Yeah, I am wondering who these people are playing the games outside of arcade locations.
I never seem to see anyone other than myself play any games on location. Went a busy restaurant/bar on a friday night with my wife a few months ago. We were there a couple hours. They had one game, a Midway cocktail with a bootleg multiboard in it. I played one game of Dig Dug on it. No one else touched it the whole 2 hours we were there.
We used to go to the pizza buffet after church all the time. Place would always be packed with the sunday lunch crowd, tons of kids, and still no one was playing the games.
Maybe 8 years ago I went roller skating with some friends on a friday night, we had fun for a couple hours and then left (you can only take being 26 in a room full of 15 year olds for so long). They had 3 vids and one pin (the same Elvira and the Party Monsters pin that they had when I was 13 years old). I watched those games the whole time we were there and not one of them got a single play the entire time, at a busy skating rink full of teenagers on a friday night. 10 years before that (at the same location) you actually had to wait for a spot to get on one of the games.
Even arcade locations are getting very weird because almost nothing new comes out anymore (and what does come out is either an annual update that probably won't even recoup costs, a multicade of some sort or a deluxe game that costs $6000), thus arcades are filled with a lot of really old, worn out, beat down games. Not classics mind you, just old equipment, as locations and operators just still keep running the same games they had before the industry curled up and died. Even big locations like Dave and Busters are running lots of machines that are 10 years old or more (last time I was at D&B they had plenty of stuff dating back to the mid 90s, and lots of stuff right at 10 years old).