there is no or almost no motivation to the game other than the possibility of winning a prize, like slot machines, roulette, or the game in this article.
rootsudo 5y ago
They do, it's called probability and statistics. Doesn't mean kids care. Or teachers, or parents.

cable2600 5y ago

Sega claims to retrofit Keymaster to PrizeLocker that is more of a game of skill than luck.

pelorat 5y ago

Claw machines are rigged as well. Not with a count of 700 but still there's a counter. Performing the equivalent of "card counting" on these types of machines are a hobby for some.

dclowd9901 5y ago

It’s funny, I was just thinking today about House of the Dead and if it was actually possible to beat the game on one credit. It seems like there’s a lot of sections that a player could not possibly aim and shoot fast enough to get through. I realize there’s no actual prize in those games like the key master games, but I still think it should be possible to beat an arcade game on one credit if you’re skilled enough.

RedComet 5y ago

Shameful, but common knowledge.

ddtaylor 5y ago

While I think Sega has effectively sold a gambling machine I'm not sure if they should be liable in these lawsuits. They sold a tool that could have been configured correctly to comply with local regulations. The owners manual explains to the operator that they can configure this probability, which they could simply set to 1 to bypass the entire gambling mechanic.

lostgame 5y ago
Would it be possible for SEGA to ensure the game does comply with local regulations before selling it? I can imagine it would be the same, e.g. with slot machines? Ideally; these machines should not be able to work in ways that can be over its local limits. Wishful thinking, but...in a perfect world.

monkeyboot 5y ago

Here in Asia/Taiwan, the claw machines by-law must display the money required to be spent to Win the prize. These are a good example because they are also skill+gambling. All claw machines Trigger a win if X dollars a spent in a certain duration. I suspect these key machines are based on a similar logic. AFAIK Poker Machines in Australia at licensed venues aren't required to display winning odds :/

chrischen 5y ago

I built a raspberry pi powered machine to press the button and time the game and then slow motioned it in action: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=79hE-vf2tzs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=79hE-vf2tzs Basically it would delay the release to just miss if you happen to time it perfectly. I complained to the Metreon theater in SF and they had the machine removed the next day. I also read of lawsuits years ago so I’m surprised I still see this machine worldwide.

suction 5y ago

When I lived in Japan, I was really surprised what the average Japanese person thought about Arcades. There are Sega-, Taito-, Konami- and other branded Arcades in the bigger cities, but "normal" people wouldn't go near them, because they are run by the Yakuza or Yakuza-owned front businesses. With the ongoing rumours that Konami itself is a Yakuza company (see the news around the Hideo Kojima firing scandal) and Nintendo having started as a supplier for Yakuza gambling parlours, I wonder if video game arcades in Japan are simply the modern version of those gambling parlours. So if there are rigged arcade machines, I am not surprised.

lostgame 5y ago
There are similar rumours - and have been for years, before the creation of the actual 'Yakuza' game; about SEGA as well. The launch of the game did nothing to help those rumours, but certainly made it a bit more difficult to find information about online. :P
- krapp 5y ago
  Guru Larry's channel covered one such rumor that "A certain Japanese game publisher" hired the yakuza to kidnap a developer's sister[0]. Covered in "The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Vol. 2." [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K2muFAuJsg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K2muFAuJsg

lobocinza 5y ago

Also: Counter-Strike loot boxes.

whemy 5y ago

It reminds me of this documents[1] I saw a few years ago about how a Black Tie crane (claw) machine works, how the machine will automatically calculate when to win. [1]: http://jeu-des-6-palets.fr/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/black-tie-toys-crane-redemption-game-operators-manual-coastal-amusements.pdf http://jeu-des-6-palets.fr/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/black-...