I agree it's a tough situation. However a shitty arcade op that doesn't want to pay Taito could already play these games on a standard PC with I-PAC or similar, so updating the multi shouldn't be considered damaging IMO.
Hopefully arcade ops in this day and age know they should pay for these games and keep the arcade scene alive.
In my opinion, this attitude is slightly wrong. I'm sure many operators would love to pay Taito if they were able. Taito has to make equipment available for this to be an option at all. Even if it wasn't super profitable, the option would have been worth it. You could totally just get a bunch of cabinets and charge by the hour and fill them all with consoles or I-PAC or whatever but it's not nearly as good and goes against the purpose of opening this kind of business in the first place. Here are the contents of 2 emails I received from Taito when I inquired about purchasing units for use in an arcade setting:
Hello MY REAL NAME,
Thanks for your reply.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Since we do not have them in stock, we need mass order to arrange the reproduction.
Technically Nesica x Live is not officially released, in the US.
As you know, it is working at Round 1 there, but it is still a location test.
At this point I inquired whether it would ever be possible to have the service outside of Round 1 in the US and if there was any place where news regarding their service could be readily attained in English and this is their response:
Hello MY REAL NAME,
Thanks for your reply.
There is a possibility to bring it to the US officially in the future, but nothing is certain for now.
That is all we can say.
Of course we would love to bring that service in the US, but there are still many problems to solve.
Licensing, networking, etc.
Nothing proceeds unless the result of Round 1 location test goes pretty well.
Hope this answer would help.
This is in the last few months. There is a distinct possibility that the service will never be made public in the US. It's also possible that even if they do make the service public, it will be prohibitively expensive for businesses that are not Round 1. There is a good reason why it costs about $2,000,000 to open a Round 1, and their prices definitely reflect it. There's a lot more to say about this, but it's outside the scope of the conversation I think.
