Is it me or...?

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...Are claw machines more fixed these days than they used to be in the 90s?

When I was a kid I went to a lot of arcades at amusement parks and 9 times out of 10 I'd come home with one or more stuffed animals or other toys I had won on claw machines. It'd take a few tries but I'd eventually win on at least one.
These days you could be at a claw machine all day and not win a single thing, so I don't bother any more. It's like they're very fixed nowadays.

It must be frustrating for parents with children that are crying because they want a toy from the claw machines and the parents are wasting loads of money trying to win something for their children.

Does anyone ever win anything on those any more? It might be different in other countries but here in the UK it seems like they are fixed since the world has gotten more greedy.

From what I know, the machine owner can set the strength of the claw - including so weak that it can't hunt anything.
My husband says, the most important thing is to find out if a particular machine is on settings that make it usable or on settings that just swallow money.
Maybe in your childhood, you encountered machines on more user-friendly settings than the ones you encoutered now.

My husband did win some plushies relatively recently but he says, not every machine is winnable at all.

A good number of years ago I pulled out around 10 soft toys from such a machine at a bowling alley for my girlfriend. A staff member noticed my haul and came over and turned the machine off and stuck an 'out of order' sign on it. Presumably the claw was set to grip just a little too well.

There used to be a claw machine at a Walmart where I live that was filled with miniature rubber duckies and squeak toys, and you could keep playing until you got a toy. I got a few decent toys out of that machine, but they don't have it there anymore for some reason. I don't think it's because of covid because they had it there during the pandemic.

When they put stuffed toys in a claw machine, they pack them in really tight so that the claw can't get a good grip on any of them, but gradually the toys get loosened. But most of the time it's just not worth paying any money to go to insane lengths to pluck out a cheap, dollar-store quality toy. One exception is when I got plushies of all three of Shrek's ogre kids.

The "play until you win" machines usually have very cheap toys that are usually small and tacky.

I know machines with branded toys are extremely hard to win, which I can understand.

But the claw machines my parents usually went for when I were a child were in between - not too cheap but not branded. Nowadays claw machines like that have become like the branded toy ones: impossible to win.

I think they should be set so there's like more of a chance of winning but still not great enough to win too easily. I think all the claw machines these days are set to weak (except play until you win).

I used to try those from time to time as a child, but never got anything. I won one plushie once as an adult, and I believe I got that because it was very close to the edge of the hatch it needed to be dropped to; I didn't even need to get a proper hold of it to get it, just a little push was enough.

So yeah, I think those are mostly meant to get money for the owners, and occasionally some places put the setting on easy level just so that people won't stop trying.

They are on a type of timer (Not time but number of goes) where by every so many goes they will grab and other goes inbetween they will not give the claw the strength it needs to grab.
There is a setting on the machine which can vary how many successful grabs the machine makes compared to how mainy failed grabs.
Is the same with other slot machines that have similar settings. If one has patience onecan learn these machine patterns on the simpler machines to work out when the machine will make a payout or give a prize.