How Sega hopes to use Japanese arcades as streaming data centers

How Sega hopes to use Japanese arcades as streaming data centers

If you thought the 3-inch-wide Game Gear Micro was going to be the weirdest announcement out of Sega today, think again. Instead, we give that honor to the company’s announcement of a strange and somewhat amorphous concept known as “fog gaming,” which seems set to utilize idle arcade machines to distribute a new type of cloud-gaming service in Japan.

Details on the initiative are pretty scarce at the moment—the main source of English-language information is a tweet from a Japanese analyst working from a summary by a Japanese blogger (Google translate) of a story appearing in the new print issue of Japan’s Weekly Famitsu magazine. Journalist Zenji Nishikawa was teasing the story last week as a “major scoop” on the level of Wired’s revelation of the first PlayStation 5 details last year, which seems a bit grandiose for now.

In any case, the “fog gaming” concept seems to be centered around converting Sega’s massive infrastructure of Japanese arcades and arcade machines into a kind of widely distributed streaming-gaming data center. Those cabinets—and the decently specc’ed CPUs and GPUs inside them—are only in active use by players for perhaps eight hours a day at a busy location, according to Adam Pratt, an arcade operator who runs industry website Arcade Heroes. The rest of the time, those machines could serve streaming gaming content to homebound players, without the need for an immense, Google Stadia-sized data center investment.

In theory, at least.

A uniquely Japanese idea

This kind of “fog computing” idea—where work is distributed between “edge node” devices rather than hefty centralized servers—isn’t exactly new. Router-maker Cisco has been integrating the concept into its “Internet of Things” devices since at least 2014, for instance. Meanwhile, IEEE standardized an open fog computing architecture in 2018.

But using otherwise dormant arcade hardware for a purpose that extends beyond the arcade walls is a relatively radical new idea for the game industry.

Japan’s still-robust arcade scene seems perfectly suited for this kind of experiment. Sega alone already owns and operates dozens of game centers distributed throughout the country, usually near major population centers. Sega arcade machines can be found in third-party Japanese game centers as well.

  • My arcade gallery begins with easily my favorite find of my Japan travels: DanceRush Stardom. Notice the on-screen indicator, which looks like a Guitar Hero note grid…
  • This tells you when to put one foot down (or, in this case, two) and how far to the left or right. Otherwise, you can step as far forward or backward as you please. This affords players an opportunity to truly dance while playing, and dance they did.
  • Since I was pretty intimidated by the DanceRush spectacle, I instead opted to play a similar game using my fingers. It asks you to tap your fingers on a touchpad to coincide with Guitar Hero-like notes…
  • …but its gimmick is an “air action” sensor that asks you to snap your wrist at an exact moment, as if you’re also playing percussion.
  • This game, which didn’t have a name in English characters, drew crowds in many arcades’ “bemani” sections.
  • This bemani game has a clearer emphasis on crazy-fast piano playing.
  • This train-conductor cabinet includes beautifully rendered imagery, on par with a high-end computer running Unreal Engine 4.
  • But the gameplay revolves around driving a legitimate train in safe, fast, efficient, and comfortable fashion. Meaning, no races or crazy stuff. It’s solely for train freaks. FYI: 900 yen is about eight bucks, but the pricing structure on this game is a little fluid.
  • The newest version of Mario Kart for arcades.
  • Horse-racing simulators are no joke in Japan. However, they’re all very dimly lit, so this is the best photo I got. Some of the horse-racing game stations include extravagant set pieces with toy horses on rotors running around a physical track. I’m very, very sad that the photos I snapped of those didn’t turn out.
  • Shortly after I took this photo of a paid VR arcade kiosk, an employee stared me down and shook his head. Nobody else cared about arcade photos I took; just the VR station handlers. Ah, well.
  • This new “physical” version of Pong rolled out in Japanese arcades recently. The ball and paddles are plastic pieces, and their movements have an uncanny resemblance to video game movement.
  • Unfortunately, the delay between trackball twists and your paddle’s movement is laggy enough to make this a pain in the butt to play. But it’s fun to watch.
  • An apparent tie-in video game as part of the Valkyria Chronicles series.
  • I just liked this spinny ship wheel as a controller.
  • Interior of elaborate video arcade.Gundam Extreme Versus Maxi On.
  • A multiplayer arcade version of Bomberman, with female inclusion.
  • You might have expected this placard for Bombergirl to include scantily clad cartoon ladies, but this was a surprising example of tasteful female representation in a Japanese arcade. (Most Japanese arcade games include bright, colorful placards made of cardboard.)
  • Card games are everywhere in Japanese arcades. Here’s an unattended soccer game…
  • …and here’s how the NFC-enabled “table” screen looks with a full deck. One patron was generous enough to let me take a detailed snap between his sessions as a soccer team “manager,” which had him dragging and rearranging cards to instruct AI-controlled characters on where to go and how to play.
  • Another card game, in which players manage armies by moving cards around a screen.
  • A closer look at that machine.
  • I didn’t see anybody playing this 2-year-old Pokemon game, which requires plastic “disks” that contain Pokemon characters (which can be evolved and trained by using them in repeat sessions).
  • In spite of zillions of arcade games that require cards to operate, I struggled to find any actual card-vending machines for these games in arcades. I swear that I looked. Here’s one of only two I saw.
  • I never figured out what these Paseli cards were about. And the disproportionate cartoon lady nearby wasn’t talkin’.
  • As an American who grew up near a BattleMech arcade center, I envy Japanese kids who get networked battle-pod arcade games to this very day.
  • All I could figure out by watching other people play is that the game takes forever to start and never stops feeling slow.
  • On our way out of one Akihabara arcade, and these awesome posters appeared, stuck to a drab wall. There’s a lot of this “cartoon art on drab walls” stuff in Japan.
  • Behold: Natsuge Museum, the best (and easily tiniest) arcade in all of Akihabara. It’s crammed full of classic Capcom, Sega, and Konami cabinets, including a few classics that never made it stateside.
  • A closer look at that Super Hang-On bike machine.
  • The room’s current pièce de résistance: a fully functional, riveting Thunder Blade cabinet. (Natsuge Museum regularly rotates its selection, so I was happy to see this one.)
  • Sit in that chair, grab the throttle, and hold on for dear life.
  • It’s hard to convey in photos, but this chair weaves and wobbles as you fly through the game, and the sensation is hair-raising.
  • Plus, the cabinet’s original speakers have clearly been upgraded to kick up a tremendous ruckus.
  • Kinda makes the room’s other Sega racing classics feel a little wimpy. (Just kidding. These rip, too.)
  • Natsuge Museum prides itself on operating solely with original hardware and circuit boards for its playable games. I got an awesome look at how the Natsuge sausage is made when one machine broke down mid-session. Yep, that was a live repair, and the game-history nerd in me started freaking drooling.
  • Notice those gray pods on the cabinets?
  • Interior of elaborate video arcade.
  • Some of these cabinets had stools to sit on, which were loaded with subwoofers. As a result, playing this classic Capcom beat-‘em-up felt like I was in the middle of an earthquake.
  • Such delicious, classic cabinets, all lined up to match.
  • What a beaut.
  • A closer look at some of those cocktail cabs in the middle of the room.
  • Old arcade posters, original art at the top-left.
  • Our look at Natsuge concludes with signatures from game-making luminaries.
  • Off to another legendary arcade, Mikado, down the road from my hotel. Its upper floor included row after row of fighting games. (I had been one block away from this place for nearly a week before seeing Brian Ashcraft’s recommendation on Kotaku.)
  • This was maybe a fifth of the selection on this fighting-game floor alone.
  • Dig on those button panels.
  • One corner was dedicated to turn-of-the-century arcade wrestling games. One of these kiosks is so legitimate that it includes optional Dreamcast controllers.
  • We move into the back of this arcade’s lower level, and… what’s this in the far-right corner?
  • A Starblade sit-down cabinet?! This may look like any average oversized ’80s shooting-game cockpit…
  • …but inside is the wildest mix of early polygonal graphics and scattered, weirdly shaped screens ever seen in an arcade!
  • But Namco can’t have all the fun here. Here’s Sega with POWER DRIFT.
  • I get a kick out of this racer, especially with the crazy hydraulic seat in the Japanese cabinet. Otherwise, I think the only people who love this game are Sega Saturn apologists.
  • Also, some classic Sega licensed baseball.
  • Japan doesn’t skimp on its sit-down cabinets.
  • Or its widescreen ones.
  • A few shmups pile up in this arcade’s lower level.
  • A magazine about arcades, available to freely read while hanging out in an arcade? I freaking love Japan.

