“Gotcha! I won a prize with only 10 NT coin” a man says. Recently, many crane game arcades have sprung up like mushrooms in Taiwan. An official statistics, released by Taiwan Ministry of Finance, indicates that there were 920 crane game arcades running in 2016, and were up to 2859 arcades in 2017 in Taiwan; the growth rate was over 300% just within one year. This amazing research may make you wonder what causes this phenomenon.
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Photo Credit: Udn/ Ming-Zheng Bu
Law of supply and demand is always unchangeable in the market. Over the past years, lower and middle class people in Taiwan had been seeking to increase their incomes. However, the arcade business method operates like a landlord, tenants and end-customers, a triangle business. The landlord purchases approximately 20 to 40 claw crane machines to display in his or her own shop. After that, these machines are available for rental. Then, the tenants can have an ownership of a claw crane game machine, and choose things such as dolls, plastic figures, and electronic devices they want to put in the machine. Finally, end-customers would insert a coin to challenge crane game if they are interested in those things. The coin will be a part of incomes of the tenant.
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Photo Credit: https://taiwan17go.com/w739/
Feiloli, a local Taiwanese claw crane machine manufacturer, thus, was benefited by this fad. In 2017, the market share of their claw crane machine occupied over 65% and launched a strategic alliance with Cocomen, which is the biggest entertainment provider of crane game in Taiwan. Their product has even been exported to other countries as well. Feiloli crane game machine suddenly became well-known and most famous product due to its user-friendly function and great system stability. Owners can easily change the difficulty of crane game by tuning on a printed circuit board inside the machine. They can set force of clawing and claw moving speed. All the settings will determine if a customer can easily win prizes or not. However, tuning a crane game and displaying right items are not so easy. You may have no extra incomes and spend more money if the winning rate is over 50%.
Now renting claw crane game machines as own personal business is a fad in Taiwan. There will be more and more crane game arcades newly opened. The scale can compete with the density of convenience stores. It is an interesting phenomenon and a “culture” that crane game arcades are everywhere.