Have you ever wanted to put a little action on a game of skee-ball at an iconic arcade emporium with locations all over the country? Congratulations. You’re finally in luck.
Dave & Buster’s will soon introduce a wagering component to its arcade games, according to an announcement on Tuesday by Lucra, the gamification company working with the chain. The press release is a little bit thick, but the arcade and sports-watching empire’s new gaming partner says that D&B will allow customers to “digitally compete with each other, earn rewards, and unlock exclusive perks.” For now, that means players will be able to bet against each other, not Dave & Buster’s itself, Lucra’s chief operating officer, Michael Madding, told me.
Does that mean that Dave & Buster’s is opening a casino for kids? No, not exactly. It is exposing young people to betting in a much more innovative way. Lucra says its “approach will help to destigmatize cash-based competition by evolving it into a fun, friendly, and social experience.” Dave & Buster’s will now play a role in developing the cash-based competitors of tomorrow. Some would say the correct word is “gamblers,” though Lucra emphasizes that it facilitates games of skill. In practice, Dave & Buster’s will offer a bit of both. Winning an arcade game may take skill. Betting on skill is still betting.
I am not a gambling puritan by any stretch. I’ve placed lots of sports bets. In the past, I offered hundreds of football game picks to readers and promoted gambling media outlets and platforms. I went to a casino not long after my 21st birthday, and still enjoy a night of blackjack every year or two. So please understand that it doesn’t come from a place of deep-seated moral opposition to betting when I say that Dave & Buster’s has opened a portal that may very well lead to hell, if also to nice returns for shareholders.
Why is Dave & Buster’s—a company known for arcade games, sports, beer, and wings—getting into gaming? The company didn’t respond to a request for comment; in fact, it didn’t even make the announcement itself. Its gaming partner did. But a reasonable guess is that Dave & Buster’s thinks that adding cash betting to its arcade games will keep more people hooked to those games, which, pun not intended, is probably a safe bet. In its 2022 annual report, the company said that 65 percent of its revenue came from games and amusements.
Less clear is whether D&B intends to make money on cash betting itself. At the start, players will be able to put cash on the line against each other by using the Dave & Buster’s app. “I think there’s a lot of really interesting forms of gamification and gameplay formats and ‘what’s at stake’ that we’re hoping to build into with all of our partners,” Madding said. I asked him if customers would be able to wager against Dave & Buster’s itself, and he said, “Today, Lucra is a peer-to-peer platform.” When I asked how his company would make money on the arrangement, he said he would not comment on the terms of the deal: “In general, we’re a B2B software company.”
Only customers 18 and up will be allowed to stake money on Dave & Buster’s games, and Madding told me his company runs expansive know-your-customer checks to ensure eligibility. Strictly speaking, Dave & Buster’s doesn’t cater to children. The company has said in filings that its target demographic is adults between 21 and 39. In 2022, D&B spent $832 million to buy Main Event, a chain of entertainment complexes that explicitly caters to young families and kids. Madding declined to comment on whether the Main Event locations would also feature cash gaming.
At any rate, there are lots of kids rolling through regular Dave & Buster’s locations. At the risk of overinflating personal experiences, D&B was where I went after travel baseball games when I was 9, and now it’s where my 2-, 6-, and 8-year-old cousins might go on a rainy day when school isn’t in session. (I also know 30-year-olds who very much enjoy a night at D&B.) The company caters directly to kids with Dave & Buster’s birthday party packages. There are Dave & Buster’s bar mitzvah parties.
Kids do not automatically absorb gambling habits by being in proximity to adults competing for cash, but Dave & Buster’s effort to become a hub of cash gaming feels like a new frontier in America’s relationship with gambling. Yes, it’s already impossible for a kid to watch an NFL game without coming across quite a few sports betting advertisements. But Dave & Buster’s promoting a betting product is more like if the NFL put gambling commercials on the Nickelodeon alternate telecast of a football game—something that even the football league and its broadcast partner have evidently agreed is a bit much. It seems reasonable that Dave & Buster’s will market this new service at its locations, and now the many kids who show up at the company’s venues will have one more gambling product to ponder trying when they’re older.
Neither Dave nor Buster needs to care much about that. The company has done OK the past few years at a time when many old brick-and-mortar stalwarts—be they stores or restaurants or movie theaters—have been in big trouble. Its stock is worth triple what it was when it went public nearly a decade ago, albeit less than it was worth five years ago. In a culture that’s now loaded not just with casinos but also with digital gaming platforms, it’s not even a front-page story that Dave & Buster’s would take a shot like this. When people can extravagantly lose money by placing a 12-team parlay that relies on the Minnesota Timberwolves to win a game by at least 3.5 points, it feels like small potatoes that soon enough “losing to your buddy in some Dave & Buster’s arcade game” will be another way to cough up dollars. Relatedly, the two states with the most D&B locations are Texas and California, which both lack legal sports betting. Texas also has very few casinos. Perhaps Dave & Buster’s can tap into a public thirst.
As they relate to people young and old losing their money for fun, we have bigger problems. And in one respect, social betting on arcade games is barely different from a group poker game or an office Super Bowl pool. The money (for now, at least) is at stake between multiple people, not a person and the house. But the grim part of—again for emphasis—Dave & Buster’s getting into the wide world of wagering is that it is so flatly unnecessary. Nothing was stopping people from putting a friendly cash wager on a game of air hockey without giving a giant company more of their time and data. The ability to win or lose cash at a children’s birthday party venue does not fill any yawning cultural voids, not even that there aren’t safe and regulated places for people to scratch their itches for action. But it could create one or two issues. That’s a bet I’d take, actually.
