[Snowcrafta]

In my opinion, it was much more of a late 2000's craze, peaking with Dance Dance Revolution 8th/SuperNOVA, and around the same time Guitar Hero 2 came out and made it mainstream. It was accessible because bars, arcades, movie theaters, and more all carried DDR machines because they sucked up quarters like nobody's business.

But there are multiple problems with the arcade games in general - it cost a lot of money to get good at them. Just learning how to get from Beginner to the very beginning of Heavy mode in DDR would take around $200 and probably 15-30 hours of game play time. On top of that, there are physical restrictions to it as well, since people only have so much stamina to work with, and songs get very draining which only allows people who are trying to get good at the game an hour or so a day they can play before exhaustion sets in.

There's a social stigma too - there's no way around it, but if you're good at rhythm games, most people think you're a dork. I've never once seen someone playing DDR and thought "Wow, that guy looks cool" from an outside perspective. It's a hobby that isn't exactly one you want to brag about on your tinder bio.

Another fact is that the games are simply hard, and that immediately turns people away from them. The coordination required for them even on Light difficulties are very hard, and a lot of people without any understanding of music will find it difficult to figure out how a beat works and how to follow it. Everyone who sees someone playing a difficult expert level song will immediately think "That's too hard for me, I'm just not going to even try". So even the skill floor to the games are incredibly high. There's no easy way to learn them without lots and lots of failure.

Guitar Hero managed to break a lot of this for a couple years, back when they were churning them out like it was the end of the world. It played music and songs that people recognized, it was "cool" because you were playing a guitar and not jumping around on a pad with arrows like a dork, and they laid out the song list to start people out with slow, easy songs instead of just throwing you a 300 song list and saying "go". It was magical, and there had never been an american release game that was so popular in the genre.

Unfortunately, the magic faded out around the time World Tour came around. The games were getting significantly harder, and they weren't bringing anything truly fresh to the table. You could play drums and sing in WT, but at that point people were burning out on it because they kept releasing too many of them, not to mention the peripherals for it were quite pricy and took up a lot of space. Additionally, because they were being released around the same time as the next gen consoles were, people were a lot less inclined to keep purchasing new guitars that adapted to their new consoles. It became expensive, and they just weren't fun anymore. There was a dedicated fanbase that were top tier, but most people had played them and enjoyed it at up to an intermediate level and just simply moved on to another genre.

Other games have a much better "pick up and put down" accessibility to them. Nearly all FPS are played in rounds, all which last around 20 minutes. MOBAs are by far the most dominate because of their competitive nature. MMO's are a niche now, as they faded out similarly due to dedication required to stay relevant, as well as WoW still being far and out the most played, a game that is over 16 years old.

Rhythm games just don't have the competitive and multiplayer appeal that all other genres do. It's entirely a single player experience, and it's all about what your personal best and what you can do to improve. You'll almost never find a rival who is equal skill to you, as unless you're top tier, one of you will surpass the other quickly.