Business Sega sued for rigged Key Master arcade machine

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www.polygon.com

Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine

The Key Master game machine has been a target for years
www.polygon.com www.polygon.com

Sega’s Key Master arcade game is causing problems for the company once again. A new lawsuit alleges that Key Master is intentionally rigged against players. It’s marketed as a game of skill, but players claim machines bar against awarding successful runs, making Key Master more of a chance-based game.

Marcelo Muto filed the lawsuit on Monday in a California court. It’s a proposed class action lawsuit looking for $5 million in damages to be distributed amongst wronged consumers. With Sega, Play It! Amusements (which is owned by Sega and now called Sega Amusements) and Komuse America (which co-manufactures Key Master) are named in the suit.

Key Master has been the target of multiple court cases in the past, dating back to at least 2013. This 2021 lawsuit, as well as the others, claims these machines are rigged only to allow players to win prizes at certain times — specifically, at intervals determined by player losses.

You’ve probably seen Key Master machines in malls or arcades, touting prizes like iPads, earbuds, and other pricey electronics. To play, you must navigate a key towards a specific keyhole by stopping the automatic movement by hitting a button. If the key goes in, you win the prize. The problem, according to the lawsuit, is that these machines are programmed to only allow players the ability to win after a certain number of player failures.

a photo of the key master arcade machine


Image: Marcelo Muto via class action complaint

“Nowhere on the Key Master Machine do Defendants inform consumers of the truth: that the machines are rigged so that players can only win prizes at certain times,” lawyers for Muto said in the lawsuit.

If the machine is not ready to award a prize, it’s allegedly programmed to overshoot the keyhole — even if the player hit the button at the correct time — and force the player to lose. This is demonstrated in some videos on YouTube: A player named Claw Craziness suggested that player can tell when a machine is not ready to pay out a prize, if they know the secrets.
 
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LOL at people thinking skill/redemption games are in any way supposed to be fair.
 
Of course these things are rigged. I've never wasted money on them because they're a scam. They have to give out a prize now and then to make sure people keep putting in money because their cousin's friend's sister won something last month.
 
This is a well known feature - yes feature - of these machines.

Let’s say you’re an arcade owner and you’re filling two claw machines with prizes. One you fill with expensive big stuffed animals, the other with cheap candy. How do you make a profit from both machines?
You set the win rates. It’s literally a design feature, and the user manual encourages operators to calculate how many pulls it’ll take for each item to pay fo itself and set the difficulty just above that.
 
A lot of those claw game type things are about being able to spot a winning battle and know when you can't and shouldn't try.
I recall a billion years ago there was some clamor around the Fruit Machines (electronic slots of the UK) as emulation picked up for them and it was found out they were basically nothing the law said they had to be or something like that.
 
The Shadow said:
LOL at people thinking skill/redemption games are in any way supposed to be fair.
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Some are more fair than others. I've personally won a PSP out of a Stacker machine, that was a sick win. It is a game of skill... when enough money has been spent to allow the machine to pay-out. Key Master and Cut The String have always looked like total bullshit even if the money threshold was ready though. I wouldn't play these things with zero prizes and free-play on, at least Stacker is an actual fucking game.

 
Impossible. Next thing you know they'll rig the slot machines at casinos.
 
I do think it is slightly exploitative to frame it as a purely skill based game, when it’s actually a skill-based game with a gambling element - at least things like gachas and slot machines give some acknowledgement of the odds of getting a rare prize.

That said, you can’t con an honest John, and it’s really hard to feel sympathy for people who got taken because they thought they could get something that was too good to be true.
 

There's a guy on youtube who exposed a similar thing with that machine where the lights go around in a circle and you have to hit the button to stop it between two points to win tickets and prizes.

He built a machine that could detect the light and press the button then concealed the whole device in a backpack.

What he found was the light did not consistently move between the two points even when the button was consistently pushed no matter how much timing was added into the button pusher.

In other words it wasn't a pure skill game rather it was determined by other factors.
 
I knew somebody who would go to Dave and Busters and game the ticket machines, win a ton, buy prizes like ps4s and sell them. His secrets? Find the manuals for the machines online and get an idea of how often the machine lets somebody score big, usually half an hour. And watch other people on the machines. After a bunch of losses, machines become more likely to pay out.

I have no doubt every single one of these machines is rigged. My only questions is what the law suit is going to accomplish.
 
An Ghost said:
I knew somebody who would go to Dave and Busters and game the ticket machines, win a ton, buy prizes like ps4s and sell them. His secrets? Find the manuals for the machines online and get an idea of how often the machine lets somebody score big, usually half an hour. And watch other people on the machines. After a bunch of losses, machines become more likely to pay out.

I have no doubt every single one of these machines is rigged. My only questions is what the law suit is going to accomplish.
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Nothing much and SEGA will settle out of court if they think it'll cost them too much in court. The only thing you would get is SEGA admitting to everything that's been mentioned in this thread, that the machines are rigged to fail before they allow a success and that the skill part only comes into effect when the machine is set to pay out. It'll at most educate a small fraction of normal people that you can find these manuals online.
 
Sega could argue that the "fuzziness" in vertical deviation, on this game specifically, is a necessary feature to prevent abuse of its games (see someone else posting a robot to win at skill arcade machines). The real problem would be if the game was actually impossible to win on the first game. If that is the case with the game, then Sega and other "skill" game makers will have some troubles.
 
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