(Above: A look inside a modern Japanese game center from our own Sam Machkovech.)

Many Japanese Sega arcade machines are also already hooked up to the Internet via the company’s long-running All.Net platform, which allows for online competition and lets players track rankings, profiles, and high scores across machines throughout the country. Adapting that high-speed connection so the cabinet could serve as a low-latency streaming gaming hub would take some work (and maybe an online architecture upgrade for the game centers themselves). But it hardly seems impossible.

Japan is already relatively bullish on streaming gaming as a concept, too. Back in 2018, Capcom released a streaming-only version of Resident Evil 7 for play on Japanese Nintendo Switch hardware that otherwise would have had trouble running the game. A streaming version of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey hit the Switch in the country a year later. And Square Enix also talked prominently about a new focus on “cloud-native or cloud-centric titles” at the beginning of 2020.

An arcade business savior?

Apart from technical and cultural compatibility, the fog-gaming concept could be a business lifeline for arcades and arcade game-makers who are struggling under coronavirus quarantine rules. “One contact I have in Japan was telling me that [All.Net] has been bombing out with the pandemic,” Pratt told Ars Technica. “Few locations outside of Sega-owned ones were already using it and now they are dropping it… as the fees make it untenable.”

“So, if this allows arcades to serve arcade content when closed, that could be a nice lifesaver for Sega and for the [operators],” Pratt continued. “If it is designed to help operators and has reasonable costs, then it could be a great solution to generating income while closed, which is still an issue for so many in the biz… If ops don’t get a piece of the payment pie, though, they won’t touch it.”

There are still a lot of unanswered questions surrounding the technical, economic, and even game selection issues surrounding fog gaming. For now, the concept still seems to be in the research and development phase at Sega, so it might be a while before we see it rolled out to Japanese arcades. After that, it seems unlikely to be a major initiative in the West, where online-enabled arcade machines are distributed much too sparsely to really make the concept work.

That said, fog gaming as currently described is already one of the most intriguing, outside-the-box ideas we’ve heard come out of Japan’s arcade industry in years. We’ll be watching with interest to see if Sega can make it work in the coming months.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1680987