Become a devious manager of a game arcade in management sim Prize Denied

Indie developer snownooo announced their upcoming arcade management sim Prize Denied on January 9. The game will be released for PC (Steam) in the third quarter of 2025. It will be playable in English, Japanese, Chinese and Korean. 

In Prize Denied, you are a former arcade owner who used to be generous to your customers, however, this led to your business going bankrupt. Now determined to resurrect your empire of claw machine (i.e. crane game) arcades, you will stoop to cunning business tactics to get profit out of your customers.   

Rather than a full-on management sim, Prize Denied is more about setting up your claw machines so that they look attractive to customers, but are very hard to beat. You want people to lose lots of coins trying to get that coveted plushie. This can be done by reducing the possibility of the claw grabbing the prize, or by adding obstacles inside the machine that make it harder for the customer to get the prize out.  

Gameplay involves putting down Action Cards, which can be used to unleash various effects on the machines and their customers. After setting up your machines, you can even meddle with the customers in real-time. This includes messing with the crane game’s probability, snatching prizes before customers can grab them or even hitting your machines with a baseball bat! When using Action Cards, players will need to pay attention to the fact that they can have wide ranging effects on many elements of your business.  

After each business day, you will have the opportunity to unlock new cards, giving you access to new actions and parts for your machines. Prize Denied will have over 100 different cards, some with unique and zany effects. Each day also has an income goal – if you manage to make enough profit, you can expand your business empire and move onto a new arcade- which could even be located in space!  

Prize Denied looks like it will be a humorous look at how hard it is to run an arcade without resorting to cunning tactics. It calls to mind the tongue-in-cheek nature of classic management sims like Theme Park, which gave you similar options to “short-change” your customers to stay afloat in a difficult market, such as the ability to add more glue to your coconut shies and more ice to your cola. 

Prize Denied is scheduled to be released on PC (Steam) in the third quarter of 2025. 

Based on the original Japanese article by Taijiro Yamanaka (original article’s publication date: 2025-01-09 18:37 JST)