First, yes, I've read the "where is BMUS2" threads, as well as the whole GOLD AC US thread, so don't flame me about this: If you think it's too stupid a waste of time to contemplate, request a lock, or express your thoughts tactfully. Thank you.
Reading the GOLD AC thread, I thought about the economics of having it at an arcade, and unless its a loss-leader, it doesn't work AT ALL. By the time you get enough regulars playing the game enough for it to be profitable, with how expensive the cabinets are, you wouldn't be able to play enough for it to be worth your while, and when spending that much anyway, its a far better idea to get a DJ Dao RE and buy the console games as they come out.
Breakdown of AC Economics: A IIDX machine costs, say, $15000, and upgrade kits occur annually and cost, say $1500. If the machine is completely saturated with regulars, you could stand having maybe 15 regulars, with at most 5 near the machine at once. So in order to be able to play 1/15 of the time, or 1/5 of the time they want to play, they would need to spend $1000 dollars plus $100/year for the machine to be profitable. I know that if I was going to spend that kind of money to play great IIDX, I would want to play whenever I chose. It would be less expensive for me to buy a DJ DAO RE, and buy each new mix as it came out on console! Therefore:
There is no benefit for an arcade to own a IIDX machine, unless it is so inconvenient and expensive for the players that it would be more beneficial for the players to get their own deluxe setup.
I've been thinking about this one quite a lot since I re-emerged into IIDX w/ Gold after having only played BMUS. It brought me to: The home market is a lot more optimistic about music games now than it was some time ago, so what would it take for IIDX to get in on the action, and it doesn't seem too difficult. People are willing and happy to spend money on cool music games and accessories. A new game would absolutely NEED to be for the home market. And I thought long and hard about
HOW:
I. Marketing
1) Best Buy. Get the game set up in Best Buy for people to demo. Thats what made Guitar Hero get noticed. It would get this noticed too.
2) Spin it as a hip-hop/trancer/anime game. To put it bluntly, and to quote a friend of mine who is African American: "Black people look at Guitar Hero and think 'wheres my game?'" There is a real market here. For the box-art and the draw of the ads, make 2 really cool looking, IIDX art style DJs, one's a black guy with a bandana over a do-rag and the other is a hispanic girl who looks all fine. There you draw the major urban crowds, the white suburbanites who want to be like 'em, the japan/fans, and the dance kids. Probably just call it "IIDX" (Pronounced two-dee-ex).
3) Drawing more upon what I said before, with ads: Ad starts out with said DJ with a turntable and keyboard with keypad, starts jamming, (which ends up being a well known song), then in a small club, then looking all awesome in a club with fancy lights and a huge crowd of dancing people, jamming away on what looks like an arcade IIDX controller, going crazy with the turntables, with the original video for the song thats being played on a screen to the DJ's back, with big booming speakers with IIDX written all over the back, (changing angles and songs a few times, with the real videos of popular songs on the screen in the back). The crowd starts cheering loudly and then the female DJ gets up in front of the turn tables looking all hot and she says, with an attractive female voice, "Bring the Party, its IIDX" (Or whatever the game's slogan is). Then she starts to spin, her hand flashes in front of the screen, leaving just the game's logo, the the konami/bemani symbols, maybe 'available at all Best Buy locations' or something to get people to test it.
II. Content
1) Interface has to be sexy, BG music has to be GOOD. BMUS was painful the whole way through, it had a disgusting interface, bad resolution, dirty stinky feeling, overly techish, horrible BG music. It was awful. Somewhat modified from IIDX Gold, but simplified, and made to look club-like, to match the ad, could work great.
2) Music. It doesn't have to be all licenses like GH/RB, but it should be at better than the Xbox/Wii DDRs. It has to have at least 20 targeted licenses. "Stronger" by Kanye West, "Please Don't Stop the Music" by Rihanna, "Yeah" by Usher, "What I've Done" by Linkin Park, some Shakira, and some other latin/dance music too. There can be some skimping to get cheaper licenses, but there have to be at least 5 "Holy Crap!!"-quality licenses, and 10 other popular highly recognizable songs, plus 10 hiphop, 10 club, 10 latin-beatmusic songs. Plenty of Konami originals too, but specifically targeted ones, as well as some new decent hip-hop/house tracks. Songlist has got to be at least 70. And none of them can be stuff that would be considered boring or bland or abnoxious to the targeted crowd, so like 3/4 of Bemani music simply would not work at all.
