Im probably in the very very small minority of people who still love and go to arcades. Its such a great place to meet like minded nerds. We are lucky to have 2 really awesome ones in town, one of which has a lot of good old machines, and they repair them too. They have some new ones that are OK too.
Anyway, I dont like that they changed to the dumb card thing. I get it (efficiency, capitalism, it was bound to happen) but it removes another visceral experience in society that was so fun.
Anyway, my old man rant!
They arrived when arcade machines started charging more than one quarter per play. They are there to make it easier to spend money, I mean once you bought them, why not spend them all?
I’m old though.
Arcades have to charge more than a quarter per play now due to inflation. The price isn’t just you renting the machine for the duration of the play, it’s you paying a small slice of the rent on the arcade location, the income of the workers, the maintenance of the machines, and the electricity for the lights, AC/heating, and so on. No arcades would exist today if they could only charge quarters.
Even accounting for inflation arcades should be cheaper.
The compute hardware costs much less and is much more power efficient.
Other power hungry features like lights and displays are both cheaper and more power efficient.
The argument that they still need to be expensive makes so little sense, other than the physical space they occupy.
Have you seen what modern arcade games are like? In order to set themselves apart from consumer hardware you can get at home, modern games have been leaning heavily into unique hardware gimmicks (of course this has always been a thing to an extent ever since Beatmania and DDR, but it’s much much much much more of a thing now since these are effectively the only kinds of games that get released in arcades anymore). Which does mean specialized cabinets are more expensive now, and maintenance is a whole can of worms - Wacca at my local Round 1 has had display issues for over a year and I’ve just assumed it’s never getting fixed because Marvelous is no longer servicing parts for it.
Look up how much a Maimai or Chunithm cabinet costs. We’ve come a long way from the JAMMA era when operators could get new games on the cheap by reusing an old cabinet and just swapping out the PCB.
On top of that, some modern games even require revenue sharing agreements where the operator has to give the publisher a cut of every credit played, which cuts into profit margins even further. I think they literally can’t just charge a quarter for some of these games.