I think I need to explain my reasoning on this one: Yes, the song list might very well make every current IIDX fan in the world vomit with rage. That doesn't matter, and there are still the JP releases. Taking a Japanese game and adding a couple licenses won't do the trick, I promise. It needs to be greatly revamped.
3) Playability: Re-implement 4-Key. Call it "DJ Mode,". Give it a different playable interface with only 4 columns, so as not to scare the crap out of new players. Have, as you're entering DJ Mode, a place where you can choose 3 things: "Learn to DJ", "DJ Mode", and "Learn IIDX". The first would go through a simple tutorial, a-la DD/Gold, but with just 4 keys. (For those of you who haven't seen it, first its 'hit 1 key to time', then 'hit different keys', 'chords', 'scratches', and 'the whole thing in succession as 1 song'. Then DJ Mode would be the full song list, with 1 difficulty. "Learn to IIDX" would be a tutorial much like the other one, but 7 keys and a little more involved, because people know how to play by this point. Then have "IIDX Mode" with Normal, Hyper, and Another, like regular. Also Expert Mode, blah blah blah, blah blah, blah. Blah. You get the point.
4) Difficulty: It would not be able to get up to the difficulty standards of regular IIDX. Because of a full 4-key, the L7 charts for all the licenses and stuff wouldn't have to be really easy, but the difficulty scale has to be such that
a first time player could get to the point of beating the great majority of the game with just that one release. Its not that people in the US hate games that get hard, I mean, Guitar Hero does have some actually difficult stuff, and people love it.
I made a chart of 'number of note charts per difficulty rating' to break down about how it would have to go. All of these difficulties are on the HS scale. And yeah, the hardest [a] would be a 10. I know, it would be boring for established IIDXers. It would be most players' first and only release. This is assuming 70 songs. If there were, say, 90 songs, the difficulty could ramp all the way up to 11.
. . . . [Number of charts in given difficulty]
Rating . DJ/4k . . [n] . . . [h] . . . [a] . . Total . . . . BMUS Total
. . 1 . . . . 10 . . . . 5 . . . . 0 . . . . 0 . . . . 15 . . . . . . . 8
. . 2 . . . . 20 . . . 10 . . . . 0 . . . . 0 . . . . 30 . . . . . . 18
. . 3 . . . . 25 . . . 20 . . . . 5 . . . . 0 . . . . 50 . . . . . . 26
. . 4 . . . . 10 . . . 20 . . . 10 . . . . 0 . . . . 40 . . . . . . 16
. . 5 . . . . . 5 . . . 10 . . . 20 . . . . 5 . . . . 40 . . . . . . 17
. . 6 . . . . . 0 . . . . 5 . . . 20 . . . 10 . . . . 35 . . . . . . 13
. . 7 . . . . . 0 . . . . 0 . . . 10 . . . 20 . . . . 30 . . . . . . 15
. . 8 . . . . . 0 . . . . 0 . . . . 5 . . . 20 . . . . 25. . . . . . . 9
. . 9 . . . . . 0 . . . . 0 . . . . 0 . . . 10 . . . . 10 . . . . . . . 8
. 10 . . . . . 0 . . . . 0 . . . . 0 . . . . 5 . . .. . 5 . . . . . . . 3
. 11 . . . . . 0 . . . . 0 . . . . 0 . . . . 0 . . .. . 0 . . . . . . . 2
. 12 . . . . . 0 . . . . 0 . . . . 0 . . . . 0 . . .. . 0 . . . . . . . 1
tl;dr:
0) US Arcade IIDX is NOT and WILL NOT be feasible, it has to be Console.
1) Forget everything you know about IIDX.
2) Market it to be urban/anime.
3) Get people playing it.
4) Get highly accessible song list.
5) Give it a playable difficulty curve.
Wishful Thinking: What would it take to get successful IIDX 
